I've mentioned recently the current Sydney Diocesan program called "Connect 09" which is an attempt to expand the influence of the Anglican church in Sydney, and the number of people attending Anglican services (presumably).
My church has conducted a number of Connect-related attractions, which I would assess as having varing effect. Generally I'm opposed to doing anything by sloganeering; particularly anything to do with what I might call transformative communications.
As an aside, I reflect on my experience working in marketing for a multi-national, selling specialist chemicals. We had a few slogans, which were imposed on us by our UK head office, but they were by the wayside, when it came to our real communications efforts. We pretty much knew who our customers, or potential customers were. Our efforts went into understanding our competitors and why they were attractive, what would lead a customer to use our products, and what their needs and drivers were that would lead them to see our products a benefit. To find out all this, we talked to our customers and live prospects. We did not engage in mass communications at all, but close, detailed, personal and intense communications!
Its simliar with promoting (!) the Christian life. While we would see that all people would benefit from Christian faith, we should be realistic and understand that very few people are at any time in a position to contemplate Christian commitment. We do not 'connect' with such people by mass marketing, low involvement communications efforts; we do so by making real connections over the long term and delivering on the promise of those connections...over the long term.
The stimulus for this blog came from my experience recently while on holidays in the Blue Mountains, to the immediate west of Sydney, and still within the diocese.
The village my family stayed in was having its annual festival which involved private gardens being open to the public (and well worth it) and a market which saw the main shopping street closed to traffic, and filled with high quality market stalls selling goods, art works, food and some 'New Age' promotions for health and 'spiritual' products.
The local Anglican church joined in by holding a flower festival, its auditorium decorated with quite attractive and hard worked at flower displays, with a 'praise festival' in the afternoon, featuring the hymns of Wesley.
We attended the 10am service, which we'd done some years past on a similar holiday. All I can say about the service was 'the flowers were good', if you like that sort of thing, and the (electric organ) music was enjoyable enough; although I'm not a fan of either the electric organ, unless its being played by Jimmy Smith.
The service itself wasn't up to the mark. Now anyone can have a bad day, and I enjoyed the Bible readings and prayer; but the sermon was a meandering and insensitive chat about part of Luke's gospel, without any real acknowledgement of the life-issues that it touched upon and how the word of God could be of benefit to us in our everyday struggles, thoughts and relationships. The minister had a swipe at the great flower display (with a remark about hayfever! Man, that must have encouraged his parishioners) and hashed his way through the prayer book, undoing its benefit of saving the incompetent from themselves, IMO.
We then went to the street market, and it was as if we were on another planet. The disconnect between the church and what was going on a stone's throw away was immense and palpable. Although I do hope that some people ventured in to look at the flowers and came back at 3pm to join in singing Wesley. I venture that few did.
To adopt the word from the slogan, if a church wants to connect with its community, it must, I think, work on a number of levels.
Firstly, it must be known as part of the action of the community. It must have an amount of 'mind share' that will let it contribute to community life. Then it must be actively involved in the community on a number of relevant fronts: finding where there is need and meeting that which it can. Both these aspects of 'contact' are long term and need to be done without rush or panic year in and year out, changing as the community and its needs and interests change. Slogans may work on top of this, but not instead of it. But then, if this is working, slogans are irrelevant, if not offensive (being that they deny the relationships that are built and validated year in and year out).
Then, when things like festivals come along, they get involved. The idea of flowers is OK as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far. Flowers and art? A choral festival, with a 'star' choir featuring at the morning service; a music festival that would be of interest to the community, not necessarily the church family; although some links would be beneficial? But these are only the start of the contact: then start to open the path to gain permission to tell the church's story (that's marketing talk for the message it really wants to give).
What a lot of church contacts miss is that they are only the start of the persons' experience of the church and need to make links to enable those who are interested to travel all the way to discipleship (which should have its own path, much as it did in the ancient church; today, I think, we make discipleship a glib bit if wordsmanship, not a process of learning to live the faith as a disciple of Christ).
As Justin at St Philips said in reflection on the first minister of that parish William Cowper: its about doing a steady job over the long term. There are no valid short term fixes to make up for long term deficits; long term systematic separation from the community you now seek to 'connect' with.
