Ministry and Marketing Alignment

Partnering Ministry and Marketing - being sure that communication is authentic, and ministry driven. As ministers, we need to keep our marketing efforts intimately intertwined with our ministry. They are not separate things. They must not be — because treating ministry and marketing as separate entities is laden with risk. In fact, as time goes by, if ministry and marketing are separate things, they actually become less and less like each other. By the time Jesus made that major scene at the temple, the “marketing guys” had lost sight of the ministry they had set out to enable. Now they were consumed with the enabling rather than the ministry itself. Jesus could see into their hearts, and what He saw was that they were no longer ministering, in their own way, alongside the priests; instead, they became exclusively “marketers” with only money on their minds. Our work with donors — communicating, inspiring, persuading, everything — needs to grow directly out of the ministry itself. Knights of the Middle Ages, during the Crusades, were sometimes baptized into Christianity — but they typically held their swords out of the baptismal waters. Why? It was a technicality. They intended to use their swords for destruction, and didn’t want to place them under God’s control. Today, our pocketbooks are our swords — and we hold them out of the baptismal waters as well. We want our money to be somehow beyond God’s control. Too often, perhaps, we think and talk about donors as if they own the money, when in fact we know that it’s God’s money. Furthermore, we are not calling the donor to an activity that will be harmful for him, but rather, in God’s economy, helpful — indeed, it can be transformational!

* Like what you just read and want to learn more? Check out, More Than Money: The Truth About High-Capacity Givers.