Marketing Your Church Without Diluting Your Message
Here is how to market your church without diluting you message.
A 2004 Barna Group survey indicate that the number of adults who do not go to church has been on the rise. While it’s not surprising that the number has doubled and reached 75 million over the last decade, it’s not only surprising, but also embarrassing to see the response of the church to these facts.
One of the greatest shortcomings of the church is lack of marketing strategies to market itself effectively and authentically. From the typos, bulletin bloopers, poor layouts, bad clip art to a sense of superiority are just some of the bad marketing strategies you may have come across. The church has a tendency to portray airbrushed perfection which is far from the Sunday reality. Sadly, some professional marketing can be as bad as the amateur marketing.
Telling your story well when marketing your church is not something you do when you can afford it, but a certainty that is begging for attention and intention. It starts with the word of mouth being spread by your congregation, to message being passed by the weekly bulletin.
We are in the era where marketing is considered as the missing link living little and living big. This is a lesson given firsthand by the dot com boom where everybody with a computer and domain name seemed to be headed for greatness, as capitalism venture swept the economy to make geeks the green gods. All you need to be big is to look
In summary, marketing is very important for a business to achieve success. Many businesses have a difficult time in this area. With the stiff competition, businesses struggle to stand out among others. Other companies resort in unethical and unfair schemes just to win the competition. But eventually find themselves in great loss and failure. As businesses all over the world enter into a gigantic marketplace, every business owner is faced with convoluted market competition. Nevertheless, any entrepreneur can be different and become successful in this matter. In every product sold and in every service provided, patience and hard work should take precedence to ensure quality. Products and services should be marketed honestly, planning should not be done with evil
Another challenge concerning the Millennials is that a lot of these young adults are growing up without attending church. The Barna group calls them the unchurched segment and report that this segment has increased in the last 10 years, from 44% to 52% (5 Reasons). This is a problem because it decreases the chances for new members to join the church. The majority of people that follows a specific religion learned about that religion in early childhood. Students of human behavior believe that “The most significant borrowing occurs in early childhood. Family is thus an important factor…” (Wuthnow 106). If the number of the unchurched segment continues to grow at this pace, in the next few decades, this will continue to be a major concern for church leaders across the Americas. It is a lot harder to try to reach those people that have never attended church or don’t come from a religious background than try to reach those that belong to a church or have been brought up in the faith.
Shown in recent statistics, is that younger people, who are over 15 (as children under this age are usually forced by parents), do not participate in religious activity as much as the older generation – excluding the over 65s group, this is usually because they cannot get to church easily due to ill-health and disabilities. Brierley supports the idea of an older generation by showing that the average age of church goers in 1979 was 37 which increased to 49 in 2005, clearly showing a trend towards an older congregation. Heelas also found that those involved with the New-Age Movements were mainly middle-aged or older; again supporting the recent trend.
In the past couple of decades the rise in non-denominational churches has been increasing greatly and are said to be the second largest group of Protestants (Moore, 2011). It is said that most that break off and become apart of this fast growing belief come from a protestant upbringing. The study shows that more people are determining on where to worship by how they like the nursery, if the worship music is good, is it close to home, rather than I am a Catholic I need to go to a Catholic Church. As of 2010, four percent of Americans fall into this non-denominational group (Thumma, 2010).
While the majority of Americans (almost 80%) identify themselves as Christians, religion in the United States is characterized by both a large diversity of believers and variable attendance and adherence levels (Eck, 2002). However, an August 2010 poll showed that almost 70% of Americans believed that religion was losing influence in everyday life, yet most feel that is a negative thing even though politicians continue to discuss religion while campaigning (Religion Losing, 2012). In light of these statistics, many religious scholars have turned to more quantitative methods to establish ways to both improve service attendance, solidify the financial health of churches, and establish a faith-based understanding of current psychographic trends. One of the predominant ways this is happening is through people like George Barna.
On another note, I want to address the issue of church attendance. Church attendance is NOT mandatory; however, it is in
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