Phil Cooke has done ministry leaders a great favor by compiling helpful insights and exploring the relevance of branding from a church perspective. The subtitle of this book released early this year is “Why Some Churches an Nonprofits Impact Culture and Others Don’t.” The leading question of the book is “What do people think of when they think of your ministry?” Phil’s emphasis in the brand discussion is helpfully flavored by a ministry-friendly definition: “At its core, branding is simply the art of surrounding a product, organization or person with a powerful and compelling story.” There are not many books in this category as few books dare to fuse faith and marketing. One thing I particularly appreciated is that Phil brings some needed insights in favor of branding the church while acknowledging the downsides of “chasing relevance” to an extreme.
The strength of the book is twofold: first is Phil’s authentic passion for the kingdom forged with a solid track record of brand-building for ministries. Second, is Phil’s distillation of principles, practices and proverbs from the business world filtered through ministry values.
The limitation of the book, albeit minor, is double-barreled. The first thing is that Phil is not weaving a coherent argument through the book, but rather, provides a patchwork of observations and insights. The second limitation is that Phil’s experience with ministry dominated by strong personalities of charismatic flavor. This tends to skew insights on branding more toward the individual and not the organization. Nevertheless, these minor points do not eclipse this solid contribution and valuable resource for a rarely treated topic.
I highly recommend this book for any church leader, and it is a must-have resource for any church communications professional. The thousands of designers working every-day to keep our churches communication savvy will appreciate one of my favorite quotes from the book: Better design isn’t just decoration; its connection. See my selected quotes.