The summer 2005 issue of Leadership Journal thinks church marketing sucks:
Church Marketing Hoovers
If your church has a cheesy logo, uses bad clip art, or promotes events with obnoxious flyers, watch out. You may be targeted by the marketing savvy pastors and communicators behind ChurchMarketingSucks.com. Launched in 2004, the weblog affirms that the church has the greatest story ever told, but no one’s listening because “church marketing efforts and communication in general suck.”This site is a diverse assembly of content from across the web sampling the best and worst in church promotional materials. Bad church marketing, they contend, also includes airbrushed perfection and multicutural photos that misrepresent the reality of Sunday morning in most churches.
Effective church marketing is neither snazzy nor sloppy. Instead, better church communication is “authentic, it’s loving, and it knows how to spell,” the bloggers contend. Practicing what they preach, the site creators recently registered an additional web address to appeal to a more conservative market—ChurchMarketingStinks.com.