Church Marketing Sucks

   “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,”  — Matthew 28:19

The idea of making disciples of all nations is hard to fathom considering your limited communications budget and personnel. You can hardly afford those costly billboards just off the freeway or the latest Adobe Creative suite!

What if your church collaborated with other churches in your community? What could happen?

Consider what it would look like if everyone pooled together their talents and resources. How would your community respond to that?

Coming Together in Central Illinois

In the fall of 2015, 25 churches from various denominations came together in Central Illinois to invite those who have doubts about the Christian faith to a new, not-yet-released study entitled Room For Doubt.

These churches put aside their fairly minor theological differences and instead embraced the power of the body of Christ over those major faith tenants they do agree upon.

Room For Doubt is an initiative that stems out of Lincoln Christian University. Best-selling authors Lee Strobel and Mark Mittelberg, as well as other great minds, have worked on the material together to help answer doubts that people may have about the Christian faith.

What a perfect opportunity to reach out to a community of about 85,000 in population that’s working hard toward improving its’ image and worth!

Teamwork

The Room For Doubt initiative in Central Illinois started with one church taking the helm and rallying the troops to work together. This took letters followed up by phone calls directly from the lead pastor of First Christian Church in Decatur.

Leaders from 25 different churches accepted the challenge and began by meeting together discussing how they could accomplish this goal. They broke down responsibilities according to each other’s specialties.

Teams were put in place to work on the sermons, small group materials, print publications and online presence. There were continuous emails sent out to all the church leaders who were involved so that everyone would be kept in the loop at all times.

I had the privilege of participating with several of these teams which were comprised of communication directors from various churches. With our great minds combined and the financial resources of 25 churches, we were able to:

• Hand out 17,000 invite cards
• Post 1,200 yard signs around the area (This in itself was amazing because it was a chance to discover just how many Christian homes there are in the area.)
• Host a number of small groups necessitating 2,950 small group booklets (and we had to order even more because we ran out)

The chatter in the community was so huge that even the local NBC affiliate called to find out what all the Room For Doubt yard signs were all about and even hosted a live news broadcast interviewing Mark Mittelberg at Millikin University. It was amazing!

We feel like we’ve just barely scratched the surface, so we’re collaborating again this fall with even more churches hopping on board.

It Starts With a Vision

So, yes! Churches can come together to make a difference in the community. It starts with a vision to reach your community and an invitation for others to join that dream to reach your community in the name of Jesus.

Is God calling your church to reach your community? Perhaps you need to rally the troops in your community because you won’t make disciples of all nations on your own.