My pastor and friend Ryan Baitzel recently said in a sermon:

“Marketing is what happens when relationships break down”

My wife gave my hand a squeeze, and to my surprise, a few people made mention of this to me after the service was over as well. It was comical that I seemed to be the one person that hear the statement that DIDN’T think it was bizarre.

The truth is, I totally agree with Ryan.

Yeah, the dude who owns the design studio/advertising agency thinks that marketing (in its truest form) is unnecessary if you maintain healthy relationships. The truth is Anchored Art was created to provide churches and church plants with Art & Design that forwards their mission, whereas most marketing campaigns are designed to create a temporal push and then, ironically, create a greater need for (yeah, you guessed it) more marketing! We hope to do the opposite really, we want to provide The Church with art (and everything that falls under that umbrella) and give The Church the ability to build off that, not become dependent upon it, make sense?

The way I see it, if you need marketing to forward your church, to nurture it, to grow your congregation, then you’ve got the wrong message. When people are real, when people are genuine, when the church is the hands & feet of Jesus, what more you could possibly do to “broadcast” a message of love and redemption that people so desperately seek? In the secular art world us creative types are always retouching, rewording, or rebuilding images, campaigns, or marketing plans. How do you retouch Jesus? Do you take the holes out of his hands? How do you reword the Gospel? Should we make it and easier pill to swallow?

As a commercial artist, I think there’s a lot to be said about properly branding yourself, and identifying who you are. I would even say its important to establish your style with support pieces and videos and the like. But at somepoint, Its one voice, its one book, its one message that will stand alone and proclaim the truth.

That’s all the “marketing” you need.

-M.

{Ryan Baitzel is the Pastor at Emergence, a multi-site of Jacksonville Chapel. Find out more about Emergence and its leadership at: http://www.emergencenj.org }