by Dawn Trautman
Every Saturday, my church opens its doors and passes out hundreds of meals. We never ask for identification. We never ask what anyone believes. All we have is our belief that all humans deserve a meal.
It is common for churches to provide meals and other necessities to our neighbors. In fact, meeting the physical needs of our communities is a bedrock of churches everywhere.
Now the church has an extraordinary opportunity to meet our nation’s newest epidemic, and the vast majority of unchurched people have no idea.
In his 2023 Surgeon General’s Report, Vivek Murthy declared a national epidemic of loneliness. Not only does loneliness take an emotional toll, but it is associated with “a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity.”
People need people
People need people. They can make friends, but even that sometimes does not fully erase loneliness. The most powerful way to cure loneliness is through a community.
There are a few ways in which a community differs from just a group of friends. Friends can be hard to gather together, but a community meets at a consistent time and place. Friends may have something in common, but a community has a shared purpose. Friends may provide some emotional support, but a community provides an entire network to walk alongside during both celebrations and challenges.
It’s hard to think of anyone doing community better than churches. The problem is that progressive churches are not good at telling our story to the culture at large. Without our voices, the primary cultural narrative is that churches revolve around white Christian nationalism and that there will be a test of belief upon entering. The unchurched people around me want no part of that.
My friend Jeff Hiller plays a gay, church-going character on an HBO show, Somebody Somewhere. He regularly does national press and gets questions along the lines of, “What’s it like to create this magical unicorn universe where gay people go to church?”
And suddenly he’s in the position of explaining that there are plenty of gay people who go to church. Some are even pastors. Gasp.
It’s not just about LGBTQ+ people. It’s about BIPOC people. Single people. People experiencing housing or food insecurity. All sorts of people believe that they will not be welcome.
Mainline churches would do well to sponsor a national marketing campaign saying, “We accept everyone and can solve your loneliness.”
Maybe the idea of a multi-denominational marketing campaign around loneliness is actually the magical unicorn universe.
How do we shift the conversation? As a former youth worker who has now owned a business for almost 20 years coaching hundreds of church leaders and small business owners, I’ve had a real-life masterclass on marketing.
Here’s how local congregations can use marketing principles to spread the word more effectively. There are only three marketing basics that church leaders need to know:
- Marketing is not selling; it is telling a compelling story to a specific audience.
- Marketing is not about showing off what insiders think is most important; it is about offering a solution to a perceived need among your audience.
- Marketing must have integrity.
Many churches are still telling a story that centers almost entirely around belief, but that is not fulfilling the current perceived need. The compelling story we are called to tell to lonely people must recenter our story around belonging, not around belief.
When people search for a solution to their loneliness, our job is to make sure that churches come to mind. People already know that churches have something to do with God; we do not need to educate them about that. What they don’t know is that the church can be a welcoming, affirming place to ease their loneliness.
Once they know churches offer community and belonging, they’ll start looking up churches online. As you create a more welcoming message, start with your digital presence. Make sure everything that your church-curious neighbor finds reinforces the idea that your church is a place for them to fit in.
- Delete the photo of your building on your homepage and replace it with a spirited moment from Vacation Bible School or another action photo.
- Stop treating your social media as a bulletin board and start treating it as a portal into how it feels to be there by showing engaged people.
- If it is necessary to film your worship livestream from more than six feet away, have a greeter at the beginning who talks straight to camera in close range. Otherwise, the livestream feels like peeking in from afar, not participating together.
Don’t currently have the photos and clips you need? It’s a perfect job for a high school intern.
Next, a lonely person will look for a way in. Worship is an intimidating place to start. Create ways for people to be involved that do not involve worship. For example, our church’s food ministry is dominated by volunteers who do not belong to the church. Eventually, some of them feel comfortable attending worship because they’ve already been involved in other ministries.
“We used to start with belief. Now we start with praxis. What we do helps us form what we believe.” – Pastor Danielle Miller
Then, engage in the slower, deeper work of marketing integrity. Examine who will really fit in. While the church in a larger sense has room for everyone, your specific congregation currently may not. If you claim that an historically marginalized group will be welcome and someone actually arrives and is not welcomed, you have done more harm than good. Emphasize who you welcome well and then gather members of the marginalized group into conversations followed by action.
Finally, marketing is about timing. The crisis of loneliness is now. If we all start sending clear and welcoming messages now, we have the potential to shift the conversation and better meet the needs of our communities.
Dawn Trautman, the visionary founder of Big Picture Big Purpose, has developed a deep understanding of churches through years of co-producing the Main Stage at the ELCA Extravaganza and coaching hundreds of church leaders across denominations. Featured on ABC, NBC, NPR, and “The New York Times,” Dawn’s latest book, “Parables of a Resilient Nomad,” releases this September. Learn more at www.BigPictureBigPurpose.com.
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