Illustration by Jane Sanders
Last February, hundreds of homeowners in a 10-mile radius of a new church in Fenton picked up the phone to hear a recorded message—the kind most commonly used by politicians during campaigns. An attractive voice floating on comforting background music described a new church in the area and asked whether the listener would like more information. If so, he or she simply needed to press 9 and leave an e-mail address.
The call was followed by an equally sophisticated e-mail with lovely photos, links, an interactive map and this nice note:
“Thank you for requesting information about Full Life Community Church! Full Life Community Church is an exciting new contemporary church located in southwest St. Louis County. We believe that the truth of the Bible can have a practical impact on your life and relationships ... Take the time to browse our Photo Galleries to see what Full Life is like.”
Full Life is not alone in using the latest technology—websites, e-mail blasts, blogging and even podcasts of sermons (called “Godcasting” in some circles). Churches and temples are using niche-marketing techniques, creating subcommunities of parents, hobbyists, sports enthusiasts, recovering alcoholics or singles in the hope that their strong shared interests will bind them to one another and therefore to the larger congregation. Megachurches continue to grow here, taking advantage of entertainment technology to keep the flock interested. “Maximize ministry through live streaming webcasts,” the website of Bolivar, Mo.–based Church Growth Today urges tech-savvy churches. For just $2,395 a year, these webcasts allow ministers and preachers to be in “150 locations simultaneously,” which, to those who remember mimeographed church bulletins, seems near miraculous.
Even tiny traditional mainline churches are somewhat stiffly embracing new media. There’s a sense of urgency: Polls show that the number of Americans who express no religious preference has quadrupled since 1991. According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 16 percent of Americans now claim no religious affiliation—which means they’ve strayed from the fold, and somebody’s got to bring them back.
Some feel it’s at best crass and at worst sacrilege to sell God by employing the same marketing techniques used to sell Coke. Others say it’s a matter of saving souls, and the Word should be spread in every way possible. After all, even the Dalai Lama gave his blessing to a high-tech prayer wheel: Download the om mani padme hum mantra and let it spin at 5,400 rotations per minute on your hard drive.
Years ago, a former Hollywood publicist gave Rabbi Mark L. Shook some marketing advice on how to improve membership at his congregation. The idea was to have the members who drive expensive cars park them outside the main entrance for all to see. “People will want to join in order to be associated with the highest-class place in town,” Shook was told.
Now Shook is senior rabbi of Congregation Temple Israel in Creve Coeur and teaches philosophy at Saint Louis University. He laughed off the parking-lot advice, but he takes the larger issue of marketing quite seriously.
“I have to tell you, it’s hard to go public with this stuff,” he says, sighing. “We’re in a position where perception is important. It’s not like selling cornflakes, and if people think you are spending money on public relations and marketing ...”
Temple Israel does quite a bit of soul-searching about how to reach out. It’s tricky, Shook says, because religion in the Jewish community is less about proselytizing and more about a kind of family relationship.
He does believe websites are now indispensable for any religious institution, allowing them to connect with people in ways we couldn’t have imagined 20 years ago. These days, someone who moves from Seattle to St. Louis will probably Google a church or temple on arrival.
“In the early days, when institutions like us were trying it out, it was fine when we used amateurs,” Shook notes. “Today the site is no good if you can’t keep it up to date, and then there’s the realization ‘Oh my God, we have to pay someone for this!’”
Temple Israel once tried a cooperative effort with a Jewish dating service, and they advertised the service on local movie screens. They chose theaters in neighborhoods with large concentrations of Jews and ran the ad from Thanksgiving until the end of the year. It was quite successful—and brought people into the temple.
“I think there is a greater sophistication in religious institutions, and they are asking, ‘What outlet has the maximum effect?’” Shook says. Those who can, bring in experts. “Most congregations do not have the budget for this stuff, and we rely on members to help out free, and you get what you pay for in those situations,” he says with a laugh. “The key is figuring out what will motivate people to come in, what will get them in the door.”
Podcasting, on the other hand, leaves him cold: “This is technology that makes it too easy to stay at home. From the beginning of time, we’ve brought people together.”
Grace Church boasts a modern complex that a well-heeled office park would envy, and 3,000 to 4,000 St. Louisans attend the weekly service.
“The music is very contemporary; there’s some drama, some video, and the messages are very practical and always involve humor,” says assistant pastor Marty Haas. Humor is key, he says, because it helps break down the “fourth wall” that many religious organizations believe keeps the congregation feeling distant from the topic at hand. In addition, Grace uses a high-tech “character generator” (a computer that smoothly creates multiple images) to coordinate text and graphics with the service. The church employs a full-time artist who devotes a significant portion of his time to creating graphics for each service.
Haas started attending Grace in 1982, when it was an intensely charismatic church with a liturgy that would bewilder a newcomer. He joined the staff in 1987, when Grace was transforming itself into a “seeker-sensitive” church, one that “begins with a keen awareness of the visitors who may not have any church background.”
Although Grace has no problem spending money on state-of-the-art tools for use in its services, church staffers have frequent discussions about what is too much. “When we put the Scripture up on the screen, why should people bring their Bible?” Haas asks rhetorically. “And if they don’t bring their Bible, then we’re not helping them pick up that Bible and get used to using it themselves.”
So they’re not going to project Scripture? “Oh, we’re definitely going to continue projecting it,” he says. “It’s much more accessible for people who are not used to going to church. They don’t have Bibles, or, if they do, they might not be able to find their place and keep up.”
As to whether this is all appropriate, he says, “If we take advantage of the technology, then we can find it easier to reach people today than it has ever been in history.”
Haas has handled all the website duties himself (one page is auspiciously titled “Meet God”), but Grace recently hired a company to revamp the site so it can offer community-based forums, encouraging members to interact with each other. Blogging is a possibility, podcasting less so. “We think podcasting is a great tool that will serve a lot of churches, but every church has to look at their mission and their strategy,” Haas says. “You have to think about who you’re trying to reach. We are trying to look for people who are unchurched, and church is often the last thing on their minds. If they do listen and like a podcast, is that going to make them come or give them an excuse to stay away?”
Haas says Grace budgets little for advertising and promotion, instead relying on word of mouth. “Other churches, like St. Louis Family Church, have a very different strategy,” he says, referring to an aggressive advertising campaign that includes expen-sive television ads. “We say, ‘Go for it’—but each congregation has to know who they are and has to be willing to change their strategy as the culture and times change.” (Staff at the Family Church declined to be interviewed for this article.)
At archstl.org, you can submit a prayer request by e-mail: Click on the “Request Prayer” link, then the “Contemplative Nuns” link, and you see pictures from different monasteries and read:
“At the heart of the church are Contemplative Nuns at prayer! Within seven monasteries in the Archdiocese of St. Louis and one monastery in the neighboring Diocese of Belleville, Illinois, approximately 115 Nuns pray zealously for the many intentions entrusted to their prayers.”
The Archdiocese of St. Louis has come to rely on its thorough, professional website, which is now being extensively redesigned. “We’re at the point that we’d like to do more with the site and especially explore the interactive angle,” says Tony Huenneke, assistant director of communications. “It’s a way to reach out to young people and busy families.” What’s done won’t be at the level of the local megachurches’ websites, though, and Huenneke says that area Catholics won’t ever see the kind of high-tech presentation that those churches boast.
“Obviously megachurches are a reality today, but I don’t know if we see ourselves in competition with them or threatened in any way,” he adds. The archdiocese’s philosophy is that any tools of communication will be considered for use, as long as they can promote the message of the Gospel, but none of the media used should become a surrogate for the church experience. “Person-to-person is still the most effective way to preach the Gospel,” Huenneke says.
The Rev. John Kavanaugh, S.J., a Saint Louis University philosophy professor whose book Following Christ in a Consumer Society is now in its 25th printing, echoes that point: “The very nature of how we communicate, whether we’re selling something or offering something to a person to believe in, is through information. All the information technologies can be helpful—but just as you can have information that is distorted, appeals to people’s baser instincts or might be seductive instead of true in a book culture, you can have that in an electronic culture. You can be deluded into thinking people can have a quick fix with a book or a website—but faith is for the long haul. As Dorothy Day put it, it’s ‘a harsh and dreadful kind of love.’”
In Marketing the Church, George Barna writes that “the goal of marketing is to make both the producer and the consumer satisfied, so anything which tends to leave the ‘consumer’ unsatisfied must be jettisoned.” Will religions give up too much to seduce new followers? Will followers become shoppers, rather than stayers who commit themselves wholeheartedly?
“People already talk about ‘cafeteria Catholics,’” Kavanaugh says ruefully. “That’s a danger, the model that if one product does not satisfy, the person will move on to another product. But words are very complex—some people can be ‘satisfied’ with chocolate-covered strawberries. The satisfaction of our whole being—that’s where the staying is.”
At St. John’s Episcopal Church, near Tower Grove Park, the Rev. Teresa Mithen has no problem saying the A-word: “advertising.” “It’s part of evangelism,” she says calmly.
The self-described Gen-X minister was offered a challenging proposition two years ago. St. John’s, founded in 1841, had a congregation that had shrunk to 15 people and was in danger of being shuttered. Mithen was offered the chance to revitalize it.
Born in St. Louis and newly graduated from the General Theological Seminary in New York, the 29-year-old’s first instinct was to look to new media as the salvation. With the help of a website and a low-budget marketing program that includes snazzy postcards and advertising in neighborhood papers, she’s nearly quadrupled attendance.
“It’s not an expectation for my generation to go to church,” she says, “but that can be a good thing, because people are more open-minded and are making deeper decisions as they explore options.” She says she is lucky to have nationally recognized cartoonist and artist Kevin Huizenga as a member of her congregation; he dedicated his talent to illustrating their postcards and website. She then turned to professional website design and consulting company WebSanity. “A lot of our money is in our website,” she says cheerfully. But she stops short of other forms of communication, such as phone calls, which she considers too intrusive. “I don’t like the idea that one religion is better than another, and that kind of approach implies that,” she says.
Mithen prefers softer marketing techniques: “We want to be known as a ‘green’ church, and that’s actually a marketing tool. Letting that be known appeals to a certain demographic—but it’s also who we are.”
WebSanity wants to equip the church for podcasting, and though Mithen thinks they will start doing something with that technology in the next year, she’s ambivalent about it. “The dilemma is that the Eucharist is an inherently visceral, communal service, while podcasting is a more individualistic experience,” she says. “The other problem with podcasting an Episcopal service is that the sermon is only a small part of our Eucharistic service, while it is a large part of the megachurch experience.”
Mithen can’t help but notice some of the ironies that come with being a 21st-century church. Suddenly the patron saints for whom churches are named are turning up in domain names for websites. Remembering her New York church’s site, Mithen rolls her eyes toward the heavens: “It tells you something when you can go out and buy ‘StJames.org.’”
One way for a religious organization to get a big push is to have a city host a national convention. Last summer, it was the Unitarian Universalists who held their annual general assembly here. The national organization, headquartered in Boston, sent in Valerie Holton, a marketing-outreach consultant, to help make the most of the exposure. So as more than 4,000 members across the country converged on St. Louis for the five-day event, their profile was further raised with a campaign that included a series of radio spots on KWMU-FM, ads in the Post-Dispatch and Vital Voice, bus-shelter ads downtown and MetroLink interior ads.
“I feel we have a moral obligation to share our faith’s values,” Holton says of her work. “There are others out there with equally powerful messages doing it, and it’s important to get your message out in the market. More growth leads to more vitality and resources, and not just economically—it’s more singers in the choir, more people to help with the soup kitchen and our social-justice causes.”
Holton came and met with the ministers of the four area chapels and asked for their counsel. She was prepared for the resistance she sometimes meets when words such as “marketing” and “branding” are tossed around—but the ministers were hospitable. As for knowing if and how well the marketing succeeded, she says it’s no different from any other brand-awareness campaign—except that the results are harder to measure: “We ask churches to tell us if they’ve had an increase in visitors, and that’s certainly a piece of it, but reporting results on campaigns like this is always difficult. Most people look to join a church after a life-changing event—birth of a child, death, divorce. It’s not like we can provide a coupon with a deadline by which you must respond and create a sense of urgency.”
Back to Full Life Community Church.
It has smoothly navigable websites, e-mail blasts, Pastor Dan Walker’s blog, podcasts, some cable-TV spots ... but no physical church yet. Working from his home, which he shares with his wife and seven children, Walker has a deal with Rockwood South Middle School in Fenton to let him use the gym for Sunday services.
For Walker, this is actually a second career. With a Ph.D. in chemistry, he’d worked at Monsanto for 10 years when he felt called to the ministry. He graduated from Covenant Theological Seminary in Creve Coeur in 1999, and then, he says, “God called on me to plan a church.” Members began meeting in homes, and their numbers slowly grew. “In 2004 we started ramping up advertising,” says Walker, “and now we’re up to about 100 members.”
The Full Life website, which he maintains himself, plays a critical part in building a church from scratch, he says, and gives people a good idea of what they’re in for before they walk in the door. He says his podcasts are downloaded with increasing frequency, by people around the world, and he’s surprised all megachurches don’t offer them.
He explains Full Life’s sponsorship of the St. Louis Church Directory (stlouischurches.org), which he also built and runs, as a service to the community: Because there are so many churches, it’s good to have a website listing them and encouraging people to review and rate churches. You can read a little informa-tion about a church or temple, get directions and a link to its site, rate it with one to five stars and write a review just as you would on Amazon.com for a book or IMDb.com for a movie. Full Life has the most reviews, four-and-a-half on a scale of five stars, and gets special typographic treatment with a “top-rated” in red next to it. Walker says that’s not a conflict of interest, because Full Life makes it clear that it is the sponsor and there is no manipulation of the people writing reviews. He says the site gets thousands of hits a week and is increasing in popularity.
Haas is dubious—but tempted. “I like the intention,” he says, “but what would happen if we announced from our podium, to our very large congregation, to go on the site and vote for us? It wouldn’t be fair to all the small churches.”
Shook remembers when the Jewish Light newspaper wanted to rate rabbis. “People were not happy about it,” he says. “I teach, and it’s tough enough for me to get those student evaluations of my work! But rating a church leader? How do you rate something like that? Hilarious.”
As for that voice-mail from Full Life ...
“There are companies that do that for churches, but we did that ourselves,” Walker says. “That might be the most controversial of the things we’ve tried, though we did it very unintrusively. The number of people who asked for information was lower than it’s been in other cities where this type of campaign was run. We’re still learning about it all ...”
He pauses to reflect. “We’re trying to communicate a message,” he says slowly, “not trying to sell anything.”
