YOU BELONG HERE.
I’ve seen some version of that message across billboards, websites, social media, and signs welcoming people into parking lots. It is a nice enough sentiment. It’s also an incredibly intimate thing for an institution to say to a stranger.
I understand the math behind it. If 100,000 people encounter a message and it meaningfully resonates with even one percent, that’s 1,000 people. Some visit. Some stay. Some genuinely find belonging.
From an institutional perspective, that’s a win.
The problem with that math is that institutions are very good at measuring the people who respond and very bad at measuring everyone else. We hear from the person who saw the message at exactly the right moment. We don’t hear from the person who found it disingenuous, or the person already skeptical of the Church whose skepticism it reinforced.
They simply log one more example of a “moral” organization making a claim it could not possibly mean and keep driving. This is especially true for those who know beyond the shadow of a doubt that they do NOT belong there. Please sit in the reality of that person for a second. Good intention aside, it is one more lie the church has told them. But even if we know that to be true, it never hits our radar because that person is never showing up anyway.
If we do not feel the harm we cause, it’s easy to operate as if it isn’t real.
This matters more and more as we spend increasingly large portions of our lives being marketed to. We better understand personalization, algorithms, targeting, branding, and conversion. Younger generations in particular are getting very good at recognizing the difference between genuine intimacy and the language of intimacy being used to produce a response.
Organizations like Amazon get something of a pass here because we all understand the game. Amazon doesn’t know or care about me, they just want my money. I want something delivered to my house tomorrow. When Amazon tells me, “We thought you might like this,” I get what’s really being said and what is not.
But the game changes when your institution claims to exist for my good.
Churches certainly aren’t alone here. Hospitals, nonprofits, universities, charities, and countless other institutions make a higher moral claim. We aren’t merely selling something people might want. We say we care about the human beings we serve.
If that’s true, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard than simply asking whether our messaging is delivering desired outcomes.
It’s easy to care about people when their good and our interests point in the same direction. Churches want people to find community, and churches want people to join their communities. Nonprofits want people to receive help, and nonprofits need people to use their programs. Usually, everybody wins.
But Jesus points toward a higher ethic:
“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them.” Luke 6:32
For the Church at large, I hope our posture is that we want every person to experience meaning, purpose, belonging, inner wholeness & freedom lived out in community. Of course we hope our own organizations play a role in that.
But the sincerity of that desire is tested when what’s best for the person in front of us no longer benefits our institution. It’s one thing to say that we care about people finding belonging. It’s another to care enough about the person in front of us to help them even if they don’t belong with us. How we treat the outsider has always been a core tenet of Christianity.
That’s not a better marketing strategy. It’s a posture that has to exist long before we decide what goes on the sign.
I want you to find belonging, even if it’s not here.