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.
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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.
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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.
An article in Forbes today talks about how design is now a pivotal part of any organization’s identity.
The article speaks to the Church. Churches are accustomed to poor design in their publications. They work with poor equipment and volunteers much of the time. The church newsletter, dotted with cheesy clip art, is fairly standard even among large churches. It’s almost a universal branding—and the branding message is not a good one.
Your members will accept this approach to design. But is it working beyond your church membership? Is it helping you communicate with the world — a world that is increasingly influenced by design.
Don’t despair. Good design is accessible even to design amateurs.
Facebook makes design simple. All you have to do is upload photos. Everything will fit into the design template. There is still an art to finding, choosing and using photos. Taking your own photos is so easy today, there should be nothing stopping you.
But Facebook is Facebook. One design fits all!
Blogging formats offer the same professional design capabilities with more variety. Start your blog by choosing a theme — there are hundreds to choose from. It will be easy to create a clean and functional web site using a theme (template).
Ask your members to spend an hour taking photos of the neighborhood for you to use on your congregation’s web site, blog or Facebook. Make a contest out of it to get more people involved and add to the fun! They don’t have to be “church” photos. They can be street scenes, store fronts, parks, schools, gardens, fields, sports, architectural features or public events. This will communicate to the unchurched that your congregation cares about the neighborhood.
Be cautious about using images of people without their permission. You can do this by artful cropping. Watch your local TV news for tips. Whenever they take school footage for example they tend to show backs of heads or images of kids walking or playing with heads totally cropped. If the people are your members and they say OK — go ahead and use full images.
Clip art has come of age. There are great sources of photos available for free use if you add a photo credit at the bottom of your post. Try Photopin or Flickr.
Learn to use a photo image editing program. (Type “free photo editing software” into your search engine.) Most computers have a basic application pre-installed. Start by learning to size and crop your photos. Then learn to add type or adjust colors.
It’s time to say good-bye to the amateurish church newsletter. People expect more today. And it isn’t hard to give it to them. It helps to brand your church as progressive and forward-looking, not stuck in the past with out-dated communication skills.
Branding is a marketing term. Branding is how people distinguish one company from another. Branding tells your story.
Corporations spend a lot of time, money and attention on branding. They know how important image is in today’s world. They establish lengthy rules and guides to control their public image.
Branding includes things like logos, fonts, colors and the “look” of anything produced by the company. It also includes intangibles — ways of thinking, priorities and behaviors or policies.
Most small or even large congregations never gave branding a passing thought until recent years. But in today’s world, it can be a valuable tool. As congregations look beyond their established communities they will want to be conscious of how they are perceived.
Many churches take part in a branding process without realizing it.
Have you discussed a vision or mission statement lately? That’s an important first step in any branding process.
Key question: What do you want the world to know about your congregation?
What is important to your past?
What is important to your future?
What is there about your congregation’s personality and mission that makes you special?
Once a vision or mission statement is approved, the most common place to start branding is a logo. Many churches have their own logos in addition to logos of their denominational affiliation. Check with your denomination for rules.
Logos used to be black and white and simple. This comes from the days of black and white printing or photocopying. Enter the digital age. Use color.
Decide which one, two or three colors are going to represent your ministry. You’ll be using them in many, many things. Make sure they are colors you can live with!
Use imagery that represents the answers to the bulleted questions above. What makes your congregation unique? A church near the seacoast might want to use ship, water, or anchor imagery. A farming community might want to use wheat, bread or nature imagery. Urban churches might focus on people, buildings, or multicultural images. There is always the image of your building to fall back on, but your logo is an opportunity to say much more.
Your logo should be something that any member can relate to your congregation’s mission in one simple sentence. Simplifying the complex is part of the art of branding.
Keep in mind how your logo will be used.
Signage
Stationery
Bulletins
Newsletters
Ads
Posters and Fliers
Website
Avatars (which are square)
Video/Powerpoint Backgrounds
SWAG (you may want to get some promotional giveaways like mugs or pens)
This list is growing just as our communications options are growing. You may even want to animate a logo for use on the web! There are many possibilities.
There should also be a black/white version. There will still be a need occasional one-color printing.
Surf the internet for examples of church logos. There are some very nice ones.
The logo image is important enough to hire some help if you do not have artists in your community. In fact, it might make the process go easier with outside input.
The process of deciding on a logo can take a while. It should include many people. That always lengthens the decision process. But remember, the logo belongs to your whole congregation—past, present and future. You want the involvement of many. Try to make the process part of your mission conversation.
Dive in and have fun. We’ll address other aspects of church branding in later posts.
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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).
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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 the last two posts we talked about how regional bodies categorize churches and provide pastoral leadership for congregations according to their size.
