My Dad was a Lutheran pastor. I think he was a good one in the best sense: he always wanted to help others and he was nonjudgmental. He died in 2004, and during his life he served six congregations.
His favorite church by far was his fourth one. It was the 1970s and 1980s in Mentor, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. Business people, mostly middle management, were the leaders of the congregation, and church growth (as measured by membership and budget) was a priority.
Orchard Card Sign In
I don't think my Dad ever used the word "marketing," and he had no business training whatsoever. He never read the "business" section of the newspaper, and I doubt he ever saw a copy of the Wall Street Journal.
But during his years in Mentor, my Dad unknowingly was using sound marketing principles. They worked. An element of "luck" was involved, too, and he certainly knew it: there were big demographic shifts occurring that helped him.
The Mentor church grew tremendously: membership and budget at least tripled, and the congregation successfully executed a major building program at a time when interest rates were 18%.
From time to time I have considered the "marketing" lessons to be learned from my Dad's stint in Mentor. Here are a few.
Think carefully about how people search for your product or service. The church was founded in the early 1960s, and at that time the people who were looking for a church home would search the Yellow Pages. One of the church's founding members, Dorrie Birch, knew this, and her idea for the church's name carried the day: "Advent." Why Advent? Because it would be the first church listed under "Churches" in the Yellow Pages.
If Dorrie was around today, methinks she would be a whiz at search-engine optimization.;-)
Know why people choose your product or service, and be responsive to their needs. Many of the Mentor families at that time were a religious blend, meaning the spouses didn't grow up in the same religious tradition. A common blend was: one spouse Methodist, the other Catholic. The Lutheran faith sits in the middle of the spectrum, so a lot of families chose Advent as a compromise.
With so many members who "weren't Lutheran," educational programming and worship services had to serve the needs of people who didn't know or understand Lutheran beliefs and traditions: the theory of "saved by grace"; when to sit or stand during the worship service; even the hymns that were sung.
Find out why people aren't choosing your product or service. My Dad spent a lot of time reaching out to people who were on the church rolls but were considered "inactive," meaning they hadn't worshiped in more than a year. He asked a lot of questions, listened, tried to understand where they were in their lives. People said his basic message was: "We care about you, and we will be here if you need us." I remember one inactive member, in particular. He eventually came back and became one of the congregation's best leaders.
Identify those things that people don't like about your industry, and turn the irritants into your advantages. Churches in the 1970s tended to be judgmental toward its members and unfriendly to visitors. Advent was the opposite: sympathetic to people's struggles and welcoming to new people. Most families who joined the church cited the friendliness of the members as the top reason.
Marketing is easier when you truly know and understand your customers. My Dad grew up only 15 miles from Mentor, in the working-class port town of Fairport Harbor. He was raised among factory workers, mostly first- or second-generation Finns, Hungarians, Poles, and Italians. As a pastor, he was a blue-collar guy in vestments-rough edges and no veneer. (His name was Delbert, for goodness sake!)
He felt right at home in Northeast Ohio. He loved what the people loved: cabbage rolls, ghoulash, football, great high school marching bands, fishing for perch on Lake Erie, and watching "Houlihan and Big Chuck" on TV on Friday nights. He was very comfortable in his surroundings, people responded to him, and he flourished. That hadn't really been the case in his first three churches, when he served Scandinavian congregations in agricultural communities.
Swimming in "blue ocean" is a lot more fun. Blue Ocean Strategy says that growing a business is easier when the competition is light. A "red ocean" is one that has blood in the water, with sharks fighting for the same piece of meat. My Dad definitely had a blue ocean in Mentor. His church was Lutheran in an area that historically was very strongly Catholic. As a result, there was only one other Lutheran church in the market. That's not much competition compared to the community where he had served previously, which had at least a dozen Lutheran churches.
Marketing is much easier in an emerging market. When we moved to Mentor in 1974, there was a road sign a few miles from our house that read: "Entering semi-rural district." Orchards and nurseries dominated the landscape. But from 1960 to 1980, Mentor's population grew from 4,300 to 41,900! By the mid-1980s, Mentor's high school was the largest in Ohio. Lots of young families with no ties to the area moved to Mentor in those years-a perfect scenario for church growth.
Work harder and smarter than the competition. At least three nights a week, my Dad visited people in their homes. None of the other clergy in the area did that. He visited members, and also people who had visited the church but hadn't joined, yet. I'm sure those home visits night after night were a grind, but he never stopped doing them; the ROI must have been excellent. (My Dad didn't know the term ROI, of course; he would've said he kept doing the visits because "they worked.")
You have to deliver the goods (in this case, on Sunday morning). Marketing doesn't matter if your product doesn't meet people's wants and needs. The home visits meant nothing if the church didn't offer great stuff on Sunday: relevant religious education for children and adults, meaningful worship services, and a welcoming atmosphere.
Marketing Lessons I Learned From My Dad, the Pastor
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