In this series on branding, we’ve talked about the benefits of considering your regional body and denomination in your branding efforts. We are about to discuss branding your congregation for outreach.
But before we do, let’s talk about the benefits of branding your congregation and its mission for your own members.
People join churches for many reasons. Often they are selfish!
They want to be comforted.
They are looking for peace.
They are looking for companionship or like-minded friends.
They need help with their marriage or with raising their children.
They just want to feel better about themselves and their relationship with God.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of these reasons.
Nevertheless, the Bible is pretty clear that more is expected of us. The role of church leaders is to accept people as they are and nurture their faith so that they reach beyond their personal spiritual needs and become a force which helps others find reconciliation with God and His people.
The branding strategies that you create for outreach will help your members bond in mission. It is worth the effort for no other reason.
Branding is about perception and how your members perceive themselves influences their ability to minister.
2×2 has adopted a mission to visit other congregations and learn from them. One small church we visited, clearly a family-sized church, was practicing branding. Every week they stood as one people and recited their mission statement. It had become part of their liturgy and part of the fabric of their corporate life. They didn’t have a flashy logo, grand advertising or signage, but among themselves they knew who they were and what they were about. Their self-confidence showed in their ability to welcome visitors.
Take time to work with your people to understand their expectations. This is not a 30-minute exercise. It’s takes some time to reach below the surface of people’s thinking.
This is a failing of professional church evaluators. They come to a congregation and schedule a meeting or two. They talk with the people who will show up for such a meeting, and may have an axe to grind. This is often not a representative group. The outside evaluator doesn’t know that! Their reports quote the observations of these few people. They often come out looking selfish to outsiders. If the evaluator had taken the time to get to know the speakers, they might realize there were serious life challenges that justified a selfish outlook.
Outside consultants, especially when they are working for the denomination, not the congregation, do not take the time to do more than scratch the surface of congregational life. It is up to your congregation’s leaders, both professional and lay, to lead your congregation in self-examination.
Only then can you write your mission statement, design a logo, create an evangelism strategy or implement branding for outreach.
Today’s objects are a checkbook and a pen, but keep them hidden.
Ask your congregations to name some occasions when they routinely pray.
You’ll get answers like
when someone is sick
before we eat
when I wake up
when I go to bed
when I’m scared
in church
with my children
on the fourth down
When ideas die down, pull out the check book and your pen. Start to write but stop quickly.
Point out that the answer to many of their prayers involve their checkbooks. They write checks to pay for groceries and doctors, etc. Even sports teams try to solve their problems by offering attractive salaries.
Yet how many of us pray before we write a check?
Now refer to the lectionary reading about the man who came to Jesus on his knees. He was a good man by any measure. But something was missing. Jesus reminded him to keep the commandments. This man had checked everything on that list. Been there; done that!
On top of his impeccable values, he was a man of means. He could buy his way out of any problem. But he still felt lost.
But Jesus pointed out to him that the blessings of riches mean nothing if they cannot be shared with others who are equally important to God. Wealth has a way of stealing our attention from the reasons God put us here on earth—to be part of community. We are lost when we are separated from community.
This alienation had brought the rich, youn man to his knees. He longed to be closer to God. But to get closer to God he had to rebuild his relationships with the people around him. That meant giving up what separated him from others in God’s creation.
Turn back to your checkbook. You might get down on your knees at this point.
Suggest that each time they reach for their checkbook (or even their credit card), they offer a prayer just as they would before taking a bite to eat.
Pray for wise decisions with money.
Pray that your wealth is a tool for good.
Pray with thanksgiving that God has blessed you with the ability to decide how to use your wealth.
Make prayer about your spending a habit. And remember to think of others!
We’ve spent some time discussing the politics of church relations and how they related to a congregation’s branding or sense of mission.
In the business world branding and advertising go hand in hand. What can the church learn from this?
Advertising is getting the word out. Evangelism is getting the Word out.
Congregations must learn to tell their story.
We have identified that the audience is not just the current members and the unchurched in your community. A primary audience for a congregation’s branding effort is its regional body, including the regional office, its officials and governing councils and every other congregation in your denominational territory.
Why is this important? Each congregation is vying for the same professional resources. Remember a primary task of your regional body is to fit clergy pegs into congregational holes. Making your ministry known to your regional body is an investment in making sure the peg that is placed in your congregation will move you forward.
Fact: a small church’s ability to serve—or even exist—depends on its relationship with its denomination. This runs counter to how congregations think. Church members will strategize for hours, weeks and years about how to reach and serve their communities. The regional body is out of sight and mind.
Here is a rarely discussed reality. All pastors are not created equal. Your regional body must find places for poor pastors along with the great. They will place poor pastors in the churches that are of the least perceived value to the regional body. You want them to know why your ministry, however small, matters.
Small churches must take extraordinary steps to attract the talent needed to serve members and fashion a ministry that will sustain a presence in the community. (That means meet the budget.)
This is great failing of the hierarchical church. Most communication between a congregation and the regional body is among clergy. It is usually prompted by sudden need or conflict.
Regional offices notice the big things. They will notice:
If your church burns down.
If the treasurer embezzled a few thousand.
If the congregation receives a major bequest.
If the pastor is unhappy or in trouble.
If a congregation stops sending benevolence (They won’t ask why! They will assume you are in dire straits! You must tell them!).
Regional bodies won’t take special note:
When your congregation rallies to help a family with a seriously ill child.
When your congregation supports a local charity fundraiser.
Votes to supplement a staff salary package during a trying time.
Teaches art and music to neighborhood children in an after-school program.
Does any number of small initiatives to improve the faith lives of their members and reach out to the community.
Ironic! These actions are the heart and soul of ministry.
Congregations must regularly communicate these things no matter how mundane or obvious they seem. An added challenge—so much of a congregation’s work must be done anonymously. All the more reason to be intentional about what you can share—and it’s all part of branding.
A Few Action Steps
Make sure your regional leaders and any staff assigned to your region are on your newsletter mailing list. Send it in a large envelope with a cover letter pointing to your most outstanding news. Even if you’ve gone internet with your parish communications, print a few and mail them to your regional office. Don’t rely on them looking up your newsletter or website!
Send invitations to events to church leaders and the pastors and church councils of neighboring congregations. Even if they don’t come, they will be impressed. They might start talking about you in a positive way! (It’s called buzz marketing).
Schedule events worthy of attention beyond your membership. In the past, hierarchies initiated events worthy of broad interest. That doesn’t exclude congregations from taking the lead. Consider a topic. Choose a format: guest speaker, workshop, panel discussion or webinars. Such initiatives will brand your church as thought leaders regardless of size. Does this seem impossible for your small family church? Think about a presentation on the value of the family church!
Use photos. When you hold a successful events, follow up with a card with a photo to every participant and your regional office. Personal greeting cards are great communication tools that are underused.
Insist that lay leaders be included in dialog with the regional office. It is absolutely critical that regional leaders come to know lay leaders. This will take some doing. Regional offices like to expedite all meetings. They will attempt to deal with the leaders that make their goals easy to achieve. Make sure your pastor understands that you expect your elected lay leaders to be included in the dialog.
Encountering Resistance
You may encounter resistance among your professional leadership, but it should be easy to point out that such efforts boost their image with the regional office along with the congregation’s.
The biggest obstacle is that the time and energy spent on this activity are not part of the usual pastoral routine.
But then, the “usual” doesn’t seem to be working very well these days!
Today, the first Sunday of the month, is Redeemer’s week to worship in our own community. We have started to frequent local restaurants after worship so that our presence in the community is known. Today we brunched at Franklin’s on Bowman Street in East Falls. The chef came out to greet us and we chatted. We told him we are the Lutherans of East Falls. He said he is Lutheran, too.
Ends up our Ambassadors visited his church two Advents ago. St. John’s, Elkins Park. We talked with him about our visit, which remains fresh in our memories.
In the last two posts we talked about how regional bodies categorize churches and provide pastoral leadership for congregations according to their size.
Here is a resulting problem.
Regional bodies demand that congregations transform at the same time they are evaluating them by their past—sometimes ancient past. They want congregations to move from being a family church to a pastoral church, from a pastoral church to a program church and so on.
Growing to the next bigger size is a symbol of mission success and financial success, a feather in the hierarchical cap!
Most congregations are what they are. If they transform to the next level they will lose their identity and possibly their strongest lay talent. (Think about it. If growth were the measure of success, those corporate congregations would be pressured to serve 10,000 members not 2000. The pressure to “transform” is only on smaller congregations.)
Most pastors are what they are as well. Some like serving family churches. Some, by nature of their personalities, must serve corporate churches.
Regional bodies tend to place pastors where they are comfortable serving. They then expect them to lead the congregation to become something neither the pastor nor the congregation recognizes.
If regional leaders are serious about congregations transforming, they must provide leadership that can function for the time being at the current level while they bring the congregation to a new level of ministry. This flexibility is rarely seen.
The transformation process lays a foundation for discontent and/or conflict that is helpful to no one.
Often, the change needed to achieve transformation is a change in pastoral leadership. The current pastor may not have the skills, time or resources to lead a congregation in a new direction.
Changing a pastor, at least in the Lutheran Church is cumbersome. It requires two thirds of the voting body to be unhappy. It helps if the pastor is unhappy, too. This is not a formula for success. But it is the system. And all this discontent, however merited, will go in that congregation’s file to be pulled out by a new regional leader a decade from now! (Read our parable—Undercover Bishop).
Perhaps we should applaud our congregations for being very good at the type of church they already are. When people feel good about themselves they are more likely to grow.
Take away the aura of criticism and Church might once again be a place lay people choose to spend Sunday morning. If they feel good about spending Sunday morning in church, they are more likely to invite others.
What does this have to do with branding?
There may be things congregations can do to ease this friction. Regular attention to mission and branding their mission may help a congregation attract the leadership needed to change. It may also help the congregation see themselves as part of a bigger picture — a mission!
This ball is on their side of the court, but often they don’t play it.
In the previous post, we discussed how size affects a congregation’s relationship with its regional body.
It affects relationships in community, too, but in different ways.
Congregations rely on regional bodies for professional support. They rely on communities for financial support.
Your branding must take both “audiences” into account. This is an unusual position. Businesses (unless they are regulated) don’t have to look over their shoulders in forming their plans for outreach. Congregations are sandwiched between two audiences.
Here are some things to consider for each size church as you work on your community branding or write your mission and vision statements.
Family churches are intimate. Everyone knows one another. Many may be related. Worship is an extension of the holiday dinner table.
CHALLENGES: This size church must find a way to be inclusive of community members who come to them with a new pedigree. They must often do this with limited professional support.
_____________________________
Pastoral churches, the most common size church, rely a great deal on their relationship with their pastor. The need to foster this relationship can distract from ministry.
CHALLENGES: Complacency resulting from good relationships with a pastor can be comforting for a while, but it can easily become the focus of ministry and a mission challenge. A difficult relationship with a pastor can be devastating within the church and with the regional body. The reality of today’s world is that growing, or even maintaining, this size congregation can be beyond the skill set of a single pastor. These congregations must develop networks among members to identify, nurture, or recruit the skills they need to serve their communities. At the same time, they must continue to serve the current congregation.
_____________________________
Program churches are seen as stable financially because they can support a full-time pastor and additional staff with special skills.
CHALLENGES: The program church’s challenge is to support their staff and provide ministry for programs as well. When the community comes to you specifically for children/youth ministries, senior ministries, immigrant ministries, etc., they come to you with expectations. Like consumers, they want their needs to be met. Those needs change. Congregations must nurture member involvement to grow individual faith beyond the personal needs to lives of service. This is a huge undertaking! Program churches will have to reevaluate programming regularly and be able to switch gears. Program churches face significant expenses in doing this. Programs aren’t cheap!
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Corporate churches face challenges that result from success! They may have outgrown their ability to know their own membership in a way they can serve without being asked. Corporate churches’ positions in their communities may be seen as solid, but today’s statistics show that these churches are just as challenged in reaching their communities as small churches. The decline is a bit less noticeable because of the size, but the rate of decline is similar and may actually be more severe. Their size can be an obstacle to the intimacy many people crave when seeking a church.
CHALLENGES: Corporate churches face the challenge of maintenance. They must nurture relationships among diverse populations. They must maintain their prestige. If they continue to be successful, they will be serving people who are less able to financially support their budget.
Each of these sets of challenges must be addressed in your congregational branding. You want people to know who you are and who you can become. Know your strengths, your challenges and your goals. Search for leadership that can help you reach your goals — not just serve you the way you are before you successfully transform!
Recognizing the influence of size on their mission prospects is tough for many congregations.
Size determines your relationship with your regional body more than with your community.
Your perception of your congregation may be at odds with that of your regional body.
When you create your congregation’s brand (your mission/vision statement), you are usually thinking about your relationship with your community. The perception of your regional body can make or break your attempt to move your congregation in the direction you want to go.
Congregations need to do some work before they turn to their regional body. Many lay people don’t know how their regional bodies think.
Regional bodies have an agenda that must be recognized. They need to find gainful employment for their pastors, matching them with existing congregations. Most of their function involves fitting clergy pegs into congregational holes. Theoretically neither pool is finite but the fact is that few new clergy positions are made and recruitment of pastors to fill new ministry roles lags behind need. Regional leaders often settle for working with what they have and like everyone else in the world, they work to make their jobs easier.
At the same time, congregations imagine that there is a large pool of pastors with the skills they need, eager to serve their efforts to transform their ministry. This is not realistic in today’s church.
Regional bodies do not have great firsthand knowledge about the congregations they serve. Regional leaders change every 4-6 years and may not have visited with your parish in decades. They know what they hear from pastors, who have a vested interest in what they share. They collect annual data on giving and attendance without information to explain the data. Your congregation may have a very thick file of anecdotes from previous pastors who may have been disgruntled for any number of reasons as they interacted with your regional body. Often this interaction comes when pastors are seeking a new call and no longer feel any loyalty to their existing congregation. Their carefully recorded observations may have nothing to do with your current situation. They may have been self-serving, untrue, or less than the whole story. But this private record carries a lot of weight. Your regional leaders will consult this file before meeting with you.
Too often that private dialog between pastors and regional leaders creates prejudicial branding for a congregation — for better or worse.
Congregations need to take control of their image. Reversing prejudice is never easy.
Congregations must learn to tell their own story without the clerical filter. Ideally, they must look for ways to stand out in the denomination. We’ll cover some ideas for this later.
For now, it is helpful to understand how regional leaders think. They think in terms of church categories. There is a place for each existing congregation in a prescribed structure that relates to size and therefore budget and the available pastors willing to serve as you plan your mission.
These are the four general categories.
1. Family Church
A family church is small with less than 100 members. Leadership in these churches is often influenced by family heritage. Clergy serving these congregations must recognize that members value the viewpoint of a few patriarchs or matriarchs who may have provided continuity through many pastorates. That’s a challenge for many clergy who want to be viewed as “the CEO.”
Regional bodies often consider these churches to be dying. Nevertheless, it is how most congregations start. They have a strength and social structure that can outlast many a larger church.
Family churches will likely have to settle for part-time clergy and receive very few choices in the search process.
2. Pastoral Church
Pastoral churches have about 100-200 members, too big to be controlled by family groups but still small. These congregations rely on pastoral leadership. There will be a council or vestry. It’s strength or influence will vary with the relationship they build with their pastor.
Pastoral churches are likely to be given the names of seminary graduates, second career pastors, part-time pastors or pastors winding down into their retirement years. Regional leaders may also try to place pastors who have failed elsewhere in this size congregation (beware!).
Most churches in the United States fit into these first two categories. Most regional bodies and clergy think that viability is in the next two categories.
3. Program Churches
The next larger churches have up to 500 members. Clergy love this size church because they can support one pastor and a small staff. They are often popular with new families or people in transition because (as the title suggests) they offer programs to fit specific needs. Regional bodies wish every church were this size or bigger! It would give them stability, too. The problem is that they are few in number with clergy vying for their calls and the career trajectory they offer.
Congregations of this size will be given several candidates to consider.
4. Corporate Church
Corporate churches exceed 500 members and may have up to 3000. These churches have little need for a regional body, but they get a lot of attention because they are able to contribute the bulk of the regional body’s budget. They are plum positions for clergy who want prestige. They always come with the responsibility for facilities and staff. Most churches this size have multiple clergy with specific skill sets and lay staff. Their challenge is to provide the personal touch that small churches have. They constitute a very small percentage of the total number of churches, but there is a tendency to assume that all churches aspire to be like them.
Corporate churches will have no trouble finding clergy interested in serving them.
In between each of these groups is a transitional category. Churches can grow from one category or shrink to smaller category. It is during these transitional stages that congregations are harshly examined or judged.
Your community is not thinking about where your church fits into this structure, but your regional body is. Their perception of your size influences your access to professional services, which influences your ability to meet your ministry potential.
Tough words but true. Congregations working on a branding strategy must grapple with how they are already viewed by their own denomination.
Is your congregation trying to move from one category to another?
If it is, seriously consider how you will tell your story to your regional leaders.
Do you see why the last step we proposed (self-study) is important? Too often congregations turn to their regional leaders for help with this process without realizing the prejudices already in place. Do some work before you turn to your regional body.
In yesterday’s post we talked about the branding of Christianity and pointed out that Christians carry some heavy historical baggage.
Let’s move on.
Most Christians regardless of denomination feel pretty good about being Christian. They may feel less sure of their place within the Church. Such uneasiness inhibits evangelism or outreach.
Spending some time on branding should help.
The most common advice of church analysts is to write a mission statement or vision statement. Frankly, most mission and vision statements are variations on the same theme and state the obvious.
Mission statements are part of branding. But the process for arriving at mission statements can be dry and even threatening.
Thinking in terms of branding will either help you write a clearer mission or vision statement or make them unnecessary.
Remember, branding is about how we are perceived—first by ourselves and then by others.
Start with some kind of self-study.
The temptation in attempting a self-study is to begin to rehash congregational history and statistics—the good and the bad. These days it is often the bad. This can be a technique of hierarchy to make your situation feel hopeless. That makes their job easier and they might get the value of your assets. (Sorry to be so blunt, but self-interest is part of that long history of the church we talked about in yesterday’s post.)
You’ve probably already been this route. How has it worked?
We’re betting that it led to self-criticism that eroded your congregation’s self-confidence. We’re also betting that it helped you stay mired in the past. If you started the process with a dozen people, you probably ended up with one or two finishing the job as others fell away.
So, don’t spend a lot of time on this. It is fuel for the naysayers.
Knowing yourself is the first step in telling your story. Ask some questions that will teach you about your congregation.
Here is one idea to help the process of self-examination in a positive way.
Create a survey.
This should be totally un-intimidating and should be plenty of fun! Keep the questions upbeat.
Give people enough time to think about their answers. Let them study them during the week, if necessary.
Write your own questions, but here are some ideas.
What are your most memorable three verses from the Old Testament?
What are your most memorable three verses from the New Testament?
Can you remember the favorite Bible verse of one of your parents?
What is your favorite quotation of Christ?
How would you describe Jesus to someone who had never heard of Him? or Describe Jesus in ten words or less.
Write a haiku poem describing our church.
What are your three favorite hymns?
What is your favorite church season?
What makes you proud to be a member of our congregation?
If you could change one thing to improve our congregation’s mission, what would it be?
Notice how the questions stretch people’s thinking. If you asked them to choose just one hymn or verse, you’d get weaker results.
Also notice how there is nothing in these questions that will wear away at people’s confidence the way statistics and history can. The questions concentrate on strengths, spiritual gifts and hope. They allow for the introduction of negative but in a way that won’t bog you down.
Collect the results and discuss them together. Hold a survey party. Let people tell you why they chose their answers. Quote the scripture. Sing a few of the hymns. This should reveal something about the priorities of your people. You will soon understand why they come to church faithfully and they will be practicing telling their story! Tricky!
This process will help you define your mission.
For example, a hymn choice such as “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy” or “O Zion Haste” reveals an interest in mission work. “A Church’s One Foundation” might reveal an interest in teaching doctrine. “Just As I Am” or “Peace Like A River” may point to an interest in social justice. Let the people discover themselves.
In the end, ask people to summarize what they’ve learned. Pose the question something like this:
I’ve learned that our Church is capable of the following great things:
1.
2.
3.
Understanding yourselves is the first step in branding your congregation. Have fun! Be proud!
This begins a series of posts on the concept of branding in the Church.
We will cover:
The branding of Christianity
The branding of denominations
The branding of individual congregations
The branding of each Christian
The branding of Christianity
“Branding” is a marketing/business term. In short, your “brand” explains how you are perceived. This can happen on at least two levels.
There is our own ego. How do we perceive ourselves?
Second: How are perceived by people we interact with?
Both are big questions.
For now, we will totally side-step the biggest question: How are we perceived by the God we worship?
Christians have done a great deal of good in history. This has often been clouded by stupid — usually selfish — ideas that became embedded into our leadership structures and became one with our culture.
Much of the world (incorrectly) views America as a Christian nation. Christians, were in fact, front and center in the rise of democracy. Some modern historians try to minimize this by stressing a Deist emphasis, but if George and Thomas, James and John and maybe even Ben were here today, they would likely argue that they are Christians.
The history of Christianity predates the rise of democracy by many centuries. During these centuries, Christianity rose from obscurity on the fringes of the known world to a dominating cultural and political force. It began to implode in the years of the Renaissance and Reformation.
Meanwhile, religious social media experts would do well to study the topic of branding.
Let’s look at our branding legacy. Many a city was plundered in the name of Christianity. Many a life was taken. Many a voice wa silenced. Talents were restrained by the leaders of Christianity. America is still coping with the damage done by our Christian foreparents who condoned slavery and the abuse of indigenous Americans and the marginalizing of women. The Bible was quoted to support many a wrong.
We might say, “That’s history.” But it is also our “brand.” We can improve it, but we cannot ignore it. We should never want to ignore it. Our memory protects our future.
Branding is something businesses take very, very seriously. Businesses want people to understand their products and services and to tell good stories about their interactions with them. They want people to think good things when they see their logo.
Religious groups want this too. We want people to think good things at the sign of the cross (or any other symbol of our faith). This is made more difficult by a growing secular bias.
America’s Separation of Church and State, designed to help religion flourish, has actually assisted in creating a chasm between the church and society. It’s difficult for churches to get serious attention in the press — unless major laws have been broken. It is equally difficult to team with government on projects of common interest. Both sides of the equation want cooperation . . . .but!
The way to bypass this cultural bias is to concentrate on branding from the bottom up. Each individual Christian is free to tell the story. Individual Christians have the best chance of being heard today — even over the clamor of centuries of abuses.
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Judy Gotwald,
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at
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Redeemer’s Prayer
We were all once strangers, the weakest, the outcasts, until someone came to our defense, included us, empowered us, reconciled us (1 Cor. 2; Eph. 2).
2×2 Sections
Where in the World is 2×2?
On Isaiah 30:15b
Be calm. Wait. Wait. Commit your cause to God. He will make it succeed. Look for Him a little at a time. Wait. Wait. But since this waiting seems long to the flesh and appears like death, the flesh always wavers. But keep faith. Patience will overcome wickedness.
—Martin Luther
In this series on branding, we’ve talked about the benefits of considering your regional body and denomination in your branding efforts. We are about to discuss branding your congregation for outreach.
