Martin Thielen, Senior Pastor of the 7,600-member Brentwood United Methodist Church, wrote the cover story for the July 26 (2011) edition of the Christian Century about his experience marketing his previous parish. Initially a Southern Baptist, he left that denomination when it took a fundamentalist turn to become a United Methodist pastor.
In the article he shares what he learned while Senior Pastor of Lebanon First United Methodist Church in Lebanon, TN. During his tenure the congregation “added 1,100 new members over ten years and doubled attendance” (p.25). That experience provided him with the following observations about the role of marketing:
- Openly marketing a parish as mainline church comes with a cost
- Mainline laypeople are willing to engage in evangelism – as long as it is phrased differently (i.e. inviting and welcoming)
- Mainline churches can market themselves with integrity
- Marketing alone is not enough to grow a vibrant mainline church (p.24-25).
So What?
I have been involved with congregations that engage in almost no marketing, with those who have spent considerable funds to forward a strategic and well designed marketing plan, and with a few that fell somewhere in between. In my years of ministry the types of marketing that work effectively have shifted dramatically. To ensure that limited marketing dollars are well spent, the initiatives must have clearly defined goals and data must be collected to determine if these goals were met.
- How would you rate your congregation’s overall marketing efforts? Would a prospective attender engaging this content immediately know whether you were an evangelical or a mainline congregation?
- What role does marketing play in the life of your church? As a catalyst for growth? [Interestingly, Thielen posits that Lebanon’s growth came as a result of a “fourfold combination of community service, quality worship, small-group ministry, and aggressive marketing] (p.27).