Marketing the Church with One Word

By Adam Faughn     If you were asked to describe the church with one word, what would you choose? Maybe a better question would be, if you only had one word to try to get people to come to worship with you, which word would you choose?     Now, to be fair, that is a very difficult thing to do. The Lord’s Church is a multi-faceted entity and trying to summarize it in one word is tremendously challenging.     And, to be sure, we will rarely have only one word to invite a friend a neighbor to worship with us.     Recently, though, I saw where a church had tried to do just that. It was on a billboard near their building and they had summarized everything down to a single four-word sentence, but the “marketing” was found in just the final word.     Other than the name of the church, the location, and the time for worship, the billboard contained just the following four words: “Church Can Be Fun.” Fun? That is the invitation? That is the description? That is the marketing idea?     That is not only tragic, it is tremendously short-sighted.     I hope we all see why it is tragic. To be sure, church can have some things that are fun at times. I’m certainly not against fun and I think it is great when a congregation laughs together. But our focus is not on fun. Our focus is on God. Our focus is on holiness. Our focus is on devotion to the Lord.     But that little marketing campaign is also so short-sighted because the church will never “out-fun” the world. If someone wants to have fun, they can just go to the amusement park, the ball game, or stay home and play games with their family. And the world will keep ratcheting up how much fun a person can have. A church will never keep up if that is their focus, and then they will wonder where all the people went.     I am glad that we have fun at church sometimes. It is a joy!     But church is not about my amusement. The marketing campaign of the church is not about how much frivolity we can put into a worship service.     The Church is the blood-bought family of God, and it is meant to honor Him as He directs. That may not be as slick of a marketing campaign, and it may not draw as many people, but that is the only thing that will help them get to heaven…where not fun, but joy, will never fade.

- Adam Faughn preaches for the Central Church of Christ in Paducah KY. He may be contacted through the congregation's website: uVisit the Faughn Family blog, A Legacy of Faith