Zilch

I recently finished Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business written by Nancy Lublin who directs a hugely successful non-profit and now offers advice to business leaders. A really good read with one big takeaway from early on in the book dealing with branding. She makes the point by writing “the save-the-world sector is crowded and competitive. Organizations must ask themselves, ‘how is our breast cancer group different from the dozen other breast cancer groups?’. The trick is to be able to use one or more of the following terms to describe your organization: first, only, faster, better, cheaper. I call these ‘the five’. So long as you can pin yourself to one of these words, you’ve found a niche (38).

It is an interesting way of thinking about things. I know some church leaders who bemoan the idea of anything from the business world or that smells of marketing to influence the church, and yet Lublin’s point is a good one. And while I'm not saying that churches rush to figure out which of the five categories they fit into, it's ok for churches to figure out what kind of church they are, and perhaps more importantly, which kind of church they aren't. Does that mean that things can't change? Certainly not, but being upfront with who you are saves some potential headaches (and heartaches) down the road.