The Wittenburg Door Interview with Brad Abare and Kevin Hendricks

By John Carney
ONLINE EXTRA, April 2005

      Brad Abare and Kevin Hendricks believe that church marketing su...um, seems in need of improvement. Brad is the founder of b-moore inc., a Los Angeles-based marketing and graphic design firm. Kevin has his own writing and editing company, Monkey Outta Nowhere, based in St. Paul, Minn. Together, they came to the realization that many churches do a poor job of marketing—of communicating what they are all about to the community. Their marketing efforts are often so bad that they su... uh, stink to high heaven.
      The word "marketing" may sound some alarm bells with some people, but Abare and Hendricks see the best marketing as the most honest and uncompromising, with a clear idea of what needs to be communicated and who the target audience is. Amateurish or watered-down versions of the Gospel? Well, say Abare and Hendricks, they su... er, shouldn't be attempted.
      That's why Abare and Hendricks started a web log, or "blog," which, according to its motto, is intended "to frustrate, educate and motivate the church to communicate, with uncompromising clarity, the truth of Jesus Christ." The web site also has a very interesting name, a name which is not without controversy. In fact, some people think it sucks.
      Door contributing editor John Carney, who owns a vacuum cleaner but can't prove it, interviewed the creators of "Church Marketing Sucks" (churchmarketingsucks.com) by three-way telephone call from their respective home towns.
      (Some time after the interview, just as this issue was preparing to go to press, the site announced that it was adding a second web address, churchmarketingstinks.com. This new address will take you to the same page as the existing address, where the name of the site remains undiluted. But the new address is a concession to church web sites and publications which were uncomfortable with publishing or linking to the original address. Go figure.)

WITTENBURG DOOR: Let's start with the name of the web site, which attracts some attention. We'll take each word separately. "Church." Whom are you defining as the church? Who is the website aimed at?
BRAD Abare: I think church is capital "C." Church is the Church at large, in terms of the Body of Christ that makes up the individual communities and gatherings, a collection of people that actually communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ to their community, and it's also lower case "c," to the extent that it is every church which that applies to.
DOOR: "Marketing." How do you define marketing?
BRAD: That's a great question; we're still trying to figure that out. Marketing, I think, includes all aspects of what it takes to get your message to the masses. Anything you do: advertising, promotion, publicity, research, demographic studies, knowing your community, radio, television, branding, all of that is part of marketing.
DOOR: Now, let's get to that third word ....
BRAD: I'm going to let Kevin answer this one, because—I have to tell you—I have to actually have time in my prayer closet and repent for saying that word every time I say it. I couldn't even say it growing up.
KEVIN Hendricks: "Sucks"? Basically, we're just saying it stinks. Church marketing communications in general is just lousy. It's not working, and "sucks" has always been a guttural word for me that says exactly that. That's kind of the word that says it best. There is certainly an element of attracting attention with the word.
      We've had the conversation about whether or not to use that word. Brad talked about it being taboo in his household growing up. I don't feel it was necessarily taboo in my household, in my church, growing up. I've always appreciated the word. I guess I've never had a problem with it. It's part of pop culture now. If you're going to get offended about something, that seemed like the most minor and insignificant thing to ever be concerned about, a little word like that.
DOOR: It's like the famous Tony Campolo quote: "Last night, according to U.N. statistics, approximately ten thousand people starved to death. Furthermore, most of you don't give a s***. What is worse, most of you are more upset with the fact that I just said 's***' than you are over the fact that ten thousand people starved to death last night."
KEVIN: It's a word; any kind of meaning or offense that we take from it is more of a cultural thing. It's not like any word is inherently sinful—or, if there is anything, it's all the cultural stuff we give to the word that really makes it loaded. You certainly need to be careful with it; it's not "Church Marketing F-Bomb," but I think it's a word that grabs attention—hopefully without offending too many people. Hopefully by grabbing some attention we can further a conversation.
DOOR: How did you decide to start the blog?
KEVIN: For a long time, Brad's had a big heart for helping the church. We both work in the communications field, and kind of like to think we're good at what we do, and we feel what the church does sometimes is just very painful to watch.
      My church always used to send out a little newsletter when I was in college, and I'd get this thing in the mail, and it was full of Internet forwards, and pap, drivel, junk that I couldn't believe they'd put in a publication with their church name on it. It's just kind of embarrassing, so often, the way the church tries to communicate, and tries to present itself to the world.
DOOR: So you're saying pap, drivel and junk are a bad thing? (Note to self ....)
KEVIN: So we've kind of always wanted to try and do something about it. A blog seemed like a good way to get a conversation going, start talking about it, and make it more of a well-known issue so maybe something good can come of that, and change can happen.
DOOR: Was there one particular incident that was the straw that broke the camel's back?
BRAD: I don't know if there was one particular straw that helped to originate the idea. It's kind of like the annoying problem you have, it's like you look at yourself in the mirror every day and you don't see that you're gaining the one pound every week, but when you put your jeans on, they don't fit. You've got to buy new clothes that are ten times bigger than what you're used to. There is some point where you just break and you say, "We've got to do this."
      I grew up in church, and I've always, always, hated the stuff that churches put out, and the process by which they put it out. I've always appreciated the spirit behind it; I've always appreciated the heart for it and how they want to help people. I truly believe that the churches are on board with that, have the right heart, and the right perspective, and the right context—it's just the way they went about it. That's what really drove it, that continual buildup.
DOOR: Is there one particular mistake that churches make when they're getting out their message? One that really stands out in your mind?
KEVIN: There are so many.
BRAD: Yes, one of the things that first jumped in my head was I think they assume people are listening. I think they assume that whatever they're communicating, people are paying attention—or that they care, or that they're even getting it. This is what goes back to the core of what marketing is, because so many churches get marketing confused with advertising or promotions. They all want the end product, they all want more people in the seats, and they all want to have the big Easter services, and the Sunday morning attendances, and all that kind of stuff. I truly believe it's for the sake of getting the gospel into hearts, not just butts in pews like we talk about on the site.
DOOR: "Butts In Pews" would be a great name for a Christian punk rock band!
BRAD: But they think the way to go about getting that is advertising, because they look at these other churches that are doing it well: your Willow Creeks, and your Saddlebacks, and all the other big churches you want to list. They're doing advertising. They do radio, they do ads, they do brochures, they do postcards, they do slick-looking stuff. But that's not the only thing that gets these people in the door. These people also do research. They know what their message is, who they're saying it to, and how best to say it to them. A lot of these other churches are missing what it truly means to communicate.
KEVIN: I think it would even go farther than just the outside communication to the neighborhood trying to get people in. The internal communication sometimes sucks. How many times do they give the announcements, and then nobody knows what's going on? I volunteer with my youth group all the time, and we always get so frustrated because the parents don't know what's going on—because they don't read the newsletter we put out that gives them all the information. People aren't listening, oftentimes, and part of marketing is finding out how to get people to listen, get them to pay attention. Sometimes churches need to figure out how to do that even with their own people.
DOOR: Churches sometimes have limited resources, and rely on volunteers to do some of the work. What are some steps that these churches can take to be more effective?
BRAD: That's a great question. I think it really starts with really figuring out who you are as the church, who the people are that make up your church, and what it is you have to offer your community. And that doesn't cost money—that's time, that's investment of really thinking through what it is you're trying to sell. Let's face it, that's what we're doing with our communities; we're selling ourselves to the community, saying "Look, this is a place where you can come, meet God, meet others, develop relationships, et cetera."
      You know, we can usually find the resources to do what we want to do—if we have the right plan, and we know it's going to work. That's the way businesses work. Bankers aren't going to give a business a bunch of money if they just come to them and say "Hey, we want to put together an ad campaign and go sell widgets." They've got to actually figure out who the company is, what they're actually making, and who's actually going to buy this stuff before they even think about putting an ad campaign out.
DOOR: Is there a danger of corrupting or watering down the message in order to make it appeal to the people you're trying to reach?
KEVIN: I don't think so. I think one of the things we've talked a lot about is authenticity, and being true to the message. I would think that any marketing that has to water down its message, or has to compromise in some way to reach people, that's marketing that sucks as well. If you're going to try and water down the message to reach people, you're not doing good marketing anyway. That's almost like going in the other direction. You can have bad communications, and bad clip art, and stuff that's not professional—or you can have a totally slick, polished, professional ad campaign, but there's no soul to it, and it sells out the gospel. Both of them suck; neither of them is any good.
BRAD: It's about communicating to your communities what it is you're about, and being authentic in it, like I've said.
DOOR: Give me an example of a church or organization that doesn't suck.
BRAD: I just spent three hours with a pastor last week talking about this very thing, and part of his dilemma is, he doesn't suck in every sense of the word. He is authentic in what he's communicating, and the materials that he puts out are quality. He doesn't have a lot of money, and so it's pay as you go, and he's not going into debt to come up with some big plan, and so he doesn't suck in that regard.
      But what he's learning—and this is often the hard lesson, and this is a lesson in a business too—is that it takes time for that stuff to get through. There is no big million-dollar message that's going to get a million people in your door next week; it just doesn't work that way. There are just fundamental principles of doing things well, being consistent (consistency is a big part of marketing) and having that, then, drive the results of the people that are going to come.
      I don't know how much more you want to know about this actual church, but it wouldn't be a church anybody knows. It's a local church in Orange County, California, but in every sense of the word they don't suck, and they very much reflect their community.
DOOR: Just like The O.C., which we've heard is a perfect reflection of life in Orange County.
BRAD: In fact, this guy does a demographic report of his church every week; he has his members fill out a card, and he makes sure his church is reflecting, always making sure it balances right with what the community is. In other words, he's not importing people from outside the community or going to parts of the community that wouldn't necessarily reflect the whole community. As a result of that, he knows that his people are there, and in terms of how he communicates, and what he communicates, he's definitely authentic. He's the real deal.
KEVIN: I think it would be kind of hard to point out, and say "This church sucks, and that church doesn't." No church is going to fall perfectly along those lines, but I think we do see a lot of good examples here and there, and those are some of the things we try and put up on the web site. I was just looking through some of the past stuff we had on there, and we talked about a church that was offering a free valet parking service for the elderly and disabled. That's a cool idea; that's a way they're presenting themselves to the community and offering a service. That's a cool little thing.
DOOR: As long as they don't call it, "The valet of the shadow of death."
BRAD: I think it's important too for the readers to understand that we're not saying "that [particular] church sucks." There is a reason we have the word "marketing" in there. If we were to say "that church sucked," or didn't suck, that would be purely a judgment call, because we don't know half the churches that are out there. "Church marketing sucks," that's where it really gets back to what marketing is, and so finding the ideal church in terms of the church that does church marketing well, we're measuring it by stuff that we can see. We don't know all the stuff that's going on inside.
KEVIN: I guess I'll just add that there are lots of little examples like that, where you might say a couple things they are doing that are really cool. I know there is a local church called Bluer that has a really cool website, www.bluer.org. They've put up a fair number of MP3s of the sermons, which a lot of churches are doing, and they just started pod-casting, which is a funky new technical thing where you can basically subscribe to get the sermons on your iPod. Every time they put up a new sermon it will queue it up on your iPod. I don't know a lot about it, but stuff like that is just a cool way for them to reach the emergent church.
DOOR: The Door can be downloaded directly onto the George Foreman Grill, but for some reason that's not a popular feature. Are there particular types of churches, whether it's a particular denomination, urban versus rural, north versus south, that are doing an effective job—or a not so effective job—at getting the word out?
BRAD: I think there would be an argument for all of those categories or demographics that you picked out for ones that are doing well, and that aren't doing well, just from the reality that there are so many different kinds of churches, and so many kinds of different settings. Almost everyone you just mentioned, all those categories I can think of ones that are doing it well, but also there are ones that aren't doing it well. So I don't know if we could necessarily pick out one or the other. That would be a research project in and of itself, which would be an interesting one.
DOOR: How long has the blog been up?
KEVIN: I think we started in July 2004.
BRAD: We were all in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, at a meeting, and that's where it all came out in terms of really putting some legs to the idea and the vision, and then July is when it was put up.
DOOR: How has the response been?
BRAD: It's been really good. I could hype it and make it sound bigger than it really is, but I think it's been bigger than I would have expected at this stage in the game, it only being up a few months and we haven't done any marketing for it. It's just been out there. I think we've sent out a hundred emails between the two of us in terms of just telling some people that we know about it. That's the point, is to just kind of let it work itself out and see how it grows.
      There is no money behind it per se; the purse behind it is me. I'd love to invest; I've got grandiose ideas about how it could maybe be a foundation someday, or figure out how to help churches. I don't think it could ever be a business model, just for the fact that it's a conversation, and you don't want it to be tainted or perverted per se.
      The traffic reports that we have—if you believe in any of those web statistics—it's about three thousand unique IP addresses per month, unique IP addresses being unique people that come through. That's been the average for the last few months here.
KEVIN: It's been a slow burn of people finding out about it and telling others. It hasn't been a huge avalanche because we don't have any plans to tell a whole lot of people about it. But it has been getting out there. Every now and then I'll do a Google search for churchmarketingsucks.com and just see who's talking about it, and it seems like every couple days there is a new blog that mentions it. There is somebody, I have no idea who they are, but they've talked about it.
DOOR: Have people understood your intent, or have they had misconceptions and gotten upset?
KEVIN: People have kind of taken the anti-marketing tack, that the church shouldn't do any marketing. I've seen a few sites that have kind of taken that approach out of it, but for the most part I think it's simply just been pretty good, people understand it and agree with it a lot.
BRAD: I thought we would have gotten a little more hate mail, which I wish we would have—because something tells me that we're not doing it exactly right if we're not getting hate mail. But think some of that has to do with, the very people that would hate what we're doing probably wouldn't have heard about it yet from the circles that they run in.
      So, by default, our audience has defined itself. That's been very word-of-mouth—on line, mostly. Off line it hasn't been much yet, but we do have some publicity plans in place. We're looking to send out some press releases consistently over the next few months, and we have relationships in the Christian industry that will get some of this, and write some of this, and start to get the word out about it.
      Part of it was intentional in terms of our delay, because we want it to grow and become more than just a conversation of a couple entries. We wanted to have some meat to it, have some stuff that people could dig around, and really feed off of, and it's getting to that point.
DOOR: Does having the address www.churchmarketingsucks.com ever get you blocked by family-friendly content filters on web browsers?
KEVIN: I haven't heard of anybody complaining about that yet, but I've also heard people complaining about my business site, which is called www.monkeyoutofnowhere.com—and I can't imagine why that would be blocked. I would venture to guess that some of the blocking software kind of blocks on a whim, doesn't quite know what it would be blocking. So if it was blocking "church marketing sucks," I wouldn't rush to say that it was because of the word "sucks."
BRAD: We actually originally thought about just doing "Church Marketing S-U-X" as one of the original ideas, because we were thinking of how could we Christian-ese this a little bit so it wouldn't be offensive. Some people won't even link to the site, won't put the word "sucks" in there. They'll just call it CMS, because they don't want to offend some of their readers by that word, and we understand that's part of the problem in terms of how many people will actually talk about it or link to it. So that's why we had thought about S U X, but the more we got into it we were like no, that just seems kind of cheesy. It wouldn't get the impact we were looking for. And we didn't want to get impact for the sake of impact—but we want to be authentic in how we're communicating too, and the site could very easily be called www.churchmarketingworks.com because we believe it works, but our angle was a little different.
DOOR: In your mission statement you say something about hoping to someday change the site name to "Church Marketing No Longer Sucks."
BRAD: That's right. We actually have that domain, which shows the faith right there. We're paying the annual domain registration fee; I'm paying it out of my own pocket just so one day we won't have to do this anymore.
DOOR: What else would you guys like people to know about the site or what you're trying to accomplish?
KEVIN: I guess I'd want people to get involved in the conversation, to come and check out what we're talking about, and to jump in. If you disagree with us jump in and comment, and tell us so. That's the whole idea of it; ask people to talk. We're in the communications field, but that doesn't mean we're the last answer, the experts that know everything there is to know. We've had people comment about our marketing that know better than we do, and it's great to get their feedback, to interact with people who give more wisdom than either Brad or I can provide. I'd invite the readers to jump in and join the conversation, read the blog, post some comments.
BRAD: I'd just add something for people to know: I hope that it rings loud that our heart is: we really love the church. I believe that's the vessel God's chosen to use, and by no means are we saying that the church is not that conduit or context by which God wants to operate or build relationships. But we also know that the church can be left undefined a lot too. Over the last couple thousand years it's been around it's certainly been transformed into many various outlets, and so knowing that we love the church, capital "C," not the four walls that many churches are in but the big church, capital "C," in terms of God's people, and so having that ring out in what church Marketing Sucks is about, because it really is about the people. We love the church, we love the people inside the church, and we believe that there are more people out there that need God, and that can have a relationship with God, and spend eternity in heaven with him. If we can have just one little fraction of a part in creating a conversation that allows churches to communicate more about it, that really is what I would hope would get out about this, and what we're about.
KEVIN: Right on!