Ad campaigns invite people to church

Houston Chronicle: Ad campaigns invite people to church

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Shrinking mainline Protestant denominations are turning to marketing to help stem decades of membership losses and stay afloat.

The United Methodist Church recently unveiled a $20 million rebranding effort aimed at attracting younger members to the large but diminishing Protestant group. The new ads will appear over the next four years as part of the denomination's "Rethink Church" campaign.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has invested nearly $1.2 million over the past two years launching a similar branding effort based on the theme, "God's Work, Our Hands."

The denominations are trying to bounce back from losses that began in the mid-1960s.

From 1990 to 2008 alone, mainline Protestants dropped from 18.7 percent to 12.9 percent of the population, according to the American Religious Identification Survey. ...

There have some in the PCUSA who have been asking for this same type of advertising campaign. When I was working on the Mission Work Plan for the General Assembly Council in 2005-2006, the research I saw then suggested that this type of advertising tended to increase the goodwill of existing members toward the denomination but was largely ineffective and drawing new people.

Comments

[Travis Greene]

I can't imagine these kinds of things being effective at all. "Now with less pews!" Who is going to care?

[Michael W. Kruse]

Oh, the jingle and catch phrase possbilities are endless. I dare not start. :-)

But the research I've see does indeed show that these campaigns are generally ineffective if the intent is to attract new people. Could just be that no one has found the right campaign but I doubt it.

[Travis Greene]

I think this is one of those "cast your bread upon the waters" situations. If a church is focused on survival, they are unlikely to do even that. If the focus is taken off those inside the church and put rightfully back outside, on God's mission in the world (both in evangelism and social justice), numerical success isn't guaranteed, but I think it's a lot more likely.

Is there a place for this kind of campaign? Maybe. But not if the impetus is so transparently "Crap! Most of our churches are slowly dying! Let's make a commercial with a lot of young, multi-cultural faces! And put it on the Facetube and the Google!"