In the three years our church has experimented with marketing, we've discovered we can translate basic marketing theory into our church situation. Some information we've gleaned from business marketing principles, but most comes out of trial and error. Here are seven homegrown maxims for marketing your church:

Lower your expectations. As pastor, I had to get over looking for huge crowds after we placed an ad. Although we do expect our marketing efforts to produce something, we've revised our measure of success.

Raise your budget. While our church has yet to allocate 10 percent of our budget to marketing expenses, we're headed in that direction. We take advantage of all the inexpensive marketing opportunities we can, but even the least expensive projects take money. We're moving our church consciousness toward viewing marketing expenses as an integral part of our evangelistic ministry.

Schedule your efforts. We've developed a general marketing calendar, concentrating our efforts at peak ...