Terry sent me a link to this- which raised a few painful chuckles.

Painful as it was very familiar!

Not quite sure what point they are making though. Is the issue about image and presentation? Do we just need to be hipper and more trendy? I thought this had been tried, and had not worked, at least in the UK. Perhaps we are just not trendy enough? Perhaps we aimed at Starbucks but got stuck somewhere in a 1950’s milk bar?

Perhaps too the church in America is a bit different- they can still count on large numbers of folk who go every Sunday, even though numbers are going down there also.

For my part, I think that church as an institution does need change. But perhaps the real issue is that we Christians need to change the way we live out faith, rather than the way we institutionalise it…

The clip above seems to be challenging the church to market itself better. Is this what we should be about? Sure, I can see the wisdom of being creative and relevant in how engage with the world around us, but I still feel uncomfortable with the idea of ‘church marketing’.

I think this relates to a certain extent to New Labour, and ‘spin’. In 1997, I was euphoric along with many others as the Labour government swept aside the Tories and finally came into government. They had finally found themselves a winning formula that was eminently marketable, just as the Conservatives seemed to degenerate into a sleeze jelly.

But ideology, passion, reality- all seems to have been subordinated to spin. The message was lost in the marketing.

But I also feel a bit uncomfortable with the idea of church as ‘corporation’.

Church is (or I think SHOULD be) a collective of activists, whose rules of engagement are counter cultural, as well as intra cultural. We are called out, to seek and to save. To liberate captives and bring sight where there is blindness.

Marketing techniques, whose aim is to attract more people in, to build up the corporation- nope, not for me I think…