Church Marketing Sucks

With 2009 quickly coming to a close and everyone releasing their end-of-the-year and end-of-the-decade lists we thought we’d play along. So here is the first of several ‘top of 2009’ posts.

First we’ll start with the most hotly-debated posts of 2009. We get a fair number of comments and some posts prompt a lot more response than others. Here are the most commented posts of 2009*:

5) Do You Need a Web Site? – 40 comments
Posted with only 20 days until the end of the year, this entry made an impressive end-of-the-year surge with 40 comments debating the necessity of a church web site.

4) Piper Wants You to Keep Preaching Pure – 46 comments
John Piper made a controversial statement that multimedia can be a distraction from truly powerful preaching. That’s a recipe for debate.

3) Deadly Viper & Asian Stereotypes – 46 comments
Technically it’s tied with the Piper post, but since this issue garnered comments across the web, we’ll give it the third spot. Our discussion of the Deadly Viper controversy stirred up plenty of its own debate.

2) Pastor in a Box – 89 comments
Stuffing your pastor in a 6×6 box on top of the church roof for three days as an Easter stunt is bound to generate some discussion. It should come as no surprise that this issue also generated our most popular poll of the year.

And the number most hotly debated post of 2009 is…

1) Rick Warren & Spec Work – 133 comments
This should come as no surprise. A perfect storm of Rick Warren and a spec work contest generated 133 comments in less than two days. We had to shut down the comments as the discussion became less than civil, a first for Church Marketing Sucks.

*Another post would have landed at number three on this list with 56 comments, but we opted to scratch it from the running. Most of the comments concerned our editorial failure that we acknowledged and addressed by about the 30th comment. We’re not trying to bury our shortcomings (hence this aside), but we’d rather focus attention on church marketing issues from the year rather than our editorial missteps.