Seth Godin at Catalyst ’08
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.
What does it say about a conference if one of the speakers walks away missing that it’s about connecting people with God? Really makes me wonder…
Matt – Your comment is well taken. My question is why we would be surprised that a non-Christian wouldn’t get it? Recently I had a so-called Christian tell me he markets to churches on the basis of what they want. I asked what that was and he said that it was to have large congregations. He didn’t understand when I told him that it was God’s choice how large a congregation is. I went on to tell him that the goal of the pastor, according to Scripture, is to teach the saints so they can do the work of the ministy. It is not to get lots and lots of people in the door. That is God’s problem. But then again, just as I referred to the guy I was talking to as a so-called Christian, most people in American churches are not Christians either, so we can’t expect them to understand. When history is written we may find that most of the mega churches of today are about as far from what a church should be as one could imagine. So since the mega churches control the Christian landscape in America, it’s no wonder that a non-Christian like Seth Godin will walk away thinking that adding numbers to the congregation is the goal. And one other question: Why are we listening to non-Christians about how to run the church anyway? The Word has all the guidance we need. The last thing we need is another man’s ideas.