Rethink Church
The United Methodist Church has been running an advertising campaign recently called “Rethink Church.” (To view the commercial campaign, go to youtube)
The Web site for the campaign is not “Rethink Church” but rather 10thousanddoors.org. I find this particularly odd because it dilutes the branding of “Rethink Church,” a concept the UMC has been using for a while. Moreover if you type www.rethinkchurch.org, you will be re-routed to the UMC home page. (I thought, perhaps, they weren’t using this branding because someone was squatting on the “rethink church” name, but that’s not the case.)
The idea behind “Rethink Church” and “10 thousand doors” is to think of church beyond any preconceived notion and to imagine, instead, what it could be. The tagline on the 10,000 doors site, for example is “What if church wasn’t just a building, but thousands of doors?” On the site there are doors you can click on to talk to others, there’s a door called Go/Do which answers the question: What do you do once you know you want to do something? and another that says “Find” which directs visitors to ways they can help others. The church, therefore, is about the world and not about any given building.
While I think the marketing is a bit confusing, the message is dead on. Volunteerism is up (okay, some of that is because people are out of work, but still), MBAs are taking oaths to “do good” in their jobs and there’s a White House office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. Whether this is the “Obama Effect” or declining economic circumstances, it’s hard to say. Either way, it appears the UMC has tapped into what has traditionally been a strength of religious institutions–the ability to foster service–something many churches moved away from as they increasingly embraced a personal relationship with Jesus.