Your creative future isn’t just about your individual brand. It’s about which communities you help build and belong to. Yancey Strickler
One of my favorite millennials asked me a few years ago, “How are you building your brand?” Yuck. It sounded like I was trying to sell something. Am I trying to sell something as a Church Leader? Are you?
I get that those of us who are trying to sell something we have created (like our books, our Etsy crafts, our start-up businesses, our consulting practices, our 10-day clergy tour of Scottish distilleries) need to promote ourselves and our products. Some Pastors are free-range without a regular income and there are bills to pay.
The Institutional Church’s brand has been diminished over the last fifty years. And I suppose we pastors lean into our own brand of ministry. But the Institutional Church will continue to be diminished if we continue to be so individualistic.
Yancey Strickler, whose work I greatly admire, is onto the something and while he is not a church person as far as I know, his ideas about our future will be the difference between a dying church and a thriving church in the next 1-3 years. Read his LinkedIn post here.
In yesterday’s era of individualism, how many followers you have was the key social indicator. In today’s post-individual era, what groups you’re a part of matters much more.
Amen. Amen. Amen.
If our spiritual lives or church participation are all about our own “brand” which could be anything from “My family’s been in this church for 5 generations” to “Nobody can be the church treasurer but me” to “It will hurt my feelings if my husband isn’t elected to the Deacons Board” then our churches deserve to close. It’s never about us. It’s about expanding the reign of God.
It doesn’t matter how many “followers” we have. It matters what partnerships we have. It matters what we are building and who we include.
Show me a congregation that partners with the local police department, the local homeless coalition, the NAACP, the local college soccer team, and the coffee shop on the corner and I’ll show you a growing, thriving church that understands that their existence is more about their neighbors than their individual selves.
As you know, Regular Readers, I often ask “what breaks God’s heart in your neighborhood?” I know I’m in a dying church when congregants respond with “I can tell you what breaks my heart!!” That was never the question.
We are all broken in some way. And the path to healing involves loving people, creating beauty, noticing the unnoticed. This is best done in community with unlikely partners. And that’s our future, Church.
A Church for Starving Artists 