So I haven’t posted anything since last week. My server was hacked last Friday and I have just got it back up again. I am now with a new host (hostmonster.com) and have left my old one (siteground.com) whose tech support used to be really great and now is nonexistent. I’ll have more updates this week, but I am switching almost all of my sites over to hostmonster, so I won’t have a lot of time.

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I don’t often post on trivial stuff that I just think is cool, but I have to make an exception from time to time. I have been seeing a lot of stuff about the Watchmen movie and was mildly interested. I haven’t read the comic, so I don’t have a lot of investment like some other comic to movie franchises, but this one has caught my eye. Why? One look at the site will tell you. It is absolutely one of the best sites for a movie around and the best flash loader I have ever seen.

Check it out.

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I had a really interesting talk with my buddy Chris Zoephel yesterday about a book he is reading. The book is called The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch. In this book, Hirsch says that the medium eventually becomes the message. This is similar to a thought I have carried in ministry that says “what you save them with, is what you save them to.” From my point of view in youth ministry, this means, if we save people with games and frivolity, then that is what they think has saved them (even though verbally they might say that it is God). I’ve seen this paradigm played out enough that I believe it. But what Hirsch says is that the mediun becomes the message.

So taking this into the practical world, I am not sure I agree. Steve jobs is quoted in saying, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” He also says, “Design is the fundamental soul of a man made creation.” I believe in these ideas. Design is important. It’s a big deal. From Garr Reynolds to Seth Godin, people of success and excellence believe design is a part of the product as much as any other part.

I’m not saying that products and messages can’t be good and have success apart from good design, but they aren’t great without it. There are times when the content of a message overcomes its need to have good design. In fact, to be great, I think you have to have both. Proof of this is my recent purchase of a mouse habitat for my daughter. I found this one habitat that was just cool looking (Habitrail Ovo). I would have bought it if not for the visual image of mise poop on it.

But, I wonder if the way it was designed was actually the message. I’m not sure I could go that far. Preaching is definitely a medium, but I don’t think it has become a message all its own. TV is a medium, but it is capable of many messages, many often contrary. Even video games play this same rule. So I don’t think I can go as far as saying that the medium becomes the message, but I do see the point.

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Well, it’s the Monday after Christmas and I am trying to catch up on some work that I didn’t start before the holidays. Today is a fun, but busy day. Here is my plan:

1. Get in early, respond to emails – done
2. Meet with Glandion Carney – Canceled – Glandion is a friend, sometimes mentor and client for Like a Fire Media. Today was an appointment to work on his site.
3. Finish and get confirmation on the Yamia Backdrop for Winter Conference.  – Confirmation pending
4. Meet with William Wilson – William is a Bishop in residence at our church. He is a former monk and I wanted to pick his brain for some ideas for our upcoming retreat in February.
5. Be creative – I have a retreat and a speaking engagement coming up that I need to spend some creative time on
6. Call youth and spend time with them
7. Possible staff meeting – probably a short one – Just canceled (yea)
8. Small group meeting – tonight I get together with some friends and we live life together (again yea)

So that’s today, is all goes according to plan.

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We have lots going on for the weekend before Christmas at the Martin house.

Heading into the weekend, I set up a new theme for Cathy’s site, Lillyeth. It is basically a portfolio type of theme and it highlights her art a little better than the previous theme. She was recently featured In Flower Magazine as their artist in bloom, and we wanted to update the site so that it features her work a little better. Check it out and then check back later. She is undertaking some bigger work to showcase what she does on a grander scale.

We also had our staff Christmas party Thursday night. It was a typical church staff party with people getting together and eating and hanging out. Two things are brag-able about it though.  First, our staff really likes each other and we don’t have to do some weird interactions just to make it bearable. Second, my pastor makes bananas foster. It was a pretty good night, even though I was still a bit under the weather.

Last night we went to the Christmas at the Birmingham Zoo. The Zoolight Safari has a really awesome light exhibit including a train ride and a light show synchronized to music. It was really cool, even for the older kids (us). It was the second hearing I had this season of Mannheim Steamroller’s version of Christmas songs. Twice so far this season isn’t too bad.

Today Cathy got up early (and let me sleep in, yea!) and then went to do some shopping and I took the girls to Jane’s pageant practice. I’m not usually into Christmas pageants, but ours is mostly a local production for our own people. The practice lasted just a bit too long for Elizabeth, so we left it at about 11:45 and went and got their favorite meal, that is, a happy meal. So we watched Santa Claus is Coming to Town and ate our meals (I had left over Jambalaya).

It’s been a pretty good weekend so far. Hopefully, we will be able to find a sitter for tonight and Cathy and I will go on a date.

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One highlight from the Youth Specialties convention was the very present marketing to youth pastors. It seems that the marketing directed for said group assumes that they are ADD, ADHD, somewhat immature and possibly stuck in the 90′s or 80′s. I would love to submit examples, but they are just too prevalent and I could not force myself to copy them to this site. Suffice it to say, the design for most marketing was excessively busy, obnoxious and overbearing, and when it was placed side by side with others completely evaporated in the scheme of random gauche attempts at attention getting.

There were some that stood out though. Here is a great example of a booth that understood its purpose.

This is a great booth that values its purpose and communicates it simply. The mats and the color scheme are simple and draw the eye to the promotional materials and makes the average person ask, “what is XP3?” Here are the promotional materials:

All the promotions look like they go together, like someone had a plan that unified all their communications. Very cool! But better than that, simple enough to communicate one message about what they are.

Another great booth was the D6 booth. Notice any similarities? A letter and a number. What do they mean? You will have to ask to find out. In the markedly booths prevalent in the rest of the room, there was little simplicity and cleanliness in the message being communicated. There were mostly unclear, busy and mixed messages form other booths. Check out the D6 booth:

This booth went the extra mile. They brought in real wood backdrops and even their own flooring. The booth looks clean and  displays a lot of material to tell you what they are about. This, like the other booth, begs you to as, “what is D6 and what do they do?” I did and the staff at the booth were very helpful.

Here is where something stood out about D6. They knew what they were about and could communicate it in two sentences. The booth looked great, but the staff were well prepared to help answer questions without a long, involved speech about what they are about.

What does this mean? Well the people marketing to youth pastors need to consider their audience and their message. They need to consider what youth pastors want and what they will put themselves through to try something new. Please check out both the featured booths for more of what they do.

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I just read an interesting article by Tony Morgan that had me wondering about the question posed in the title of this post. Is marketing useless for the church? Tony sure thinks so (even though he confesses that they still use it sometimes).

I do agree with Tony that church marketing on one hand is not about marketing. Though I would take exception to the idea that marketing is not about minstry growth. I would say that it doesn’t always have to be about growth, but why be limited to that?

Tony gives the singular objective to church marketing as:

“The objective is to help people enter into a relationship with Jesus and take steps in their walk with Christ. When life change happens, people talk.”

The objective can be only helping people meet Jesus. It also may be many other things. It might be to show people that they are not alone in their struggles. Or it might be to let them know that their is help for them. Or it might be just to let them know that their are things that they have no idea are happening.The point is, why limit your church to that one message?

As far as the point that people communicate their life change thus eliminating the need for marketing, well it just doesn’t happen that way. While I see the reason in that, I don’t always or often see it is practice. It just doesn’t happen as often as it could (probably less than half). Where I am, people rarely tell about big life change. It’s embarrassing to a lot of people to acknowledge that they were messed up and sinful.

Marketing doesn’t have to be the old ineffectual ways of the past (mailers, postcards, ads, etc.). Many new ways have come up in the past ten years that are way more effective and show the real need for communication. Seth Godin could teach most churches a lot about getting a message out. Traditional marketing just won’t do it.

For my culture, and probably many others, the objective isn’t to “help people enter into a relationship with Jesus and take steps in their walk with Christ.” It is many other things. We might try to let people know they aren’t alone in their struggles, or let them know there are resources and people who can help them, or that there are things happening that they have no idea about. This idea of there being one very limited objective is… well very limiting.

To those who read this, please don’t lump marketing in general together with failed attempts. The two don’t always go together. I can only think of the message this post sends to some people and wonder what the results will be.

Sure, there are some churches out there who have no idea what message they are trying to send, yet know they should market themselves. Hopefully, they will stop sending useless messages out in mass. Also, hopefully, some people won’t use this article to give up on communicating the gospel in all it’s forms to those within reach.

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You gotta love a guy who has gathered statistics for the church for so many years that he starts writing articles about himself on his own website promoting an agenda based on no statistics with a book to solve all the problems arising from that agenda. Barna’s latest exploit is a Wake Up Call To Parents. He quotes many vague statistics about how much media teens consume and jumps right into how that makes kids into rampaging campus killers. According to this article, there ought to be more acts of violence similar to VT than we are seeing. By the way, Barna has a way to prevent this. Just get all parents to buy his book and follow his practices for parenting. Also, BTW, Barna’s parenting method seems to be to lock up your children and put their heads in the sand.

This kind of knee jerk reaction to the events of Virginia Tech boil my blood. To imply in any way that the parents are to blame for this tragedy is insensitive and infantile. Barna goes further though. He boils all of this down to exposure to too much violence in the media. I’m not saying that media has no impact, but saying this is the cause of the tragedy at Virginia Tech is the worst kind of fear based Christian response, and it makes me cringe. Unfortunately, this is the type of over simplification I have come to expect from Barna.

I say fear based Christian response because, after these life upsets, all people try to make sense of it in some way to make themselves feel better or safe. To make things worse, popular Christian site Think Christian picked up to article and seemed to endorse it. This reminds me of the Ozzy Osborne trial where the parents of some suicidal teens tried to blame him for his lyrics making their kids commit suicide. I know people want someone to blame when life doesn’t make sense, but this is wrong. The real tell on this is the Mel Gibson movie The Passion. It was one of the most violent movies I have ever seen and I don’t know of a single Christian organization that didn’t endorse it. You can’t blame the media for the violence we see and then endorse a movie that portrays that violence so vividly. Something is wrong with that type of reasoning.

Wouldn’t it be great if this actually worked though? What if art actually had the power to change our behavior in drastic ways like this? All we would have to do to fix our problems in violence would be to play CCM through out the day in the prison system, or even better yet the schools. Then all our problems would be solved. UGH!

I can’t imagine relying on the media to tell my kids what to do and expecting that. I would much rather raise my children so that they know how to respond to what they see, rather than trying to limit what they see.

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So today, after setting up many websites and helping many people and churches with branding, I have started organizing how that happens. I finished my first client under the Like A Fire Media brand. The client is an awesome photographer here in the Birmingham area named Jason Wallis. He really has a gift when it comes to telling a story one snapshot at a time. Anyway, he has a great site set up by the guys from Matchstic, but he wanted something more for blogging than blogger could offer. So I set him up with a new blog with lots of SEO and a much friendlier UI. I recommend killing several hours looking at his site. There are galleries and slideshows and even some great music.

I have had a lot of help starting what I do. Many of the churches I have worked for have helped me develop the skills I am using (don’t worry they had plenty of benefit from those skills), but most of all I can credit a guy named Erik Hersman aka “the White African.” He single handedly challenged and taught me so much about what was possible with the web. Thanks buddy.

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