Wounded Love: UMC Ad Campaign

Sunday, June 7, 2009

UMC Ad Campaign

I promised Donna I would post this. It is inspired by a conversation that we've been having about the 20 million dollar ad campaign that the United Methodist Church started last year.

Watch out where you get your info about the UMC from. Yes, the church is spending a large amount of money on advertising (if you can call it that - its more promotional materials) but it is NOT to attract people to the church, as some are claiming. The money was spent (notice - has already been spent) on a series of videos that were showed at annual conference (800+ across the US alone, I believe) to prompt people to rethink church. The videos are actually pretty great and are on the theme "Rethinking the Church" and encourage people to be the hands and feet of Christ to seekers by actually leaving the old structures of church and show examples of how to be church wherever you go. The rest of the money that wasn't used for production costs was actually used for the distribution of the videos at the annual conferences (for free) to the lay people as part of a vision tool kit to help bring the message and vision of rethinking church to each individual congregation. (so for my annual conference alone which is on the med. size that's 200+ videos). You can also order the video and brochures for free off of the UMC website.

I wish that we would have had the same conversation that I talked about in Shalom vs. the Church post after watching these videos. It was neat to see the people around me, including the old men who were cited in my post as thinking church was about a building and numbers, catching the vision of the promotional materials in a way they never could have with just me (or the bishop or anyone else for that matter) talking about it. It was putting visual stimuli for renewal in the creed of the UMC church of "making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world". It also tied in perfectly with our annual conference's theme of Going to Galilee (other UMC Ac's what were your themes?) While some would still say that money shouldn't have been spent, seeing those men have a change in their thinking was well worth it in my eyes.