Church Growth Fallout

October 5, 2005 by

Mark Oestreicher from Youth Specialties has an interesting post using a Raymond Chandler quote to talk about the state of the church:

From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.

While Oestreicher says a lot of good has come from the church lately, there’s also been a lot of stuff that sucks (his words, not mine):

  • Focus on programming over people.
  • Obsession with numbers.
  • Re-introduction of the idea that the building is the church.
  • Franchised youth ministries.
  • Church marketing.
  • Acceptance and affirmation of consumerism.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t explain what he means by church marketing. I’ll just say what I always say—church marketing is just a tool.

But he’s still right. These are examples of what we mean when we say church marketing sucks, right along with the crummy clip art and bad design. But the goal of good church marketing should be to overcome these failures. The goal of good church marketing is to look good from a distance, and still look good up close, and actually be good on the inside. Authenticity. That’s what we’re after.

Post By:

Kevin D. Hendricks


When Kevin isn't busy as the editor of Church Marketing Sucks, he runs his own writing and editing company, Monkey Outta Nowhere. Kevin has been blogging since 1998, runs the hyperlocal site West St. Paul Reader, and has published several books, including 137 Books in One Year: How to Fall in Love With Reading, The Stephanies and all of our church communication books.
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18 Responses to “Church Growth Fallout”

  • Randy
    October 5, 2005

    Nothing against Mark or Youth Specialites but this sounds like “second verse same as the first.”
    We heard all this from Yak before him. Then YS and others started down the programming, marketing, franchising road itself.
    So, Mark, what do I do with all the YS marketing pieces I get in the mail wanting me to buy plug-and-play youth materials that will build my youth group?
    I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with him, I just think its interesting that this kind of language is what got YS started and rolling. Are they rediscovering themselves or simply marketing to angst filled people who are against marketing in a market-savy subtle way?


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  • Linda
    October 5, 2005

    The best marketing I’ve ever seen of the church is a picture that went through my head at church a few weeks ago. I wish I could draw it because it’s perfect. It was a very plain building that housed people. You could see the people leaving the building and they were noticeably people but they looked like little churches. We are the best advertisement for better or worse. Do you agree?


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  • s. zeilenga
    October 5, 2005

    Ahem… I will leave my comments on “seeker-sensitive” thinking at the door and just say this: All his points point back to a mindset of the church being an organization and not a Body.
    I think once we again see ourselves as a body of believers, friends united, we will begin to shed those points of “suck-ness”


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  • Ron
    October 5, 2005

    I gave up attending church two years ago. I’ve been watching the Crystal Cathedral services from Garden Grove California. The church is offering church membership regardless of location. I have decided to join. This way, I don’t have to worry about fitting in to cliquey church groups or be intimidated as a visitor where I don’t know anyone. I watch the services on Sunday morning from my home on TV.


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  • brand1m
    October 5, 2005

    Before I read the reply above that referenced YS selling everything they can get money for, I was already thinking it.
    Not only do they sell tons of stuff that is trying to do exactly what he is saying is the problem, they then redsign the cover every few years and make some minor changes and sell it as a new product. Now in fairness, maybe he is looking to change that, but I don’t see them giving their stuff away anytime soon.
    Now at some level, I do understand the point.
    • Focus on programming over people. I agree. Please cut your product line by 95%.
    Obsession with numbers. I agree. Lets all just love Jesus and not worry about performance.
    Re-introduction of the idea that the building is the church. Ok, I really do agree with this one.
    Franchised youth ministries. I agree. We wouldn’t want anyone to get their materials from anywhere else beside YS, because afterall, they aren’t all about marketing and making $$.
    Church marketing. I agree. Let’s not market anything. Let’s all just show up and wait for the sinners to walk through the doors. Afterall, if “If you build it, they will come” can make people appear from corn, surely it can make people drive to the church. Oh wait, they don’t know where it is because we didn’t tell them.
    Acceptance and affirmation of consumerism. I agree. We should sell everything we own and live off the land, you know, get back to our roots. Or maybe, we should all start by getting rid of our YS possessions and not collect anymore of those horrible wordly goods.


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  • Mike
    October 7, 2005

    The fact that YS, and for that matter a lot of other churches and ministries, fall back into practices that they say they don’t want to do is an indication of how thick and sticky our “church culture” or “christian culture” is.
    A culture in any context is the product of values and practices being used over and over again–usually with success–without evaluating whether the form is still relevant. There was a time when programs really worked for connecting people to each other and to Jesus. Youth groups grew by sharing “best practices.” We still have these forms people love today and we call them “small groups.” (The value is biblical community the form is small groups).
    If you practic these forms over and over and over they produce a culture. One of the hardest things to change is a culture because it is the product of lots of this over a long period of time. So we shouldn’t be surprised when we keep slipping back into it. It’s comfortable, known, and can be very successful and helpful.
    Want to change your culture? Make sure your practices reflect your values and then work them for a long time with consistency and care. They will produce a different culture. But guess what? Even then they’ll become familiar, comfortable, and just like the boomer churches we like to slam, we’ll trust in those forms more than we should, and a new generation will come along and slam our practices. Which is fine and right–we’ll need a wake up call.
    So for now what YS and others need is not a finger pointing at them but encouragement to excel still more. At least they are identifying the problem.
    Mike


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  • creativechurches.com
    October 7, 2005

    Church Marketing

    Over at ChurchMarketingSucks, they brought up this blog post by Mark Oestreicher from Youth Specialties and what he perceives as the problem(s) of the church. One of which he listed was church marketing.
    It got me thinking about what IS church marke…


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  • patrick
    October 7, 2005

    i think some of you missed that he was talking about “the church” and, therefore, not YS. YS is not a church.


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  • brand1m
    October 7, 2005

    I knew he was talking about the church, I just found it humorous that what he is telling us is bad for the church is pretty much how he makes a living.


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  • patrick
    October 7, 2005

    where’s the problem with that? it’s a business that happens to be a ministry (or vise versa). businesses need to be run like a business, regardless of whether or not they’re a ministry. as such, ministry-businesses shouldn’t be lumped in with “the church” in that regard (there’s a reason they’re called “parachurch”). either that, or his blog should have been about what is bad for ministry-businesses.


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  • brand1m
    October 7, 2005

    There’s nothing wrong with a business making a buck, parachurch or otherwise.
    I guess I would just equate it to McDonald’s telling us that we are too fat and need to lose weight. Although, they might be right, they are contributing to the problem too.


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  • RobyMD
    October 9, 2005

    I don’t see what the problem is with what he said. I happen to have a business\ministry (christian clothing), and I’ve recently started youth work at my church.
    In my case sales can directly relate to people affected. If I didn’t worry about how many sales we have, it also means I’m not worried about how many people are getting the message which we have set out to share. But if I said I’m concerned with commercialization of the church and Christ that doesn’t mean I’m a hypocrite but I am aware of a potential problem and I have to work even harder to make sure I’m not making the problem bigger.


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  • Randy
    October 9, 2005

    the problem isn’t what he said per se, but the pot calling the kettle black.
    Mark and YS routinely bash churches for “marketing and selling out the church and franchising.”
    You can read all about it in their books they market to us on how our youth groups/churches need to look like them.


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  • marko
    October 9, 2005

    wow — hadn’t checked back in here for a couple days. didn’t know there was such a ys distaste here.
    a few comments:
    randy/brand1m/others: first, i’m honored, randy, that you think i have some of yaconelli’s voice. that’s a fantastic compliment to me. please know, if you never use another ys product in your life, we’ll be ok. we love to serve youth workers in churches — that is truly our motivation (not making cash, as you seem to presume). yes, we are a business (not a church, as patrick identifies). and the beauty of that is that if our training and resources are helpful to people; if they’re not meeting needs for real youth workers, then we go out of business. we don’t have donors to call to bail our butts out of bad decisions or crappy products.
    of course we have marketing. i don’t think marketing is bad, in and of itself (for a business). we have to let people know what they have to choose from. but if a youth worker is better helped by stuff from another publisher, or stuff she writes, or stuff you give him — more power to ’em.
    ys isn’t out to build an empire (and we don’t franchise — i’m not sure where you get that idea). we’re really just a little group of youth workers who are driven, every day, by making stuff to help other youth workers.
    oh, and i can only think of a couple times in recent years that we’ve repackaged or recovered books. even then, it’s been with a substantial update and rewrite, because we thought there was something worth revising.


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  • brand1m
    October 10, 2005

    – and we hear from the man himself. ;)
    First mark, in fairness I have to say that I leaned pretty heavy on Wild Truths, HELP! and a host of other YS non-marko products when I was starting out in jr. high ministry. In my opinion, they were/are the best out there (sans a few of the older ones). If nothing else, they were always professional, which is more than I can say for some other resource producers.
    I don’t want to rehash everything but I would like to use 2 examples. Surely, you can see the irony in some of your points; you say don’t focus on programming, yet that is what YS is for the most part. I think I understand what you mean, but I have just known too many knuckleheads that buy a book thinking that now they will have a model for their ministry, or, know how to “do” it. This isn’t YS’s or any other resource company’s fault, its the knucklehead’s fault. But the producers, in my opinion, are a part of the problem.
    As for the church marketing (since that is the only part really relevant to this site) it comes down to your definition. If you are talking about church marketing to sell products or something, then yes, I think that is a problem. For me though, I see church marketing as simply another form of outreach. We have a great message to share with the world, and if it takes me creating a newspaper campaign to get them to consider it, then I’m all game.
    Would it be possible to get you to clarify on what you mean by “church marketing” sometime? Also, it seems pretty ironic that you praise the XXX church guys and “PornSunday” since that is pretty much a marketing gimic, if you ask me. How do you differentiate that?
    My tone may not have been proper, and if so, please forgive me. That will happen to you when you are up late working on ad campaigns for diapers. :(


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  • Randy
    October 10, 2005

    Mark…ditto…this isn’t a bash of you or YS products. I’ll continue to buy and use them.
    It just seemed odd that an entity that existed by and large through marketing (you have to, your a sales orgainzation) was attacking marketing.
    If I offended I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to “attack” you or YS, just point out the irony.


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  • marko
    October 10, 2005

    randy and brand1m — thanks for your new comments. you ask some great questions.
    focus on programming: true, ys has had a role in creating this problem. i don’t think many of us in the evangelical church, back in the 70s when ys was really getting going, were aware of the problems focusing on programs would create (this was the essential point of my post — the church [and specifically the seeker movement] has had some fantastic innovations in the last 30 years. but there have been some side-effects that we hadn’t predicted or intended). i was always pointing my finger at myself and ys as much as at anyone else.
    that said, ys has made a huge shift away from a programs-are-the-answer mindset years and years ago. if you attend any of our events, you would clearly hear this message, that, while programs are important tools, a focus on them in youth ministry is the wrong way to go (as opposed to a focus on relationships). and i think there’s been a shift in our books as well. sure, we still have programming books of various types, because youth workers still need programs. but i really don’t think you’ll find “copy what we do” stuff in the ys line. we’ve been fairly opposed to that line of thinking for a long time.
    as to church marketing – yeah, i went back and read my original post and agree i should have defined that a bit more (of course, the post was never intended to be a treatise!). i’m all for churches letting people know they exist, and inviting them. but there’s a truly fine line here, and i believe, some potentially dangerous further side-effects. frankly, i wish we had a different (better) phrase. “church marketing” really does make my muscles tense — it still feels like two words that just DO NOT belong together. and the whole industry that has sprung up around church marketing makes me very, very uncomfortable, and often seems to be driven by the numbers game.
    porn sunday: to say i praised this is quite an overstatement. i praised the guys behind it. i think it’s not a completely stupid idea, but it seems pretty odd as an outreach vehicle (churches putting “porn sunday” banners outside, hoping to draw people in). my post was basically mocking the idea (blogs are great for sideline potshots).
    randy, i think i addressed your observation, but in case i didn’t: i don’t have a problem with acknowledging that ys markets stuff. we’re a business. but at the same time, one of our organizational “guiding principles” is that we will tell the truth in everything we do (which includes our marketing stuff).


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  • joel jupp
    March 20, 2006

    “But he’s right.” I like that. Way to keep that authenticity — to look at all the angles. I’m new to this site, but I like what I see. Thanks for all your effort and input.


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