Communication, Marketing and Social Networking - Innovative Business Ideas for Churches

The Social Context of the Church
As we enter the second week of my series - Innovative Business Ideas for Churches - I want to set up the context for what I want to say about the place of communication, marketing, and social networking in the life of the church. If there is a theme for the next several days it is how do we as the church live and grow with one another.

Even before I went to seminary (1978-81), I felt that relationships were central to life. But I never found much affirmation for that idea until the last few years as those who see themselves as either “post-modern” or “emerging” are emphasizing the social relationship aspect of the church. For the most part, the church has treated our human relationships as just an aspect of psychological counseling. There is no real sense of the social dimension. I see something much more fundamental in relationships, and the business and academic authors I’m going to feature over the next few days do too.

For example, what always impressed me about Jesus was not his teachings, but how he related to people. Let me just list names and the stories will pop into your mind. Think about how he related to them. Woman at the well. His mother at the marriage in Cana. Rich young ruler. The centurion with the dying servant. Peter. Woman who touched is cloak. Children. Money changers in the temple. The authorities during his trial. The thousands he fed. The disciples in the upper room. In each situation, he uses his words to complement his actions. In each situation, the social context – what is happening at the moment – is the setting for the words.   

I’m not a post-modernist because it is just modernism dressed-up in different individualist clothes. I’m not a modernist either because I find that the Enlightenment’s pension for abstract rationality disconnected to from the larger context is incomplete. This is the intellectual ethos that pervades the church’s understanding of the relationship between words / ideas and the social context. We have reduced the church in good scientific fashion to preaching, rituals and polity.  Is it any wonder that churches that are almost totally experience oriented are exploding in growth?  It isn't that they have figured it out.  It is that they are supplying to people what was missing in their other church experiences. And if  you watch long enough many of those people do not last in those settings either.

It is for these reasons that I think the traditional mainstream church with its strengths of preaching, rituals and polity will reemerge as a denominations of strength.  And it will happen because the social dimension will revive to provide a deeper experience of the church than what we have provided.

A Preview of what is coming.
What you will read over the next several days are essays that attempt to describe the social nature of the world we live in.

Since these essays will be about communication, marketing and social networking, let me define what I mean by those terms. Think of this as a trailer for the essays that are coming.

Communication: From an organizational standpoint, the most universal need in every type of organization with which I’ve worked is communication. At the core of the communication problem is a spiritual reality. Our human sin is not just a forensic description of our failure to live up to our creation as God’s children. It is also the corrupting influence upon human relationships within social settings, like businesses, like churches. We don’t communicate for any number of reasons. We hide behind the technology of newsletters, email and websites thinking that because we use them that we are communicating. Communication happens between people. It is one part initiation toward someone and one part response to that person. If what you project toward someone does not get a response, whose fault is that? Is it the communicator or the receiver? When we look at in this way, we fail to understand that this relationship is functioning within a larger social context. When we see that context we realize that we are both responsible for communicating. So, if there is an overall purpose to why I’m doing this series it is to communicate a set of ideas that not only get a response back to me, but also get communicated, passed along, to other people too.  My goal is to create a conversation about these ideas.

Marketing: Marketing, advertising and sales sort of go hand-in-hand. However, I’d like you to think of marketing as another way of communicating. When you recruit people to participate in an event at the church, you are marketing an idea, an opportunity to people. You are hoping that they will respond and attend. The world of marketing and advertising is under-going tremendous change as it finds a voice that it either lost or never had. If you go back and read my piece on The Cluetrain Manifesto, you’ll see some of this expressed as “markets are conversations.”

In the church, because we have arrogantly proclaimed that we are not a business – yes, arrogantly denied the very commonality that we share with every human institution that exists – we have failed to have a coherent strategy and methodology for building the church. If you look at churches that are growing, they do not suffer from this delusion. Businesses and churches are not the same, except they are filled with the same people. To ignore that common social context is irresponsible.

Therefore, marketing is not about the technology of advertising your church’s programs. It is about how the people in the church engage in a conversation that builds commitment and participation in the programs that bring them closer to Christ in their worship, relationships and daily discipleship. As you can see, we are all marketers.

Social networking: Of all the theoretical fields of social science research, this maybe the most recent to emerge. We are used to talking about the Internet as a “web.” We are used to talking as Presbyterians about our connectionalism, especially as it relates to our polity. The development of increasingly powerful computer systems has allowed scientists and mathematicians to study the inter-connection nature of creation. They have studied it from the standpoint of trying to describe how all things are connected at the physical level. One of the ways they conceive of this is speak of a butterfly moving its wings on one side of the world causing a hurricane on the other.

It is the exploration of the social connection of creation that I find that it is illuminating the world that God has created. The range of research is fascinating. Some of it you may well be familiar with this because of some popular treatments of the material. Some of the research is a bit arcane, but it points to some fascinating insights about how we relate to one another in a social context from a business perspective.

What is it that I want you to know about social networking? It is how we actually function in life. It is the theoretical basis for understanding why relationships matter and how they can matter more in our lives.  It is a picture of the influence or impact that our relationships can have on people and their organizations and communities.

Wrap Up
In the church, we have tended to treat the social dimension from either a theological descriptive perspective or as simply the arena for social justice advocacy. By doing so, we have become socially malnourished. Our caring for one another through our relationships still happens, but it does so in spite of the church, not because of it. Think about the last time someone had a tragedy afflict his or her household. People rushed forward to care for them, primarily preparing meals to feed the family during their time of crisis. And when we are in the midst of this outreach, we often hear comments about doing more for one another. Well, the research that is taking place in understanding the social nature of human relationships provides us in the church a basis for making our relationship matter as an intentional action of the church beyond the crisis moment.

As the church, we say we are a community. Yet, in my opinion, no one has figured out how to make community work on a large scale that incorporates all kinds of churches in diverse social and demographic settings. There are exceptions, and I believe that is what they are, exceptions. They provide us insight into the nature of the church as a community, but they are not models that are easily transferable.  As a result, we have an opportunity to in essence renew the social life of the church by employing innovative ideas that are doing this very thing in the business world.

There are things missing in our understanding of what it means to be the church. And the social dimension is one of the chief areas. Please send along your questions, comments, and stories. Share these essays with your friends, pastors, elders, deacons, whomever, so that we can actually talk about these very important issues.