Church Marketing and Evangelism

It is very seldom that I shut up for an entire week, but last week was one of those rare exceptions. It was amazing to come back from Chicago and be in overdrive. My wife and kids were home all week because it was winter break. Sadly, I didn’t get to spend quite as much time at home as I had hoped, but was still around a fair amount more than normal. I was able to move my little girl’s bedroom and to begin work on the new nursery for our boy, who will be here in the next few weeks.

A big project I worked on last week was initiating our first ever direct mail campaign to advertise Easter services. We will hit a little over 13,000 homes with a glossy card talking a little about the church. It is pricey, but this is one where we are stepping out on faith that this will be an effective outreach campaign.

Also, just in time for Spring, we will begin doing something known as Servant Evangelism. This is slightly different from the door-to-door approach where you ask people where the attend church and then invite them to yours. This approach has been  pretty effectively used by other churches, and was really pioneered by a pastor from the Vineyard movement.

It has already been suggested that what I am trying sounds more like what non-denominational mega-churches do. It is true, I guess. These are approaches that the community churches have used. However, I can’t buy into the typical mainline snobbery and scoffing as if we are above using techniques that growing churches use, regardless of their denominational affiliation (or lack thereof). That is one thing about the ELCA that is really irritating to me. We fat too often define ourselves by what we are not. A couple of generations ago Lutherans were defined as NOT being Roman Catholic. Here in the South it is popular to simply bash Baptist churches and define ourselves as not being Baptist. While it is true that there are deep and meaningful differences between Lutherans and Baptists, this negative self-definition is shallow and denigrates our own tradition.

I say all that to say that we have to look at best practices across the board (and across denominational lines) to determine the most effective ways to plant and grow churches. I read this week about a church in Charlotte, NC that has grown to more than 4,000 in average worship attendance in less than two years. Before we dismiss this as an anomaly, or offer a sociological (as opposed to theological) approach to explain them away, maybe we should ask some questions. How did they get there? How did they get the word out? What attracts people to the church? What can we learn from what they have done that would translate to our practice of mission development?

Now understand me here: I am not saying I want to build a megachurch or simply replicate what non-denominational churches do. I want to hang on to the confessions and to good liturgical practice. Yet I am unwilling to sit back and do nothing, or to take all my cues from a national church that has a failure rate of almost 70% in church  planting.  And when we have trainers who stand up and say, “now don’t expect your church is going to get really big”, then what kind of messages do our mission developers walk away with? I mean with that sort of approach it should not be a surprise that so many of our mission churches start strong and then plateau at 40 or 50, which is too small to be self-supporting.

I really didn’t intend this to be a rant, nor do I intend it to bash or national church body and staff. I do mean to say that perhaps we are more closed off, more elitist, more snobby about our approach to church than we are willing to admit. Sadly, I think this is only hurting the church. Am I way off here?

On a side note, worship kind of sucked Sunday. It was disheartening. If I were a visitor I would not have come back. More on that later…it deserves a post of its own.