Advertising

So, my best friend and I had a great discussion the other night.  It was probably mostly a waste of valuable time, but I am rather passionate about it.

Should churches advertise?

I stand on the far right or left on this.  I am an extreme-ist. I think advertising should be an absolute no go for churches.

My first stance is that we, the people, are the church, therefore we should not try to brand us.  When you advertise, branding is what occurs.  People now see your, whatever, and associate it with what you are advertising.  We are the church, Christ’s bride, His body.  You shouldn’t brand that.  Grace Fellowship isn’t the identity Grace Fellowship.  It is the living breathing organism of people.  When people start seeing Grace Fellowship as the identity of Grace Fellowship, we have lost.  People need to see that the people are Grace Fellowship, that they are The Body.

Secondly point.  Advertising is the easy way out.  It is a lot easier to throw an ad up on the radio or tv or newspaper than it is to actually go out and invite someone to join you.  Advertising will bring more people in.  No doubt about it.  Know what else would bring more people in, the church(believers) inviting more people and I believe if we were doing our part we wouldn’t have to even think about advertising.  Just because the church isn’t doing what it needs to doesn’t mean that the church(the identity) should take it on it’s self to bring more people to it.  The people need to bring more people.

There are many more points, but I am not sure I want to type that much.  I do want to touch on this point though; well what if both were occurring?  Well one major thing is opportunity cost.  The opportunity would be the time, energy, money, and any other resources applied to advertising vs what could have been done with those resource.  Now opportunity cost should be a bit less weighted, but that is another story.  Anyway, there any isn’t any amount of resources that couldn’t be better focused else where.

For example lets just say you do a direct mailing.  You send out 10,000 post cards.  Now of those 10,000 cards, two people show up and one of them stays long term and gets plugged in.  Now you can’t place a value on that life, but you can place a value on the cost it took to develop the and send the cards.  Could those resources have been applied differently to be better off?  No doubt, all you have to do is have the person that developed the card mentor one person.  Simple enough.

Now the other side of the cards, now you have branded your church.  I can see it now: “Grace Fellowship, ooo yea thats the church that sends those stupid post cards.”  People now identify the church as an identity.  That’s shouldn’t be our goal.

Anyway, this is a bit too long and I am bored with it.  Let me sum it up.

Churches using media as adverting is in my opinion, well stupid. If you have a faint heart please replace ‘well stupid’ with ‘an absolute no no.’

But then again, what do I know.