This post is a video recap of the short blog series on church branding. In this series we’ve looked at why you should care about your church’s brand? This coaching session was designed specifically for the team at Lawton First Assembly and it covers the basic philosophy behind church branding. You can review the entire series below.
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Creative Church is Live!
After months of behind-the-scenes designing, coding, tweaking, and heart-stopping technical glitches CreativeChurch.com is finally live.
As you may know I started this blog (RyanWakefield.com) in 2011 as a way to capture many of the ideas I was learning from the churches I was working with across the nation, and that’s been an amazing part of my job at AG Financial Solutions. Now I can relate to the saying that “it’s not always fun to write, but it is always fun to have written.”
Now for the update. Recently, I took an opportunity to help with the launch of Creative Church. I believe this is going to be another tremendous way to be a part of resourcing and inspiring local churches across the country. Unfortunately that also means that I will be pausing my personal blogging and I will be using that time to focus on making Creative Church a friend to creatives. I hope you’ll join with me in that journey.
At Creative Church we want boundaries to be pushed. We want comfort zones to be stretched. Because growth happens at the edges, and revolutions are not founded on the status quo. Check out our first blog series is called “Creative Proverbs” and features words of wisdom from church creative leaders from across the nation. We asked them, “What if you had five minutes to share one proverb with church creatives? What would you say?”
This is post #1 in a short blog series on church branding. So, why should you care about your church’s brand?
Let’s first define branding. For this set of posts I’ll utilize Phil Cooke’s definition: “a brand is a compelling story that surrounds a person, a product, or an organization.” A brand is how people view you. And again according to Phil, “How people view you is the single greatest determining factor on whether or not they will listen to you.”
So the answer to the “why care” question can be found by answering the following questions:
In their book “Built to Last” Collins and Porras discuss what the successful and visionary companies do to be great. They discuss how great organizations have a “cult-like culture” where every employee must adapt to the leader’s vision in order for the company to thrive. In fact there are four common characteristics of cults that apply to this organizational philosophy:
- Fervently held ideology – All employees believe strongly in the company ideology.
- Indoctrination – Management is responsible for introducing and encouraging the proper work culture to employees.
- Tightness of fit – Employees who do not believe in the corporate ideology should change organizations.
- Elitism – Recognizing the sense of responsibility that comes from being a member of a visionary company.
Obviously their research backs up the effectiveness of this philosophy. However, this approach simply ported over to the church world could cause damage to your people and your ministry. Before you apply, consider the following ways to take the cult out of your culture:
