[This post is part of a Book Club book series where we take a deep dive into Building A StoryBrand by Donald Miller. To check out all of the posts, view the table of contents here]
95% of this book is above how to change your marketing message so that you can effectively impact your community. As a church, how we engage with other people the first time and the fiftieth time is important.
But that other 5% of this build is dedicated to changing the organization from the inside out. It’s one thing to have your social media team spend two months working on the perfect marketing campaign to push out an Easter and Christmas service holiday. But that’s a short season and building this framework is about completely transforming.
Don’t Just Build A Facade
Many marketing campaigns I have been a part of have been putting on a fresh coat of paint to a semi (or not so semi) dysfunctional program. You make it look nice to invite people in and then you move on to the next project.
This framework doesn’t work like that, at least not if you want lasting success. The change has to be internal as much as it is external.
I went through this my last year with Youth for Christ. For the first 75 years of existence, since Billy Graham had been the first employee and filled football stadiums with his message to teenagers about the Gospel, they had the motto of being “Geared to the times, but anchored to the Rock.” But when I was onboard with the team, there was a huge rebranding done to change the company’s logo, motto, and overall branding as the ministry itself was changing.
Marketing messages were put together, but the transformation that was happening with the organization was also happening. Ministry leaders were going to mandatory training across the world. Volunteers were now hearing the motto “Give life to your story” where it shows how you can use storytelling to effectively evangelize, instead of the traditional Bible tracts or bait-and-switch youth ministry games followed by turn-or-burn sermons. The culture has shifted.
ChurchMag’s Culture Is Shifting Too
Even in the midst of doing this Book Club, we have seen ChurchMag go through a huge transition as Allison Dye took over and even now as Blessing Mpfou takes over the site and is giving a fresh and new vision and mission for the site. To make this successful, we need to go beyond a nice update to Instagram or edit of the About Us page and truly transform as a website.
It’s inevitable though. Blessing is not Eric, just as Eric is not John Saddington, the original founder of ChurchMag back when that exchanged hands as we saw a big shift in the website. And with these changes, we can transform, grow stronger, and continue to introduce the Gospel into new areas of life.
Those who fail to transform will inevitably fail at Building A StoryBrand. Continue to fail and you will be doing a disservice to the Gospel. We do not have to be ever changing, but we do need to be transformative inside and out.
Where do you see your church having strengths and weaknesses in changing the culture of your church?
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