Outreachertising & Marketingelism
Posted on 14. Sep, 2009 by Steve Swisher in Marketing
Last year our local Wal-mart did something I have never seen a church do, they remodeled the entire store, changed the color scheme, and put up a new logo. Why is this such a radical thing? Because the store was built less than ten years ago. Can you imagine a church completely remodeling their facility ten years after it was built? Granted, one could argue that Wal-mart probably has a few more resources to draw from than the average church, but I have seen churches that are 50 years old with almost $100,000 in the bank that were unwilling to touch the layout, color scheme, or logo of the church.
There is a disconnect in most churches when it comes to sharing the gospel in terms of presentation, packaging, and marketing. For some reason those are considered secular words that are too unclean to be used in the same holy breath as outreach, evangelism, and mission. I’ve been in church meetings where I felt everyone in the room was ready to treat me like a leper for mentioning them, “Unclean, unlean remove thyself from among us you leprous, capitalistic swine.” There’s this idea that if we put any effort or attention into how something looks, then we are being shallow, manipulative, and deceitful. Or in some cases we’re accused of not relying on the power of the Gospel and the Holy Spirit.
Why is it ok for us to do “evangelism training” which is basically teaching people how to give a more effective sales pitch concerning the gospel, but not ok to use other methods like an appealing design to more effectivly communicate. Having been a marketing major in college as well as been in advertising sales for several years, I can tell you there’s a lot of similarities between person-to-person sales pitch and “evangelism training”. Here’s the way a lesson in sales goes: establish a report, gage their interest and knowledge about the product, explain the product, share testimonial experiences, call for a sale. Does any of that sound similar to the NET, EE, or FAITH? Perhaps we need better terminology that will allow us to sprinkle “holy pixie dust” on other effective sales and marketing techniques that will allow us to more effectively reach people with the greatest message ever. What if we called it “marketingelism” or “outreachertising”? Would that allow us to talk about it in church more?
The truth of the matter is that people are people. And people are influnced by layout, colors, and good design. That’s why from the first meeting with your launch team, begin inegrating the language of marketing and evangelism. Did you know that secular companies do this too? The term “evangelist” and “evangelize” are now common terms in business marketing. In the same way we need to make sure the people in our church understand that our logo, mailers, t-shirts, signs, and such are all a part of our mission to evangelize our world.
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