Marketing the Church

Does your church advertise to let people know who you are? How do you decide what to say?

Zooming down the freeway through a major Texas city, I thought I saw a billboard that said, "Finally, a church we can believe in." The next day, heading back the other direction, I confirmed it. There was an older white couple bigger than Dallas, as they say, his arm around her shoulders, smiling down on the traffic and announcing they had finally found a church they could believe in. The church's name and logo were also big and easy to read.

This was an expensive advertisement. No doubt, the tagline came out of focus groups, surveys, and the kind of process professional consultants lead. The phrase-makers belie the assumptions underlying their church growth strategy: people are looking for a safe place to belong, a place of comfort.

The statement is also theological. It begs for exegesis. They are, of course, suggesting churches exist that people "cannot" believe in. But, "A church you can believe in" is also code for something else. "Change you can believe in," Obama's slogan, comes to mind. But based on the billboard's colors, pictures, and fonts, I inferred they are quite intentionally not about change, unless it is a reversal, a going back to the way things used to be, "when God was famous" (as a teenager put it in Christian Smith's Soul Searching). To read more, click here.