A big buzz in the world of business and marketing right now is the concept of word of mouth. The idea is that advertising is dying, and rather than wasting marketing budgets on expensive commercials that aren’t delivering, why not invest in your customers? Let them do the advertising for you.
If customers love your business or organization, they’ll tell others. It’s free advertising. It’s also called customer evangelism. A blatantly religious idea is the biggest buzz among savvy marketers. It’s time churches took back the great commission.
Creating Customer Evangelists is the book that presents the Christian idea of missions to the business world. You can also read “The Customer Evangelist Manifesto” (free PDF download) for an overview. You can also download “Testify”, a free 50-page PDF that features 18 organizations that have implemented customer evangelism techniques. Or you can read the blog, Church of the Customer.
What’s so funny about all the customer evangelist buzz is that’s how Christianity started and has continued. There’s a reason God doesn’t take out magazine or billboard ads (well, until recently anyway): He decided to let Christians be his walking billboards, with letters “written on our hearts, known and read by everybody … not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts,” (2 Cor. 3:2-3 NIV).
God takes a certain risk that Christians will make him look stupid (and we’ve certainly done that), but that risk comes with being genuine and authentic. That method has proven itself effective over the last 2,000 years.
The fact that Christians are to be evangelists for God is a no-brainer, but what we rarely realize is that Christians should also be evangelists for their church. In reality it’s achieving the same purpose, but rarely do we think of our church as something worth telling others about.
Is your church worth talking about? If it’s not, perhaps it’s time to take a good hard look at your church’s effectiveness. Make it a place worth talking about. No church is perfect, but there should be plenty of reason to be an evangelist for your church, as well as your God.
