Church  Marketing

“Church ‘cap’ marketing”

This is a draft version for comment and feedback. It is designed to provoke discussion and it is not a
‘position statement’. Please let me know what you think. Thanks, Nigel.
P.S.  is the mathematical symbol for the elements that belong to two sets at their intersection. It is
pronounced ‘cap’.
09/10/2003

The Church has avoided marketing

I begin by confessing that it is fifteen years since I wrote to the then Director for Ministry in the
diocese asking where I could go to explore the application of marketing to the church. I got an
inconclusive reply and I have done little about it since apart from occasionally borrowing a book on
the subject from the library. In that time I have not noticed that the ‘church’, whether the national
Church of England or other national churches or local manifestations such as dioceses and parishes,
have really turned to marketing for advice and inspiration. Part of my own excuse for taking fifteen
years is an inner sense that it is just inappropriate for the church to turn to such a worldly outlook as
marketing and I suspect that this inhibition is widely shared.
Firstly, there is an apparent clash with the Gospel. We are not to be ashamed of it; we are not to
trim it to predilections of this world; it is the Spirit that guides us into truth. And yet all wings of the
church acknowledge that our inheritance of faith is our inspiration and guidance under God in
bringing the grace and truth of Christ to this generation, in all its cultural particularities. A simple
examination of church history demonstrates how the Gospel has always been inculturated in every
period and every location. If we are to proclaim the Gospel afresh to this generation and place we
must learn the language of the people – and this means more than grammar and syntax. Marketing
can be thought of as the business tool for understanding the cultural language in which a company
has to work and then formulating the product so that it is best communicated to the public. The core
message may be an absolute, but the medium must be flexible. Rather similarly to the church,
health professionals were reluctant at first to use the insights of marketing in communicating their
absolute messages (e.g. smoking kills) and yet they have turned to it with some success in
campaigns (e.g. over HIV or drugs) and there is now a distinct branch of marketing called ‘social
marketing’ which is about communicating absolute scientific facts or other messages chosen in
advance (MacFadyen et al. 2003). If that can be done for science, it can be done for the absolutes of
the Word of God. Marketing analysis may actually give us courage to be bolder than we currently
are to remain authentic.
Next the church maintains a critique of the world, and what could be more worldly than the market,
consumerism, and Mammon? How can we possibly learn from such a world? Marketing falls under
the judgement that all have sinned, but then so also the Church of England hath erred, not only in
their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith. As any culture, our current
consumer culture is a mixture of good and bad (Ward 2002:6) but it is the one in which the church
now finds itself called to be. And marketing has the potential for redemption, just as shopping has.
It is unimaginable how we can avoid shopping in our current culture, the challenge is to shop
ethically; likewise the challenge is to market ethically. Interestingly, most textbooks on marketing
have a significant section on ethics. Jobber (2001) has a section on ethics at the end of almost every
chapter. Whatever use we make of marketing insights, they must be examined for their morality and
their consistency with the Gospel, but there is no need to rule out all such insights a priori in my
opinion.

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Thirdly, there is a clash of image and culture. For significant sections of the church, turning to
marketing is about as abhorrent as raising your hand while singing ‘songs’! Ironically, the
avoidance of marketing in this context is itself an unconscious marketing ploy: it is about projecting
a certain image of the institution as above ‘that sort of thing’ which would alienate certain powerful
sectors that support the church. We find at all levels of the church that in order to keep happy the
people we already have we lose our room for manoeuvre (Ward 2002:64). Meanwhile, key
marketing choices are actually happening by default and without planning. These include the brand
image of the church (just remember the vox pop. responses in the video Restoring Hope in our
Church!) (Thomas 2003:125) and the limited segments of the population who can take church
religion as a serious life option (normally those over 60yrs for a start) despite our efforts to reach
everyone.
I sense that the church is now more open to new ideas, from any sources, than it has been since the
1950s. We have come to this readiness to learn because it has borne in upon us just how broken we
are. In marketing speak, we have lost market share alarmingly and no longer have the profitability
we need to reinvest in new work. For me, this is the work of God and we are being taught
something theological. As I read it, the central message of marketing is that the customer has
something vital to tell you. I translate that into a theological message that God is already out there
in the world, speaking to people’s hearts, working in their lives, and if the church is to co-operate
with the Spirit it has first to learn what the Spirit is already doing in the world. Our potential
‘customers’ have something vital to tell us because God is already speaking to them, and through
them God is speaking to us in the church.

The limitations of marketing

The outlook and methods of marketing are only tools with which to approach reality; they are not
reality itself. There are plenty of other tools around that can also help us to discern what we are
being called upon to do, many with a much greater rootedness in the reality that is God, such as
prayer. My argument is that we can usefully be stimulated by the insights of marketing and
challenged by its questions.
And marketing has been developed for a very specific field which has many points of distinction
from the work of the church. Within marketing, there are acknowledged adaptations to stretch the
concepts to help apply them to fields beyond its original core of commodity businesses; these
include service industries, non-profit industries and social messages (social marketing). The core
language is of products that possess benefits exchanged for cash between companies and target
customers. In the case of the church, many of these concepts have to be considerably stretched.
What might be the product, a church service, a relationship with God? And what benefits can we
identify, fellowship, righteousness? And what do people give in exchange, donations, commitment,
faith? Furthermore, the context we are set in is more complex than that of the average company as
we wish to ‘sell’ to absolutely everyone, not just sufficient people to make a good profit or the
groups of people easiest and most profitable to reach. And the competition is not so much other
churches, like washing powders, but a whole variety of things that compete for time, money,
commitment and offer alternative benefits such as friendship or feeling good. Clearly, whatever
marketing has to offer the church, there will have to be a good deal of intelligent adaptation if it is
to apply at all. Yet on the other hand, asking these sorts of questions may clear up some muddled
thinking on what the task of the church exactly is.

The nature of a market-oriented institution

Perhaps the first thing is to clear up a common misconception, marketing is about far more than
advertising and promotion. True marketing is the antithesis of spin. I have read that American
churches have been using marketing for decades but that it is now failing them. I suspect that the
problem is that the ‘market’, i.e. the potential customer base, is changing so rapidly that the
American churches are having difficulty in adapting fast enough with the fashions rather than the
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principles of marketing as such are failing. Perhaps contemporary customers are looking for a less
slick product and are more resistant to a hard sell. If so, that is good news for us over here where
generally we wallow in un-slickness, but exactly what aspects of our muddling through with the
complex realities of life will strike helpful chords with others? – that’s the marketing question.
Yes, the marketing question begins with the customer and not the product. What does the customer
want, or what could they be helped to realise that they have as a need? The focus is on the customer
and learning from him or her; it is respecting them and having a positive view of them. In church-
speak, we are to look at the church as a resource for people’s spiritual desires and not at people as a
resource for the church, i.e. in terms of membership, money, volunteers, or social approval and
status (Thomas 2003:9). Large companies with a similar reach to that of the Church of England will
spend a great deal of money researching their customers. The church has not put similar resources
into learning and has relied on the stories clergy and laity tell of what the public think and want.
Companies have access to similar ad hoc information, but still undertake systematic research and
the church needs to do the same. These days people assume that their wants have been thoroughly
researched and that a company is offering a product that really meets them (Moynagh 2001:46) and
will expect the same attentiveness from the church.
Now all this is not to make the church servile but a true servant. It is not servile as marketing
includes provision for companies to educate their customers and to stimulate their desires. The
marketing church will be educating people about God and stimulating their desire for God.
Marketing also recognises the constraints a company is under that prevent it just doing whatever the
customers want: the capacity of the staff and existing capital investments to adapt; the established
place of the company in the market and the expectations upon it; the need to keep ahead of the
imagination of customers; the logical and engineering constraints of the product. Likewise the
church’s message has to remain true to scripture and tradition; we have to be listening to where God
is leading us; we have to work with the expectations people already have of the church; and we
have clergy and buildings etc. that have a lot of unexplored gifts but can also be ‘old dogs’. So it is
not a matter of customers doing what they like with a blank canvass, but it is a matter of the existing
canvass being touched up to adapt to the customers and not being left in a take-it-or-leave-it kind of
way.
Marketing textbooks list some of the features of organisations that are market-led and customer
focussed. A list of their antitheses makes a recognisable caricature of the church. I have adapted a
table from Jobber (2001:7).
Know what customers want and aim to match it Assume a good product is all that is required
Invest in market research Rely on anecdotes and received wisdom
Welcome change Cherish status quo
Try to understand competition Ignore competition
Risk and innovation rewarded Risk and innovation punished
Being fast and first Why rush?
Segment by customer differences Segment by product
Marketing spend regarded as an investment Marketing spend regarded as a luxury
Search for latent markets Stick with the same
Was ‘recognisable caricature’ too generous? How about ‘accurate description’? Well, that is a bit
unfair, particularly as the church is really beginning to ask serious questions of itself in a way that
makes me feel more hopeful than I have done for years. We are only just beginning to ask some of
the marketing questions that may be able to help us. We have yet at a national level to place the
financial investment in marketing (and promotion) that is needed. But we are moving away from
cherishing the status quo and beginning to welcome risk and innovation in looking for significantly
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new markets and potential products for them. There is a lot of thinking going on about the new
culture we find ourselves in, but we are still missing out on the benefits of market research. We
have not really begun to segment by customer differences and it is this that I want to examine next.

Positioning
Position = target market + differential advantage. (Jobber 2001:06)

Segmenting the market

My greatest resistance to marketing has been to segmentation: surely the Gospel is for everyone and
that the church should have every type of person in its membership? To classify people into
different segments and then only to work with one or two segments was akin to never leaving
Jerusalem. And the great joy of the church was that whether Jew or Gentile, child or pensioner,
middle or working class, we were all one in Christ Jesus. My change of heart has come with a pair
of realisations: 1) that churches appeal to only certain sections of society (or at least mainly so) and
this has always been the case; 2) that different churches appeal to different sections of society so
that between them they could potentially appeal to all sections, at least if they co-operated and
planned this.
On the first point, most local churches think nothing of segmenting according to age and gender:
Sunday schools, youth groups, women’s fellowships, men’s choirs (this last also segmenting by
interests). Also, local churches will think it a virtue to adapt themselves to the local culture, village,
inner city, or whatever and consider as inevitable that there will be some parts of a parish that will
feel ill at ease as a result, such as a wealthy quarter. We know that village churches often find it
hard to keep a balance between traditional villagers and incomers, so that this segmentation also
occurs unconsciously. And then the church promotes a number of different brands, otherwise
known as churchmanships and denominations. How well these map onto social differences like
class is debatable, but they must surely at least map onto personality differences, if not more
differences. Even the New Testament church seems to have experienced similar phenomena, with
some churches being predominantly Gentile, others Jewish, some Greek, some Pauline. A brief
reflection of church history seems to tell the same recurring story, but now we have a means of
addressing this phenomenon in the discipline of marketing.
So, on the second point, instead of marketing’s advice to segment the market being contrary to the
Gospel imperative, I now can see it as the contemporary way to address the Gospel imperative of
proclaiming it to all. It would make no sense to proclaim the Gospel only in Aramaic and demand
that customers learn the language before they can know the things of God or share in the fellowship
of the church. By extension, it makes no sense to proclaim the Gospel only in Victorian hymns, or
in folk music, or in Quaker silence and demand that people learn – and enjoy – these cultural
languages before they can access the Catholic Church. Just as at the Reformation the church
grasped the need for adaptation to national cultural differences, in today’s much more complex and
demanding world, we have to adapt to the multiplicity of cultural differences, such as those
identified by market segmentation. The church as a whole can then provide different adapted
products, different vehicles for the Gospel if you will, often with different branding and labelling,
so that the church as a whole can be all things to all people (even if we lack the St Pauls who can do
it in a single person). Whether at the level of the different groups in a local church, churchmanships
etc across a deanery, denominations and inter-denominational groups at national level, we must
segment the market. Then we must allocate (by agreement or default) each segment to be the target
market for one section of the church or another for that section to reach with the Gospel. The vision
is not of the church as a distinct tribe among the many others jostling in the post-modern mêlée, but
as a part of every tribe. Christianity should be a distinct accent in which every voice can be spoken
(Holmes 2002:8).

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Moynagh (2001:78) argues that in today’s culture people are attracted to ‘people-like-me’ and that
such ‘people’ are not gathered together into neighbourhoods as they once were. A local church that
does not have a critical mass of any one type of ‘people-like-me’ will find it incredibly hard to
attract people in that type: they will turn up, see that there is no one like them there, and not come
next time. As one woman said to him, “I come from a village church. Thank you for explaining
why, in human terms, our church will never grow. We are not connected to the commuters, to the
young people and to the other important networks in our village.” It also seems to me that ‘people-
like-me’ undertake activities that are ‘what-we-do’ and if singing is not one of them, God help
them, for the church won’t. Moynagh’s solution is for us to go to the networks rather than for us to
try and attract the networks in. That is the marketing approach: not try to sell a fixed product, but to
take an adapted product to specific parts of the market.
The textbooks on marketing describe all sorts of variables that are used to segment the market
including behavioural, social profile and psychographic. I sense greatest interest amongst church
commentators on psychographic ones, particularly on characterising the ways in which people
respond to the challenges of postmodernity. There would be great value in using a mixture of
variables. Geodemographic ones, such as those linked to postcodes, could give real guidance to
parish churches and how they might approach ministry in their neighbourhoods for instance. I want
to discuss ‘degree of brand loyalty’ as an interesting example of a behavioural variable. Companies
are very interested in whether people are very brand loyal (termed solus buyers) or are special-
offer-seekers or variety-seekers. To succeed a product will need to appeal to all three types and
presented to each type in a different way; it is not good enough to concentrate on the solus buyers
and ignore the others as disloyal and so not worthy of attention. Nor is it a matter of attempting to
convert switchers to solus buyers; it is a basic character trait and must just be worked with.
However, too often the church spends nearly all its effort in trying to convert switchers or to
keeping solus members loyal, while mishandling with varying degrees of offensiveness the
switchers who remain true to character. Perhaps an analogy with toilet paper may be reassuring. It is
possible for switchers to remain very loyal indeed to purchasing loo rolls regularly, but each week
they may fancy a different colour or feel or notice that a new brand is on special offer. This seems
to me to be akin to the argument of Thomas 2003 throughout his book, that the church ignores the
50% or so of the population that believe but do not participate in church membership. Traditionally
the occasional offices are the ministry the church has offered these people (so long as they are not
divorced, gay, or live outside the parish!); how much more we could offer them.

Differential advantage
Segmentation is the easy part. What exactly is our differential advantage in any one segment? The
answer of ‘eternal salvation’ won’t do, because the answer has to be phrased in the language of
perceived benefits desired by the customer (the ‘perception’ may not be conscious, so perhaps
detectable might be a better word; customers are attracted to many subliminal features in products
such as their sexuality). The advantage also has to be expressed in terms of differentiation from the
competition, and it is not always easy to tell who our competitors are. Both these aspects deserve
much more attention than they currently receive in church circles. Exceptionally, Jill Edwards
(2003) has provided an interesting analysis of ‘consumer religion’ at Lakeside, Thurrock, Essex and
its apparently greater differential advantage to Christianity. We have so much to learn about the
segments and the competition.
This is an area that I really want to think more about for the revision of this draft.
Finally, just reflect for a moment on your instinctive judgement of the positioning of the church in
modern society. Every other person will be making a judgement too and is likely to come to a fairly
similar conclusion, without the bias of institutional loyalty. Need I say more?

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 The marketing mix
One of the basic conceptual tools of marketing is the ‘marketing mix’, often expressed as the 4Ps,
sometimes with supplementaries such as the fifth P I have added. The marketing mix is all that a
company is doing to present to its selected target market its product with the differential advantages
both present and highlighted. You could think of them as an extended analysis of the product, all its
features, including benefits, such as where it can be purchased (place) and who is meeting the
customer (people), exchange-value, such as price, and how all these are communicated (promotion).
For it to work, the whole mix must fit the positioning and be coherent. If I am right so far, the
church, through branding and the offer of diverse ‘products’, must offer a great variety of marketing
mixes if it is to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world, i.e. have a wide ‘portfolio’. In this section I
want to think theoretically and leave new ‘product’ ideas to the last, brief section.

Product
A key issue is what is our product, God or church services (I mean more than liturgy by ‘services’;
what the church does for people, ‘service’ as in service industry)? Normally we think in terms of the
more tangible church services. In these cases we have people we can count (numbers attending,
numbers being baptised, number of visitors a year, etc) and money we can count (fees, donations,
concert tickets, etc). They are also variables that we can change, e.g. new style services. They are
the front-end of the church that people encounter. However, if we focus solely on church services as
product we may miss spiritual truths.
Negatively we can fall into the trap of seeing the prospering of the provider of these services, i.e.
the church as a set of institutions, as the ultimate aim of the services, just as a company is in
business for itself. Companies try to persuade customers that they are on their side, but people will
only half believe this as they know what really counts at the bottom line. They are equally
suspicious of the church (cf. Moynagh 2001:112). “They are just after your money,” is a not
infrequent judgement that has an element of truth in it. As an all too human institution we are out
for ourselves and we particularly seek out not just money but affirmation and social influence. We
need to be honest about this and put all these motivations alongside the spiritual task of the church.
The positive task of the church is to be part of the work of God in the world. What we are selling is
God at work in people’s lives and in society, “Let God work in you.” Counting people or money
may be proxies for assessing how well we are doing in that work, but they can be very misleading
ones, particularly when they are pointing to success. The real scores on the assessment criteria are
usually hidden from our view and, what is more, different wings of the church believe in different
criteria, e.g. whether personal conversion is an either/or state and how it is associated with baptism;
how important is the transformation of society vis-à-vis individual salvation. The main argument of
Thomas 2003 is that those who are not currently counted in may still be people in whose lives God
is working and they are responding to God. He believes that people want a direct relationship with
God that correlates with the widespread mood of ‘disintermediation’ (2003:5). If that is the case, the
church’s task is as much working among such people as friends in their own setting as trying to
recruit them into church structures (Moynagh 2001:112). That is not to say that we do not need to
recruit workers, but that perhaps that should be seen as clearly distinct from selling ‘products’ and
for recruitment to work by explicit calls to vocation among both church people and non-church
people (often the church will be involved in projects that can be joint with non-churched Christians,
people of other faiths or none at all – and the non-church people may gradually convert in the
process as well). Nor is it to say that we don’t need money to sustain resources, but that money
could be raised much more specifically than we have tended to do in the past, including – and very
importantly – by actually selling services for an advertised price. That way we avoid the problem
that people who do not wish to support the institution for itself may still recognise that it is fair to
pay for services received. This is all part of the general commodification of life that the church
needs to work with rather than just lament.

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With this proviso, we can turn to the services the church offers and ask exactly what are the benefits
to the customer. In the case of a car, it is clear that the product offers the benefit of moving from A
to B as and when you wish. But, of course, it is a lot more than that! We express our personalities
through our cars, e.g. stylish, fast, or not-to-be-argued-with (I suppose that is the reason for so many
townsfolk drive 4x4s), or display our wealth and social status. To varying degrees most commercial
products and services carry these supplementary benefits. In many ways commerce offers
consumers many of the intangible benefits people used to get from church. Moynagh (2001:76) lists
identity, structuring of life, friendships, sense of well-being, even a meaning for life. He concludes,
honestly, that consumerism offers these benefits more effectively than the church does. Rarely have
people ever come to church solely out of their deep relationship with God. We just have to look
around our fellow members to see how there are psychological rewards such as friendships, a
valued role, entertainment, doing-good, social status (even pay, God forbid, in the case of the
clergy!), and need we look further than our own hearts to confirm this commonplace. It is probably
this mixture of motives that non-attenders pick up and criticise when they accuse churchgoers of
hypocrisy. Likewise, when the same critics say they have no need to go to church, they are probably
referring to the way they get their similar psychological rewards elsewhere (such as the Sunday trip
to Lakeside). There may be some need for repentance among us here, but I think this can also be
seen more positively. God works among us in the very concrete aspects of human life. Love, for
instance, is not just a detached spiritual quality, but is incarnate in acts of charity, in human
emotions, in sexual intercourse. These side-benefits of church membership may need purification,
but they are the necessary vehicles for the grace of God. If that is the case, then they are
legitimately part of the benefits to the customer provided by our products. But this only returns me
to my difficulty earlier, what fringe benefits can we offer that are superior to consumerism? If we
turn to our core benefits, we have something of a crisis of belief. Even those who say they believe
in judgement, hell and double predestination must also half dis-believe it to make life tolerable.
Without that disbelief how can one ever cease pleading with people to convert, or hold on to any
notion of love and mercy in the nature of God? So what are we offering? I suppose I might say aids
and training in deepening prayer and praise, in moral reflection and conversion of the will, in
opening ourselves to the Spirit and his gifts, and in joining with others in doing these things which
are best done ‘in community’. As a supplementary, how do we make our advertised benefits match
the perceived performance and buyer expectations of our religion?
All this marketing talk is not misplaced, I believe, because we have moved into a culture, for better
or worse, in which ‘I am what I buy’ (Ward 2002:17). That may be a pejorative way of putting it. In
the past people gained identity and a sense of belonging through the work they did and the
community groups they belonged to. They demonstrated their values and beliefs through their
choices of employment and clubs. Today, what you do for a living is much less important than how
you shop. By the items you buy, especially the ones you display such as clothes and cars, you
demonstrate your social position and aspirations and your moral sensibility (the last through labels
such as fair trade and animal friendly). In parenthesis, the other important mechanism today is
where we ‘party’, and I would include in this the big festivals and demonstrations (such as the
antiwar march in February).
In our culture, whatever we do, it is a kind of shopping (Ward 2002:58). Shopping is not
materialism or consumerism as was condemned in the mid-twentieth century, to shop is to seek
something beyond ourselves. We crave the meaning of objects. It is the job of advertising to invest
objects with meaning so that they are worth buying by our meaning-craving world. And, as I have
mentioned before, they make a good job of it. By their purchases people are able to buy a sense of
identity, a fellowship with others who ‘shop at X’, a moral purpose, a better self-image. We in the
church may sneer at the shallowness of all this with some justification, but until we wake up to the
real strength of what shopping offers people we will not be able to offer them a deeper encounter
with God than that they get through shopping. We have also to realise that what we offer has to be
packaged as shopping and no longer as club-membership. Ward (2002:20) likens today’s churches

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to clubs. The days of the Freemasons, the Rotary, the Foresters, the Guides, even the golf club, are
passing and with them the club-like local church. We are only just imagining what church might be
like in this new world. It may include networks rather than clubs, short-term products rather than
long-term loyalty, payment by price rather than by subscription.
A marketer often uses the concept of ‘brand’ to invest products with the meaning purchasers desire.
Moynagh (2001:40) claims that brands are the new signposts to life. They are new traditions that
guide and shape individuals. The ideas associated with brands become the source of identity for the
shopper. Thus, he argues, the church needs to perform the function of a brand. The importance of
brands is emphasised by the marketing textbooks. Superior branding out competes superior
performance in the market place. Branding is especially important where consumers find it difficult
to judge quality for themselves; does a high branded perfume, for example, really smell superior or
do we just think it does because of its brand? Unconsciously the church has used branding as a sign
of authenticity for centuries through the denominational system. Through the authorisation
procedures in denominations they have also tried to ensure consistency of product, which is a
necessary corollary of branding. Is the diversity of local churches, with all the inconsistency it
brings, now a strength or a weakness in the branding efforts of the church? Thomas (2003:126)
argues it could be a strength, but it needs much better marketing if it is going to work in my
opinion. The way we shall reach all types of people is to have a variety of brands for each market
segment and then diversify further by micro-segmentation at the local or individual customer level.
If we are to do that, we shall need to know what we are doing rather than just rely on hunch as we
do at the moment.
Time and again commentators point to the great hunger for spirituality in our culture and bewail the
fact that the church seems so ill fitted to meet it. I suspect that this hunger is not as great as is often
portrayed. For example, the ‘mind, body, spirit’ shelves of bookshops are often identified as
illustrating the hunger, but although this is a significant phenomenon, the length of shelving
dedicated to this is a very small fraction of the shelving in most bookshops. Reaching the people
who buy these books will be targeting only one segment of the whole market. It is worth doing, but
we must go more widely.

Price
Marketers recognise that ‘price’ can often be more than monetary cost. Other sacrifices that have to
be made are the time and effort to purchase and the opportunity cost of not buying alternative
products. In the case of the church, people who are investigating involvement will size up a raft of
these sacrifices that have to be made. In addition to the expectation to give regularly and
generously, members are expected to show commitment to the fellowship, to the building, to
singing, and to offering time. They will have to shoulder being labelled as a churchgoer with the
loss of ‘style’ that brings and the associated threat to social and family acceptability. They will have
to cope with the risk that faith is all hot air, or that the vicar may turn on them, or they will be
accused of being less holy than they ought. Marketers are very alert to this problem that they call
dissonance, the experience of let down purchasers may experience They take steps to minimise
dissonance through quality control, not hyping the promotion, and affirming post-purchase
confidence; the church does little in this regard.
Of course, in a profound way the Christian faith costs the earth, picking up our crosses, striving to
be perfect, dying with Christ. We should not be afraid of the challenges of the Gospel. However, I
think it would be quite wrong to suggest that church-as-it-is routinely places that radical challenge
before its members and thus, by inference, that those who don’t attend church are morally inferior
because they do not rise to this challenge. I am sure some people are sanely put off faith by the
challenges it brings, but they may be closer to God than many church members who have hidden
from themselves the cost of discipleship.

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Being in the world, even if not of it, still demands some sort of income stream. Many of the books
on new ways of being church seem to me to duck this issue. How is the church to pay for itself?
One answer is that it will have to radically slim its paid workforce; this is already happening and
will accelerate, assisted by poor recruitment rates. The other answer is to find new sources of
income. In our commercial world I believe that we have to package our products as commodities
for which people pay – if they want them, that is (we have to provide products they want enough to
pay for at a realistic rate). This may seem a heretical idea, but first consider how the church already
charges for some of its services and products: weddings and funerals, counselling, fundraising
socials, chaplaincies to hospitals, prisons and the armed forces. As with so much of our society,
caring has been consumerised and taken out of the voluntary and familiar sectors. We may lament
this, but it has its good points too, e.g. old people not being so vulnerable to the whims of their
families. It is also a social reality with which we have to work and allow it to be transformed by the
Gospel rather than just condemn it. We need to start thinking, “what can we charge for?” Just a few
ideas are: courses on spirituality, religious holidays, works of art and kitsch, music and books,
conferences and festivals, gigs and dances, food and drink, morally traded food and clothes.
Depending on the products, it may be appropriate to have a sliding scale of fees to take account of
ability to pay, e.g. concession rates for concerts.
Moving into this way of raising income could be very productive. It would help us focus on
consumers and their wants and needs and on the quality of what we give them. It would stimulate
thinking about new products that could be designed and marketed. It could sustain some sort of
institution through this next generation when ‘club-style’ church and subscription income is likely
to plummet.
One interesting question is at what level can the price be set. There may have to be a lot of
education to persuade customers that this is a service that should be individually paid for rather than
free-at-the-point-of-delivery, as if the taxpayer or God were paying for it. This may be a lot easier
for new style products. It may be possible to charge some sort of premium for superior products.
The corollary, a high price can be a good way to affirm the quality of the product on offer (it is part
of its branding). We will also have to get into the habit of comparing costs of production with
income gained, judging whether it is right to invest in a market that might not be profitable for a
long time, or whether to run lost leaders. The church does have an opportunity at the moment to
sustain experimentation in these new style products, an opportunity that will be eroded as the
traditional base raises less and less income.

Place
The traditional answer the church gives to ‘place’ is a large gothic building, on a Sunday, in the
morning, with as large a group as possible. In recent decades there has been a move away from the
gothic element in new building; now we are waking up to question the rest of the answer. It seems
to me that our old buildings are both a great asset and a great liability. They are very distinctive and
so add a great deal to the brand image; many potential customers find the aura appealing. Many
people speak of visiting churches (i.e. rather than services) and our cathedrals are still very popular.
However, I noticed in a recent Church Times report that visitor numbers at cathedrals had fallen by
about 8% over the past four years while visits to attractions generally had risen by about 10% (I
think those were the figures). One possible explanation is that the church is failing to promote
visiting cathedrals, at least in comparison with advertising spend of other attractions, but they are
probably also failing to keep up with the innovations needed to keep visitors returning. The liability
is that at local church level, you can hardly be a serious member without accepting some
responsibility for looking after the local church. Non-attenders may be more willing to give to
maintain the building than the clergy, but it seems a bit perverse if accepting Christ as Lord comes
with the price tag of maintaining the country’s heritage. So we need to use our old buildings as
imaginatively as possible and to explore lots of other outlets as well. This, of course, is well

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understood, just hard to put into practice. We also realise that we need to provide other options to
Sunday mornings and other group sizes, hence interest in cell churches and the like.
Two short comments: We need to be much more creative over our use of other ‘channels’, to use
the marketing term. We already have church schools; some churches have shops; are there other
outlets we should be investing in? Are there outlets run by others that would ‘stock our products’?
Here I would mention as an example the Asda promotion of instore chaplains. Some of these
volunteers have broken away from the traditional Industrial Mission model and started things like
‘Sunday schools’ (not necessarily on a Sunday) within the store. We also need to think much more
about the image we are creating for our brand by the ambience and décor of the spaces we use. The
popularity of banners was a way of dealing with this, but most banners I see now seem tired and out
of fashion. Creative interior design that adapts to both old and new buildings needs attention.

Promotion
In terms of advertising, the church suffers two major problems: no real national mechanism with an
adequate budget to organise it; an equally serious loss of nerve. Brands are mainly created by
advertising. Without it, brand image develops by default: when did you last see a cartoon depiction
of a vicar who wasn’t bald? Cartoonists pick up the prevailing brand image and reflect it back in
caricature. We can tell a lot from them. Changing the inside of churches is only half the task, they
must also be promoted (Thomas 2003:126). As for the loss of nerve, consider the plans for this
Christmas’ posters, replacing the Christ child with Father Christmas. We must not be ashamed of
the cross. “We don’t become relevant by seeking relevance. We become relevant precisely because
we have abandoned the search for relevance and have turned instead to embrace the cross” (Thomas
2003:110). Neither should we be frightened of desire, it is God’s hook within us. Ward (2002:72)
advocates stimulating people’s desire, leading them to deepening their desire for God.
One other thought, we have a sales team out there in the clergy and others, but we do not train them
in sales techniques and how they might be used appropriately.

People
Perhaps as least as much other service industries, the product is almost equivalent to the people
delivering it. ‘People’ means the clergy and others who are the public face of the church, but also
the mass of people at an event who demonstrate by who they are the market segment that is
expected to be attracted to the event and how successfully the product works for them, e.g. how
cheerful or friendly they are. Now we are not aiming for a ‘Have a nice day’ workforce, who put on
a cheerful countenance come what may and so present a consistently friendly image to the
customers. We want people to grow in genuine relationships in which misery and anger are
acknowledged and dealt with. But do we really help our staff to achieve an across-brand
consistency in this key area? It is not about hiding personality under a uniform presentation, but a
system that helps clergy and others examine their relationships and how they can become more
mature. The first hurdle, a major one speaking personally, is to encourage clergy to be open to this
sort of help.
Obviously I have spent much less time thinking about these later elements of the marketing mix and
they need more attention.

New Church ‘products’

So far I have been theoretical. What might this mean in practice on the ground? One person’s
imagination, supplemented by reading some of the latest books on the subject, is a desperately thin
attempt at answering this question. We need both national and local structures in place where
creative thinking can take place away from the routine pressures. I remember nearly thirty years ago
a Ford company worker telling me that he was very busy because the company always put

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development as the priority over routine maintenance. The church almost invariably is very busy
because it is putting maintenance ahead of development.

The place for ‘solid Church’

Ward (2002) describes church as it is now as ‘solid church’. It is church that has not changed much
since the 1950s and not much more since the Victorian period. Critics might complain that it is not
so much solid as rigid by comparison to the huge transformations that continually sweep through
contemporary Western society. However, it would be clearly foolish in the extreme to jettison this
church. It may also be unwise to try to transform it radically. Attempting to do so may alienate
current members and fail to attract new ones. The task may be more to plant new ‘churches’ that are
very unlike the parent organisations, but are still fed and nurtured by the parents through staff,
finance, prayer etc..
I have no particular experience in either inner-city or suburban churches so I want to reflect on
village churches and what the future might be for them. The liberating thing is that they could be
released from the parochial expectation of the Church of England that they should minister to
everyone living in the parish. By this I do not mean that traditional ministries such as marriage and
burial should be repudiated, but that the missionary outreach of the congregation could legitimately
be to ‘people-near-enough-like-us’, i.e. the traditionalists and community-minded people in the
village. If they can break out beyond this, all well and good. If not, they should make room for
others to reach the rest of the population. So, for instance, Moynagh (2001:133) suggests that
perhaps the best thing traditional churches can do is to pay for missionaries rather than try to be
missionary themselves. They could employ people to establish new church plants, perhaps across
networks based on work, partying or shopping rather than on residence. The current members of
village churches are usually very place-loyal and loath to travel to a neighbouring village for a joint
service; non-attenders may abhor this parochial attitude and find it stifling. Meanwhile, the
traditional congregation will need to become largely self-organised with the assistance of whatever
time they can pay for from a professional priest. As now, they will have to turn to other locals to
help keep the building going. In sum, the energies of the diocese will be directed elsewhere and the
village churches would be left largely to their own devices, encouraged to help each other.

Pointers to new ways of being Church

Alongside the traditional local churches many new forms of church, of ‘product’, will need to arise.
These will need to be distinctly branded from the traditional. So far these brands have mostly been
local ones, the Alpha Course is an exception, with the limitations this scale brings. We need to
consider if we can launch new national brands in a rather similar way the major airlines have
responded to the new cheap ones by launching their own cheap brands. Hopefully many of these
innovations will arise within the Church of England. This way the parent can invest in the offspring
in its early years and reap the benefit when the offspring matures and can reverse the cash flow to
the centre. Some innovations will occur outside the institutional church, what proportion will
depend on how the institution handles its entrepreneurs and their risk-taking.
These new forms of church will be very varied. I throw out some ideas on a brainstorming basis –
many will be hopeless, but the filtering process kicks in after lots of ideas are generated rather than
immediately each idea arrives. Lots more are possible.
 Set up fellowships in new networks, e.g. workplaces, that are similarly run to parish churches
but without the buildings.
 Run training products on spirituality that people pay for. The Alpha course is a bit like this.
Other possibilities are courses in philosophy, music as well as more explicit subjects like prayer.
Establish spirituality gurus that people could employ rather as they pay for fitness instructors.

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 Pastoral care could be offered on a cost basis. This might include selling chaplaincy services to
additional institutions. Some of the church’s old pastoral institutions could be reclaimed more
for the explicit Gospel, e.g. the Children’s Society and Westminster Pastoral Foundation. If they
did not wish to move in this direction, perhaps new organisations could be established.
 Campaigning may attract others to work with the church and grow spiritually. This may include
fundraising for development charities, promoting fairly traded goods, or political or
environmental activities.
 We could make much more of Ministers in Secular Employment. We could give people more of
a badge, not only NSMs, but lay people at work as well. In appropriate settings they could carry
a church label when they do their main work, either in helping their own customers or in
supporting their colleagues.
 Establish alternative societies, new religious communities, both in the countryside and
especially in towns. These communities may present alternative levels of commitment ranging
from the life-long of the traditional religious to ‘for-the-holiday’ (rather as the Othona
Community works).
There are a lot of ideas floating around at present in books, on the Web, and some actually in
practice on the ground. Many of them will fail, like new businesses where the statistic is that about
half fail within two years or something. Many that are established will remain small-scale, just as
most small businesses remain small. Some will take off big-time. Most big initiatives will need to
be taken by the church at a national level. At present there is little sign of this, which is a pity.

Concluding reflection
I remain very ambivalent about all this. Is all this marketing stuff just joining the world, just seeking
approval from the world, just looking for worldly success for the church? While in writing mode, as
opposed to critical mode, I turn to the thought that we hold God’s treasure in earthen vessels. A
superficial examination of church history suggests that the institutional church has always survived
through the normal social forces of the period. Yet, however much one laments the worldliness of
the church, without it the Gospel message would have no one to preach it. And being preached, the
Gospel keeps alighting the lives of individuals and keeps reforming the church. What an
examination of marketing may allow the contemporary church to do is to listen to God speaking to
us through the people about us and their needs and desires. It may help us to let go of established
ways of doing things, as old wine bottles, and to discover that God is already leaving all sorts of
new wine bottles about for us to find and enjoy.

References
You can see what a thin list this is! Obviously I have absorbed a great deal from others and
forgotten where the ideas came from – thank you, everyone. I have read a number of other books
recently but have not found them quite so stimulating as the ones listed.
Edwards, J. 2003 “Shopping for a new religion” pp11-14 in R Dudley and L Jones (eds.) Turn the
tables: reflections on faith and trade CAFOD
Gibbs, E. and I. Coffey 2001 Church Next UK ed. Inter Varsity Press
Jobber, D. 2001 Principles and Practice of Marketing 3rd ed. McGrawHill
Holmes, S. 2002 “Postmodern Living” pp6-8 in Bible in Tranmission Summer 2002; Bible Society
MacFadyen, L., M. Stead and G. Hastings 2003 “Social Marketing” pp694-721 in M.J. Baker (ed.)
The Marketing Book 5th ed. Butterworth Heinemann
Moynagh, M. 2001 Changing World, Changing Church Monarch

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Thomas, R. 2003 Counting People In SPCK
Ward, P. 2002 Liquid Church Paternoster Press

P.S.
I have just picked up Gibbs and Coffey 2001 and noticed that they devote a chapter to a critique of
applying marketing to the church. I may have to rewrite all I have done, or abandon it! I have only
had time to glance at it for now, but at least some of their criticisms are directed at applications of
marketing that I believe I have avoided myself.
Nigel Cooper
The Rectory
40 Church Road
Rivenhall
Witham
Essex
CM8 3PQ
01376 511161
nscooper@essex.ac.uk

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