A First Step in Branding: The Mission Statement

We’ve discussed the need to look over your shoulder and include your denomination’s regional offices and other congregations.

We’ve discussed how branding helps your members understand their mission.

Now you are ready for outreach to your community.

A typical starting point in any branding campaign is to craft a mission statement.

The mission of every church is defined in the Bible.

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. —Matthew 28:19-20

There are other verses you can focus on, but this one encompasses a great deal.

The task of each congregation is to refine this directive in a way that will keep your people on a chosen track of implementation.

We all know how easy it is to become distracted from our mission. This is a special challenge for small congregations. We small churches are so busy putting out fires that it is easy for us to lose our way!

There is a tendency to measure all congregations against some standard that, frankly, isn’t very well-defined. It may be a typical suburban church or a church with a well-known pastor. It is never the small church — although we outnumber larger churches!

This can be a shock to a small congregation’s self-confidence. There the driving force is often a dedicated and changing staff of lay people, who juggle uncompensated mission and ministry with work lives.

In defining your mission be true to yourself. If you are a family church, concentrate on the values of a family church—the warmth, the intimacy, the ability for newcomers to assimilate quickly. If you are a pastoral church you might have an emphasis that is a “trademark” of your leadership. That might be reaching a particular ethnic group or operating a daycare program. Your mission should express whatever binds you together as a people.

Mission is a huge task and one that was never intended to be performed solo. (2×2!) The task of congregations is to answer the question How? (We’ve talked about the Why? question before.)

How will your group of people—with all the things you have going for you (taking into account your limitations)—fulfill Christ’s directive? In short:

How do you reach, how do you preach, and how do you teach?

You might start by asking each member this question. Their answers should help shape the “official” mission statement. Having been included in the process, they will own the mission.

Once a mission statement is adopted put it to work.

Feature it on your web site, on your stationery, and on your signage.
Hold a service to celebrate the adoption of a mission statement.
Invite several people to speak to the mission. Do this regularly!
Have a pin made or give out refrigerator magnets featuring your statement.
Make a congregational T-shirt featuring your mission. Declare T-shirt events (service projects, for example) when members should come in “uniform.”
Hang a banner over your door. (Outside where people can see it.)
Begin every service or meeting by reciting your mission together.
Write a press release and send it to local papers.

Keep your mission front and center.

But remember, your mission can change. Review it every few years to make sure you can still live up to its directive, and that, in focusing on it, you are not ignoring new opportunities. Actually, we live in such a fast-changing world that proclaiming a special mission emphasis each year might not be a bad idea. (Next post!)

11 Oct 2012

Understanding Your Congregation

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.

10 Oct 2012

Building Your Relationship with Your Regional Body

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 your website to address issues that concern your congregation and others. This is another common shortcoming of congregations. Their web sites are little more than online brochures. Think beyond your property line! You will be building your image as a mission-minded congregation.

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!

08 Oct 2012

A Challenge for Church Transformers

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.

More to come!

07 Oct 2012

How Size Affects A Congregation’s Relationship with Community

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!

06 Oct 2012

Branding 101: Know Thyselves

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!

05 Oct 2012

Branding 101 for Churches: How are we perceived?

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.

Much of Christianity is still trying to hang on to our medieval roots. The final blow to this thinking may be social media. (Click to tweet). Time will tell. These early years of social media may be pivotal years in the history of Christianity!

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.

We’ll study this more in upcoming posts.

04 Oct 2012