What Happened When We Stopped Marketing our Church

Tony Morgan, New Spring Church guru, wrote a great couple of posts on why churches should stop marketing.  He makes a good argument that marketing can push you away from your true mission.  I'd love to hear what you think of it.

I wanted to share my reflections on it too.  A year ago I might have disagreed with him.  Not so much any more.

In the church I was with before Connexus, we had done a lot of marketing (at least for Central Ontario).  We did flyers, billboards, radio ads and more to invite people to church.  We always said the best way we wanted to grow was through personal invitation, but we marketed anyway.

Without a doubt, people with no church background came to church because of our marketing, and some of them came to faith.  That's awesome and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

We have marketed less since starting Connexus.  Frankly, we didn't do an ideological shift.  We just stacked up our first year expenses and an easy thing to not spend money on was marketing. So we cut it.  We've done a couple of small flyer drops and one full page ad (last Christmas) - hardly enough to register one drop in the ocean of material people see.  Other than a weekly radio show we do, we don't spend any money on marketing regularly.

Being a year with almost no marketing though, I think I've learned some of Tony's lessons and a few more. 

• When you don't market, the only way to grow your mission is to have people invite friends.  When you rent theaters half a day a week to host church, you gain little profile. People hear about us now because someone who is excited about Jesus and the environments at Connexus tells someone else.  Only now, a year later, are we starting to get any recognition by reputation in the community.

• Once we cut our marketing, we realized fewer people were telling their friends about Connexus or what it meant to follow Jesus than we had assumed.  It's given us a chance to cast vision far more clearly with our folks.

• When people don't invite their friends, one of two things has happened:
  • You're not doing a good enough job in realizing your true mission as a church.
  • They've been in a Christian bubble too long and have forgotten what it's all about.

• Not marketing made me and others reflect on our purpose.  Jesus said we would be known as his followers by our love, not by our image. But it's easier to promote than to really love.  I hope our next series (Revolutionary Love) might begin to put our toe in the pond on loving the wider community unconditionally.  I hope in a year we are known by our forgiveness, love and grace.  You don't need to market that.  It sells itself.

• We realized that marketing really attracts church people.  Is it that they want to be associated with successful churches?  But we are keenly aware that our mission is not to suck other churches dry, but to suck the malls, beaches, hockey rinks and ski hills dry.   Not marketing helps us NOT attract people from other churches.  That's good.

• I think in the end, we stopped asking people to "be" the church. If you look at the early church, they grew because Christ was with them and they loved and gave radically.  They didn't mail people flyers. It makes me ask whether we are bold enough to actually be the church in our culture, to love as radically as Jesus loved.

I don't want to come across as owning all this stuff yet.  It's a growing edge for me.  I want to be more radical and bold in my faith, not less.  And if this portable church is going to impact a community, word of mouth is a great way to go.

I know at both our campuses people show up every weekend because somebody told them about Connexus.  That excites me. 

Maybe we are becoming the church. 

Comments

[Nick Blevins]

Hey Carey,

These are great thoughts. I've thought about marketing in relation to church planting and I would love to hear your thoughts. Do you think new church plants should use mailers? In your partnership with NP do they encourage/discourage mailers? I know your start was a little different than some, but I've thought about that question a lot.

Our church plant was different than most as well, in that 200+ people were part of the launch team that was mostly made up from supporting churches sending out people. But, we sent 4 weeks of mailers anyway, and still send them about twice a year for different things. Like most churches, we still see most (about 60%) of our first timers from friends/family but the mailers did account for about 20% I think.

I think our churches are a little different, having a good group of people who could invite before there was a Sunday morning gig. But, what do you think about the church plants that are starting with 15-20 people, trying to build a launch team of 50-100? Are mailers good in that situation (to promote the church launch)?

I've thought about that some lately and would love to hear your thoughts. We have experienced some of the points you mentioned, and I can see where the other ones could easily come true if we stopped marketing as well.

[dan scott]

I really appreciated Tony's posts as well. What's funny to me is that I've always wanted to market our church and we don't. Never in the history of Ada Bible Church have we ever sent out a mailer to the community, put up a billboard, or had a radio spot for any of our programming. We've sent marketing pieces to our own people. We've also created word-of-mouth pieces that our congregation an use as personal invites.

Recently, I've been wondering what it might look like if we did market what's going on. We don't really have a seat for you if you come except on Saturday night. But God is doing some amazing things at church, and I want the outside to experience that as well...

But you're learnings are a good word to us considering going to a marketing model. I love the question, what would happen if we took the word-of-mouth away from the people? Great thoughts...

And I can't complain of course: people ask their friends and family (insiders & outsiders) to come, they do come and most stay. We have people doing great things for the Kingdom within the community. And I'm thankful for that.

Right now we're planning a community KidStuff for May... and we will probably do some radio spots for that... but I think that's a totally different animal than what Tony was talking about.