Seth Godin spoke at Catalyst this week. If you’re not familiar with who he is, he’s a marketing expert who’s written several books about the topic. His blog is one of my favorites, so I was pretty stoked to get the opportunity to be hear him speak.

He spoke about “tribes,” which wasn’t much of a surprise since that is the title of his new book. In a nutshell, the theory is this: top-down targeted marketing doesn’t work anymore. The new way to market your product is to get people to connect with other people who use your product so that they sell it to each other. So the best way to sell more widgets is to create a culture of people who not only use your product, but who want to hang out with other people that use your product.

At first glance, it really makes a lot of since for churches. Most of us have already been doing this forever. We have groups for men and women and youth and singles and anything else. When people connect to other similar people, it creates a connection that keeps them coming back to church, and hopefully work of the kingdom gets done.

But as a non-Christian, what Seth doesn’t understand is that our goal isn’t to grow our congregation or to connect people to other people. These are just byproducts of a higher calling: to help people connect to God.

As people working in any kind of church communications, we’ve got something that nobody else does. We aren’t trying to make people feel good in order for them to “buy-in” to to what we’re pushing. We are communicating the truth so that the Holy Spirit can work in the lives of those who are called. (Romans 9 and 10)

Here is the danger: if our churches are growing for any reason other than the work of the Holy Spirit in people’s lives, it’s not work worth doing. If we want to just do good works, we can join Habitat for Humanity or the Red Cross. If we want to entertain, we should get into show business. But either of those would be selling ourselves short of our greatest purpose which is to reveal the Kingdom of God.