In 1517 Martin Luther nailed the theses of his Reformation on a church door. Modern-day followers will try billboards to renew the faith.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will test a new advertising campaign in Denver in September aimed at strengthening its brand name and reversing a national downward slide in membership numbers, church officials said.
The ad campaign tells stories about church members demonstrating faith in action.
Each ad will end with the tag line “God’s Work. Our Hands.”
The campaign is the largest in scale for the church in about five years, spokesman John Brooks said.
“The Denver area is important because it is not an area with a strong Lutheran presence compared with a place like Minneapolis,” said the Rev. Kent Mueller, spokesman for the Denver-based Rocky Mountain Synod.
The church’s identity, he said, is not as well established in this synod, which has about 76,500 congregants scattered across five states – Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and northern Texas.
Most of the synod’s members are in Colorado – almost 61,000. And about two-thirds of them are in the metro area.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church, the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination with 65 synods encompassing 10,470 congregations, has seen declining membership for several years.
The Chicago-based church recently reported that rolls had fallen to 4.8 million at the end of 2006, a 76,000-person decline from the previous year.
The drop, and the church’s commitment to “grow in evangelical outreach,” spurred the campaign, church marketing director John Kho said in a statement.
The campaign will be spreading the word online and via newspapers, billboards, bus shelters and marketing kits handed out in 62 Denver-area congregations.
One ad shows a carpenter with tools next to him arrayed in the shape of a cross. The text: “When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, our first reaction was shock. Our second was to grab a hammer.”
The church fielded 18,500 volunteers and donated $27 million, the ad says.
The campaign is a partnership of the churchwide organization and the Rocky Mountain Synod, which had already developed an initiative called “Vision, Passion, Action” to invigorate its 175 congregations.
Synod work groups concluded that congregations are seeking to “deepen discipleship and to be effective at evangelism,” the spreading of their Christian beliefs, Brooks said.
Another conclusion was that congregations are looking for “ways of more clearly describing and claiming a Lutheran identity.”
The church will survey for results in the Denver area and could extend the pilot to other markets, and to radio and television media, Brooks said.
“We believe that stories about sharing God’s love will motivate members to tell others, and be compelling enough to get nonmembers to listen,” Kho said.
Staff writer Electa Draper can be reached at 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com.
