When Faith Becomes A Brand

I sat in a creative meeting once where a church’s media team spent an hour debating the optimal length of a sermon clip for Instagram Reels. They discussed trending audio, caption hooks and the precise moment of emotional payoff that would guarantee the most shares.

Not once in that hour did anyone ask if the clip was actually life-changing. It's now traction over transformation.

Somewhere between the Great Commission and the merch store, the modern church discovered marketing. And it worked, for a while. Sermons became soundbites. Ministries became sub-brands. Testimonies became content campaigns. We called it excellence, but somewhere along the line, it became performance.

We used to ask, “How do we make disciples?”

Now we ask, “How do we increase engagement?”

You can feel the difference. One changes people. The other just tracks impressions.

When Marketing Becomes Ministry

THIS IS NOT a critique of creativity.

The problem begins when branding replaces belief.

When the mission of Jesus becomes a content strategy, the gospel stops being good news and starts being good optics.

We are no longer proclaiming truth.

We are managing perception.

We’ve confused being compelling with being commercial.

This identity drift happens when an institution loses its core purpose by chasing validation outside its mission. Churches do it all the time. We repackage conviction into something palatable enough to sell, sanding off the hard edges of the gospel until it’s smooth enough to be scrolled past without friction.

When you shape your message around market trends, don’t be surprised when the truth becomes optional.

The deeper issue is that platforms now define leaders. When “reach” becomes the new righteousness, we stop measuring fruit and start counting followers. We convince ourselves that metrics are the same as ministry. But you can grow something fast and still call it cancer. A leader’s primary calling is not to be clever with words, but to demonstrate the Spirit’s power.

Express, Not Impress

Jesus never ran a campaign. He never A/B tested His message for the algorithm. He didn’t build a brand. He built a body. He wasn’t trying to be viral. He was teaching us to be faithful. And somehow, without merch or media kits, the gospel reached the ends of the earth.

If the modern Church wants to recover its credibility, it has to stop selling Jesus like a lifestyle upgrade and start following Him as Lord. Faith that’s packaged to impress eventually forgets what it’s supposed to express.

The truth doesn’t need better design. It needs better disciples.