This post on #10 of the "Top10 church communicator's mistakes" caught my eye:
Church start-ups aside, one of the biggest challenges I run into on the road is a church that undergoes a re-branding in order to create momentum that does not already exist. The downfall of this effort is that to most churches, rebranding is a packaging concept. It never affects the core. If you repackage something that was not growing in a healthy way, the recipients of your message might be attracted at first, but the draw will not last. As well, your community can see through an attempt to modernize that is inconsistent with true change. If you want to re-brand, build real momentum first. Re-brand from the core out. The only way you can do that is learning how to organically connect with people and grow without an ounce of packaging. If you are not seeing success in organic growth, it means you have not mastered connecting with new people--an indication that your radar is off and you would not likely re-brand properly anyway.
We as youth pastors are often guilty of this. We can misrepresent what our ministry is about or what actually happens in it for the sake of trying to get students to be a part of it. Or perhaps we sense that a change needs to occur--whether it's becoming more focused on helping parents disciple their teenagers or knowing that our ministry lacks a certain spiritual depth--and so we change things up to improve things. The problem is, we change only what can be seen and not the core, as Reising notes in the post. As a result, nothing of import really changes in the ministry, and teenagers will eventually see through the hypocrisy anyways. If we know things need to change, then we need to get to the heart of the matter rather than spend so much trying trying to give the appearance that things are better when they really are not. And know that I am preaching to myself on this one.
