Be The Church

Aug 8, 2012
3 min read

Amongst churches today, the phrase “be the church” is becoming cliché. It’s overused, overemphasized and perhaps a little over-advertised. But its beginnings were one the most successful interdenominational volunteer campaigns that the modern American Church has ever seen.

About 27 years ago, in 1984, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation began a pilot program dedicated to providing assistance to people with chronic health conditions. Through several expansions and celebrity support, the Foundation’s goal shifted to encompass general volunteer efforts through the unified “Faith in Action” campaign that started in the early 1990’s. Once a partnership with World Vision and Outreach Inc. was forged around 2003, the tagline “Be the Church” was added to the FIA campaign and it began to attract national attention. San Diego and Baltimore became the two hubs that the program worked out of and in 2010 over 130 churches participated in a nationwide community service effort that involved their congregations working in the community rather than attending a regular Sunday service.

It’s easy to look at this campaign and consider it a success based on sheer numbers. Where so many have failed, this one succeeded in crossing denominational boundaries to unify Christianity for a common purpose. But it was so much more than a few weekends well done. It was a strategic endeavor that took massive planning efforts from the FIA team as well as the individual churches.

FIA provided materials outside of just an online networking hub. It spent its limited donation dollars where they would go the furthest, on advertising. It adopted a unified logo and theme, and even developed a character through a single picture of a boy carting a wheelbarrow, still featured on their website.[1] Shirts, banners at faith-based conventions, flyers, direct mail and a heavily promoted word-of-mouth campaign worked together to not only cause a little bit of intrigue among news stations, but also to demand their attention with a focused and professional movement. Best of all, FIA provided all of these resources free of charge to participating churches, solidifying uniformity and collaboration.

When many campaigns would have stopped with their own efforts, FIA went above and beyond with their own “consumer insight,” meaning they paid close attention to how the churches interacted with the materials they were given. They provided forums and blogs for churches to post pictures and share with others about their personal experiences with the service day. Most, if not all of the FIA founders were also given the opportunity to serve for themselves to get a better feel for how the campaign worked.

My own church was one of the first to participate in the FIA movement in San Diego. The resources we were provided turned a logistical nightmare into a manageable checklist. From an advertiser’s perspective, FIA’s materials were nothing short of genius. The shirts that we received were a specific shade of orange, as were the pre-printed flyers. They even worked with us to put our own church logo on the front (strategically keeping the back uniform throughout). They gave us a PDF for every planning issue under the sun, all of which having the same letterhead, just in case we passed it along to another church. Their follow-up communications were relentless, yet they rewarded churches with swift responses by featuring them on their website and YouTube channel.

Not only did FIA do an amazing job from both ends of the communication pipeline, but they also genuinely cared for each church or volunteer group that was involved. They constantly updated their own pictures to involve real-life projects and sent handwritten thank-you cards to each participant.

Oh, and that blonde-haired little boy on all the promotional gear, his name is Jackson. Jack for short. He loves the beach, plays football and will always beat me in Smash Brothers on PlayStation. His dad is the pastor of the church I worked for, and I babysat him and his sister a couple of summers back. I’m not sure if FIA reached every single church in the same way that they reached us, but I will definitely vouch for their personalization when it comes to their advertising campaign, even if I am a little biased.