As an Anglican priest in Oxford, I have a particular attachment to the city’s famed spires. These pyramidal structures on college chapels and parish churches are a daily reminder of my vocation. Their highly visible presence, punctuating the skyline, alerts me to two things: the location of the faith community and the person of God. In a similar way, many churches across the UK are beginning to announce themselves again. They are re-telling their stories and directing people to their buildings in dramatic ways through focused branding projects. This is good news. However, I wonder if the more neglected task is making God himself visible with the same creative energy. Perhaps, church communities need to find new ways of pointing upwards as well as inwards, to speak of God with equal imagination and intentionality. So how might they avoid stopping short of their real goal?
Let me first mention the merits of branding a church. Branding is not something sinister to be feared or dismissed. It need not be synonymous with western consumerism or converting God’s house into a den of thieves. Like most forms of creative communication, branding is morally neutral. It can be used for ill or good. Macmillan Cancer Support, Samaritans, (Red) and Amnesty International are just four of numerous non-profits I witnessed, first hand, coming to new birth during my career in branding. The results of those reinvention initiatives speak for themselves. Branding involves making something more visible than it once was in an increasingly crowded marketplace of ideas and products. This visibility goes deeper than logos, fonts and colours, important though they are. It helps us quickly recognise an organisation’s distinctive voice, or the unifying idea that inspires everything it does.
The same opportunity presents itself to churches. The brutal reality is that many people will no longer navigate their way through incomprehensible church communications that would send cold shivers down the spine of any aesthete. This is not always to do with budget constraints. It’s about an attitude. Is the church open to beauty and possibility? I have been fortunate to be part of one that is. It is, of course, essential that funds be used wisely. Yet clarity is equally important and so there is a tension to be held. I remember the looks of delight on client faces when their cluttered messages, muddled strategies and weary products were transformed into something simple and coherent. They surfaced from long-term denial and their organisation became visible once again. Staff felt newly engaged and their spirits were lifted. Customers felt listened to. So when a church re-imagines itself a new wave of optimism is released. The congregation feels proud of what they belong to.
What makes churches entirely different from other organisations, however, is that their communication task is much bigger. The creative process mustn’t stop as soon as the community understands and expresses its local mission more clearly. It needs to point upwards and beyond itself.
God reveals himself in the sacraments and in our many different forms of worship. He doesn’t require us sexing up his image. Nor do we sell him as a heavenly product. Nevertheless, God is ultimately what churches invite people to ‘taste’. Churches are not self-referential clubs. As society develops, there are always new things to be discovered and articulated about the divine life. This requires new languages. New stories. It’s not about fresh expressions of church. It’s about fresh expressions of God. Creativity needn’t compromise truth, church history or practice. Should it not, if anything, help faith communities to go deeper into these things?
I find it personally challenging, as a priest, that some of the most imaginative communication about God today is happening outside church walls. It’s in the work of filmmakers, TV dramatists, novelists, poets, musicians, academic theologians, and arts festivals organisers. They occupy dialogical spaces and locate themselves in larger narratives and projects that churches sometimes avoid. The commercial world taught me that the best creative work requires courage, even a fight. Clients may initially have said ‘over my dead body’ but then, after much encouragement, they witnessed the exponential growth of their organisation and its core message. Because they risked. I believe churches can risk too, pointing higher. Isn’t it time to say something new about God?
Revd Alan Ramsey is a curate at St Aldates in Oxford. Prior to ordination he worked for ten years in branding in London following his BA in Three Dimensional Design. He’s originally from Northern Ireland and now lives in Oxford with his wife Diana. Alan will commence an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths in September.
A fascinating perspective. I’ve always found the concept of church “branding” inherently distasteful, because I’ve seen it as a product of seeing the Church as a business. I’m still wary, but your perspective that church branding is, essentially, a creative way to commnicate our faith causes me to look at the other side of the debate. The key, as you say, is to avoid the tendency of local faith communities to point to themselves instead of to our Christ.
Thanks Dave. I think it’s always healthy to be wary and for churches to be continually asking questions: why are we doing this? why are we not doing this? It’s important to have diverse voices in the mix, some calling for change and others for caution. However, it’s good to be equally wary of the sacred/secular divide split. We can often view church as that holy place full of holy people at the end of the street forgetting that we are still those same ones who have to navigate through the ethically complex world of commerce as believers each day. That’s when our church community, our forms of worship and our narratives of Christ are truly on display.