Marketing the faith for good

There is increasing sentiment within various levels of Catholic hierarchy these days about the biggest challenge facing the Church: the education of the laity. There is more than just a feeling that many Catholics, particularly our youth, simply do not understand what the Catholic Church is all about.

On the other hand, one would hope that any such education programme would not be a one-way street. Because in this modern world of ours—where ordinary people are living at a far more hectic pace and their attention is being increasingly sought after and distracted by more movies, more sport, an all invasive Internet and the hedonistic temptations of the corporate sector—faith-based organisations are desperately in need of understanding what motivates modern mankind.

I have often mentioned in this column the need for churches to understand the marketing process. I don’t mean the seedy side of the discipline generally portrayed by second-rate, shock-tactic advertising, but its basic fundamental of motivating consumers positively in a specific direction.

Every parent will know how difficult it is sometimes to motivate children and how many of us were literally dragged by our ears to church on Sundays by our parents.

And how many of us sat during Mass with our minds wandering all over the place, bored by what we as children regarded as the somewhat repetitive nature of the liturgy (not to mention sermons and homilies that went clean over our heads)?

A classic example of how marketing can play a constructive role in the Church was an experiment conducted in a Durban parish about 30 years ago.

It all started with catechism and a parish priest who refused to accept a situation where mothers of Catholic children attending government schools would drag their offspring kicking and screaming once a week to attend catechism classes at the church. The same offspring cared not a jot about who made them nor about apples, the Garden of Eden or loving their neighbours.

Something that still happens a lot today, not just among kids, but also among adults who arrive for Mass on Sunday with nothing else on their minds other than the previous day’s sport, hassles at home or goings-on at the office. Mass to many has become a Sunday routine with about as much religious or intellectual stimulation as an afternoon stroll around a shopping mall.

Somehow, the priest found, those catechism classes all seemed so pointless. The kids clearly didn’t want to be there. Their parents found it a pain in the neck to fetch and carry, and did so only because they didn’t want to burn in hell.

In desperation the priest asked some marketers in the parish if they could offer some sort of help in making the youngsters look forward to catechism and learning something about what it meant to be a Christian.

A plan was hatched and after catechism one day the children were asked to bring their cricket kit the following week.

Word got around and suddenly there were more kids than usual. Catechism took place outside and the young were introduced to a session of “Christian Cricket”. This version was just like the normal game—but the objective of the exercise was that every child had to concentrate 100% on making sure that every other kid was having more fun than they were.

They took to it like ducks to water. The good players insisted on the poorer performers having more chances to bat and bowl, and instead of howls of derision when catches were dropped, the guilty player would be surrounded by all the others and there would be pats on the back, assurances that even famous cricketers dropped catches, and genuine offers of help and coaching.

Shy and self-conscious lame ducks were made to feel like princes by their peers.

Suddenly a bunch of self-centred, disinterested, dragged-to-catechism-by-their-ears Catholic kids had discovered the joy of giving: the very fundamental of Christian and Catholic life.

And so the catechism classes grew and alternated between “Christian Cricket” one week and a lesson in the classroom the following, where instruction from the catechism book relied on cricket analogies to get points across.

It succeeds beyond all measure in creating Christian understanding. Sadly, it was eventually abandoned because more and more mothers complained that they didn’t drag themselves away from shopping sprees and tea-parties just for their kids to play cricket.

This sort of knee-jerk, misperception of what the Church was doing then still exists today, and it why there is a crying need for a long-term programme of education for the laity. Perhaps the recently-launched Hope&Joy initiative will help accomplish that.

There is a desperate need for the Church to apply those same marketing methods that turned Christian Cricket into meaningful catechism, to bringing about a closer more relevant appreciation of the Church by a very distracted and lackadaisical laity.