Seen and Heard

 

First, Have Something to Say

An Un-Communications Manifesto

 

“We have a great product; we just need to do a better job getting the word out about it.”

 

As a communications professional working for over 25 years in both the for-profit advertising world, and the non-profit world of church ministry, I’ve heard this phrase in one form or another countless times. Probably, you have, too. Maybe, you’ve said it yourself.

 

In the ministry world, it gets phrased like this: “We have a timeless message, we just need to communicate it in a more relevant way.”

 

In communication jargon, we might say the problem is not in our content, but in our delivery. In business lingo, the problem is not in our product design or production quality, but in our marketing.

 

As a culture, we’re obsessed with communication. Ask any group of people how to solve our societal issues with politics, justice, education, or healthcare and they are likely to say, “better communication.” How to improve your marriage and family? “Better communication.” How to get ahead in your career, dating, or personal goals? “Better communication.” The message is ubiquitous.

 

Corresponding to this is the rise of the Communications Professional. The constellation of career fields around marketing, public relations, branding, advertising, content development, etc., has exploded. In business leadership, the Director of Communications has risen from a minor sub-department to a C-Suite executive. In churches, hiring a communications person has moved from something only a few megachurches would even consider, to being a top priority, right after securing a pastor, worship leader, and perhaps a youth minister (or more likely, the youth minister is expected to be a communication guru as well). And no one needs to comment on how important managing media spin has become in the world of politics.

 

At the heart of this shift towards professionalizing communication is an attitude of epistemological arrogance. Simply put, we are certain that we know stuff. We know the truth, our opinions are correct, our message is right, our solution works, our product is perfect. Therefore, if other people are not convinced—if they aren’t buying our product, joining our movement, believing our creed—then we must not be saying the words right. We couldn’t possibly be wrong; we’re just not saying it right.

 

The premise of this manifesto is simple: We don’t have a communication problem. We have a pride problem.

 

I didn’t start out my career believing this way. Fresh out of high school, I believed I was called to be a Youth Pastor, so I went to my church’s youth leader and asked how I could help. He pointed me to a recently purchased Mac Classic computer and explained that he needed a weekly newsletter designed. It wasn’t long before I had taught myself graphic design using the recently democratized tools desktop publishing. I was enamored by the technology: Adobe Photoshop, the original image manipulation software, and Aldus Pagemaker, predecessor to Adobe’s InDesign. It came into my mind that the tools of the trade that had once been confined to the well-funded advertising agencies of Madison Avenue were now available to the masses.

 

At the same time, I had moved on to a part-time job as “Print Shop Secretary” for another local church. As I looked around at the Chancery Italic and Old English style fonts, the corny clip-art, and the badly designed bulletin put out every Sunday, I thought I had found my life calling. Why shouldn’t the graphic design work of the church look just as good as the secular business advertising I saw in national magazines? We, the Church, had the greatest message in the world; why shouldn’t our communication pieces promoting eternal salvation be at least as well-designed as the full-page spread selling vacuum cleaners?

 

Later, I would extend that vision from printed design to include websites, branding materials, video production, and social media. But the premise was the same. Improve the quality of communication, and the decades-long decline in the North American church could be reversed. People would surely flock back to the pews once they realized that the life-changing message of the gospel, long clouded in the grey mists of outdated design, was allowed to shine forth clearly in a newly minted modern mantel of timely typography and current creativity.

 

Of course, religious dogma is unchanging by definition, so the approach of “change the method, not the message” makes sense for faith leaders. However, as my career progressed and I went to work as a graphic designer in the world of advertising, I discovered that a similar mindset was shared by business people as well. Restaurants were certain their recipes were delicious; if their tables weren’t full, it was because they didn’t run the right coupon in their latest ad. Car dealers were sure they had the best vehicles on the market, they just needed the name of the dealership a little bigger in Saturday’s newspaper. Realtors had wonderful houses, they just needed to tweak the description to highlight that cozy little cottage. In every field, the belief was the same: change the method, not the message. Just communicate better.

 

Nowhere was this more true than in the media business itself. For ten years, I worked for a local newspaper, supervising a team of graphic artists who designed ads for their clients. Throughout that time, the drumbeat was constant: we must become a digital news source, not just a print product, in order to succeed in the modern world of web-based communication and social media. Yet every quarter, the financial reality stayed the same: despite declining circulation, profits from print advertising were greater than online. So for all the talk of digital innovation, fundamental change never happened. Instead, the pressure shifted to the Marketing Department. The story was, local news still has tremendous value, we just need to remind people of how useful it is to their lives and they will sign up for subscriptions once again. The more revenue the paper lost, the greater the pressure to improve the self-promotion.

 

Today, the newspaper is a shadow of its former self. The print product is slimmed down to a few pages of mostly syndicated content, while the website never gained traction. The reporting staff is a skeleton crew, and the entire design department I supervised has since been eliminated and outsourced. But last to go were the sales staff and marketing team. Even as they draw their last breath, they are singing the same song: “The product is good. We just need to sell it.” The problem is communication.

 

I wish I could say that was the last time I had to watch that sad scenario unfold. Unfortunately, I am still seeing it, in the institutions I love the most. The failing public school system in my community seems convinced they don’t have problems with educating students, they just aren’t communicating their success well to parents and stakeholders. Healthcare leaders seem convinced they know how to solve chronic disease; they just aren’t persuading the public to practice the right prevention. The addiction crisis is preventable if we just educate people on the dangers of illicit drugs. The university down the street is convinced that a traditional four-year liberal arts degree is still worth the tens of thousands of dollars of debt students incur, they just need more cool photos of the swimming pool that was added to the Student Life Center. In my own church, the Men’s Ministry that rarely sees a man under 60 attend their monthly dinner is convinced that they are providing exactly what men need—they just need more announcements from the pulpit on Sunday to get the young guys to come check them out. The problems is communication.

 

But what if we are wrong? What if the answer is not a new logo, clever copywriting, or a more user-friendly website? What if search engine optimization is not all we should be searching for? What if our wound is deeper than a cinematically produced promotional video can band-aid over? What if the virus we suffer from is more serious than a viral media campaign can cure? What if we can’t market, spin, educate, inform, or talk our way out of the hole that we’re in?

 

After my wide-eyed start in the world of church communications, my faith that all the church needed was an image overhaul has faded over the years, but not without a fight. I will admit that for some time I participated in the “worship wars,” convinced that a shift in musical styles was the key to the next revival. I went up against the forces of tradition that persisted in poor design practices. I finagled for more funding in our communications budget. Most of all, I sought to perfect my own craft, voraciously devouring all that I could learn about design and marketing and seeking to apply it in my ministry context. But the more I learned, the more my misgivings grew. Like a doubting disciple, I was hesitant to reveal my heresy. Could I, as a communication professional, really admit to myself, much less to others, that communication was not the cure-all I had believed it would be?

 

At the same time I was practicing my trade as director of media and communication at a large church, I was experiencing a metamorphosis in my understanding of faith. First through the writings of contemporary theologian N.T. Wright, and then through my studies in seminary, I began to be aware of how the Church, at least the tradition I had participated in, had neglected vast portions of our theological inheritance. It wasn’t so much that we had wrong doctrine, it was just that we didn’t have much doctrine. We had simplified our message down to a stump speech, and elevator pitch version of the historic Christian faith. Moreover, the average Christian simply had no knowledge of Biblical narrative. Their knowledge of the incredibly complex and layered literary work that is the Bible was limited to a few stories from Children’s Sunday School. Simply put, we don’t know our own story.

 

Even among pastors and seminary students, little attention was given to theological and biblical learning. The unspoken assumption was that we already knew the Gospel, we just needed to learn the best ways to present it. Sermon planning was less about learning the text or comprehending its message, and more about choosing the most relevant illustrations and making the most compelling applications. And yet, more and more I saw that we were just scratching the surface of the deep biblical message and wide theological tradition that were available to us. Even the storytellers seemed uninterested in fathoming the depths of our story.

 

And while, as a Christian, I believe the story of our faith has a unique spiritual life and power that sets it apart from all other stories, I could see echoes of this problem in other domains. Businesses, institutions, and organizations of all stripes seemed uninterested in asking probing and profound questions about their own story, and the stories of the people they were seeking to serve. Don’t get me wrong: narrative and storytelling get a lot of lip service in today’s communication profession. Volumes are being written about the power of story, and the need to tell them. The problem is, we assume that we already know them. We are not seeking to understand our story, we are just only focused on how to tell it better.

 

There are many communication gurus available to give you a step-by-step process on how to tell your story better. At one time, I would have been one of them. I am sure they still have value. There’s certainly nothing wrong with doing your best to communicate well. However, I would like to propose a new “step one” in “how to communicate better,” and it is simply this: 

 

First, have something to say.