Missions and Marketing

I'm going to have to start by coming clean. I've been involved in missions by working in or for the communications department of a missions agency for the past 5 years. I still don't get it. For a good part of the time I was involved with the agency, there was an ongoing effort to focus on “rebranding” the agency. To me, that meant trying to figure out what our particular strengths were and trying to emphasize it in order to gain some sort of advantage. But it was strange. There weren't any large differences between us and other missions agencies that were selected as our peer group, and the idea that they were “the competition” felt a lot like being interested in the same girl as your best friend.

At the time, the agency I was working for was losing missionaries due to attrition, and a slowdown in applications following 9/11, and having trouble knowing what to do about it. They emphasized their long and storied history, revamped their website a couple of times, bought a new ERP, beefed up their major donor and foundation support-raising, and started lots of new initiatives.

In the middle of it all, I found myself asking a lot of questions about missions and what happens when most of it gets done outside of the local church. I was managing projects, working on websites, and writing articles, but at the same time, I was thinking about questions like, “What's a missionary, anyway?” And, “What's all this talk about 'partnering with the local church' really mean?” And, “How come all the talk about missions I hear sounds more like business than missions when it comes to how we interact with churches and people in the US? Does missions only get talked about among the actual missionaries?"

So what does a missions agency market? Here's a short list of things that I think do actually differentiate agencies:

• Missionary services provided (training, health care, MK education, technology, on-field support)

• An intangible “quality” on the part of the missionaries already on the field

• Knowledgeable home office staff

• How finances are handled

There are also a lot of things that agencies think make them special, but are really just the latest buzzwords. They're like the Purpose-Driven Life campaign, or sermons on the Da Vinci Code. Somebody important said or did something about it, and suddenly everyone thought they should do it too, in order to be successful:

• Church planting

• Partnering with the local church

• Holistic ministry

• Cutting-edge

• Team based

• Intentional

I have to admit that some of these are real differentiators, but I'd also say that if people have been thinking through missions carefully, these are mostly things that you would expect of any mission agency. I'll write more about this later.

At the risk of just being an armchair missionary, I should probably try to provide some pro-active suggestions. The problem is that when I've tried to do this, I keep coming back to questions about why the missions agency is like this in the first place, which I'll get to in another post as well.