There are many people that don’t believe that advertising and Christianity should mix. I understand that sentiment, because there’s a lot of lying in traditional advertising. Commercials on TV scream their message and try to attract customers. Our world has become so commercialized, so I completely understand how the church would want to push back from that.
Rob Bell once said, “The thought of the word church and the word marketing in the same sentence makes me sick.” In Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell writes about the early days of his church plant. He says, “I remember being told that a sign had been rented with the church name on it to go in front of the building where we were meeting. I was mortified and had them get rid of it. You can’t put a sign out front, I argued; people have to want to find us. And so there were no advertisements, no flyers, no promotions, and no signs.”
In 2005, Rob Bell went on a multi-city tour called “Everything is Spiritual.” The tour DVD is available from Zondervan. Here’s the description of that product:
In the Hebrew Scriptures there is no word for spiritual. And Jesus never used the phrase spiritual life. Why? Because for Jesus and his tradition, all of life is spiritual.
During the tour, Rob Bell spends about twenty minutes talking about physics, including quantum mechanics. So here’s my question. If everything is spiritual, can’t advertising be spiritual? If God can speak to people through quantum mechanics, can’t He also use a Facebook ad?
Advertising and marketing is simply calling attention to something. And isn’t that something we want to do? Don’t we want people to attend church? Don’t we want the people in our community to meet Jesus? Don’t we want to call people’s attention to Jesus and His church?
I don’t think marketing is simply spiritual; I think it is extremely spiritual. I believe that marketing and advertising are outreach. Advertising can help you fulfill the great commission. Marketing can help you advance the Kingdom of God.
Postcards won’t solve your problems, but they also don’t have to be tagged with the secular label. Is someone that comes to your church via a personal invite less valuable than someone that comes to your church because of a postcard? Of course not.
Some people will say that we should simply preach the Gospel and leave the results to God. Some would say that marketing is a worldly method, and it should not be used.
Even if you would say that advertising and marketing are worldly methods, can’t God redeem them for his purposes? We use science, history, and all sorts of worldly subjects in our church and in our church services. Language, psychology, and biology all help us understand humanity. Fairytales and references to pop culture teach us things about God. If God can use all these things – if everything really can be spiritual – then why limit God when it comes to marketing?
In one of our surveys, we found that nearly 40 percent of our attenders came to Oak Leaf Church because of a postcard or a road sign. Only God knows if these people would have visited Oak Leaf Church by some other way, but I believe that God used our advertising campaigns. Personal invitations are the best, but marketing has helped people get connected to our church, where they have been challenged to go from where they are to where God wants them to be.
