The short answer is, “yes.” Yes, a church should market online, and “yes” a church should live by faith. What is my point? There are critics on both sites of the issue. Some correctly states that it is Christ’s church and just as, we live by faith in our personal lives, we should live by faith with our church. They are not wrong. If God doesn’t bless any level of marketing we do, it will not be effective. And if God is a blessing, we will be successful with or without Christian marketing.
Those on the other side correctly state that though God is sovereign and we need God’s blessing to succeed. He expects us to use our talents, our brains, and our abilities to reach the lost. Hence, marketing is a wise choice.
The truth is that both are right. The most important thing is that we are aligning our ministry with God’s revealed will (the Bible), and we are acting with sincerity and love. If those things are all true, God will bless us, and He can certainly bless marketing efforts!
If you have a budget for marketing, it’s wise to use it! You could go with the first group mentioned above and eliminate marketing altogether, but that might be likened to sitting on the couch and saying, “If God wants me to eat He’ll give me a sandwich.” But if you don’t get off that couch and get some food, you’ll starve! You would be equal to the person who buried his talents.
God gave us talents, abilities, and spiritual ambition to use them. If your abilities and talents are not in Christian marketing, there are others with those talents. When God put Adam in the garden and told him to work, it glorified the Lord when he worked!
He didn’t sit down saying, “Lord, I trust you so much that I believe you’re going to do all of this gardening for me!” No, he did what he needed to do to obey God to have the good outcome he, and God desired — good food to eat.
When the Lord Jesus was here on Earth, and it was time for his disciples to enter the ministry, He established a Christian marketing campaign for his disciples! You might say, what kind of Biblical proof do you have for that?
Mark 6:7, “And he called unto him the 12, and began to send them forth by two and two”
He sent them on a door-to-door gospel marketing campaign! Two by two they went from door to door proclaiming the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Many of them would go on to follow the Lord Jesus, and some would go on to trust in Him and be saved.
The campaign was ultimately a great success because many went on to be saved. Though many forsook Him in Jerusalem when they realized He was not the Earthly savior that had hoped Him to be, the church was established and grew exponentially after His resurrection.
Because of this marketing campaign, many would go on to see that Jesus Christ is the perfect lamb of God who took the place of sinners like us, fulfilling the wrath of God in our place and rising again three days later.
This article has been written by Josh Spaulding.
Josh Spaulding is pastor of Bible Baptist Mission, https://biblebaptistwashington.com/, Baptist Church in Washington, Ind., author of, “The Reality of Saving Faith, and publisher of Eternal Answers, https://eternalanswers.org/, a ministry.
