Summary: Your church’s personality, how it would sound and act if it were a person, can either invite people closer or push them away. This post offers a 5-step audit to help you assess whether your intended personality truly connects with your audience and aligns with your mission.
What is Brand Personality?
Every brand, whether a church, business, or personal brand, has a personality. It’s the set of traits that define how your church comes across. Think of it as the tone, style, and character people associate with you. It’s important to note that you can set the personality you intend, but your community ultimately decides if it’s believable.
The real question is, does your church’s personality connect with the people you’re trying to reach or is it sending the wrong signals? Marketing scholar Kevin Keller points out that a strong personality must be relevant, honest, unique, and aligned with positioning. If there’s a gap between what you say and what people actually experience, credibility suffers (Keller, 1993).
Here’s how you can apply this filter to check your church’s personality:
- Relevance: Does our personality connect with the people we want to reach?
- Honesty: Is our personality believable and backed by our actions?
- Uniqueness: Does our personality stand out, or can any church say the same?
- Positioning: Does our personality align with our mission and calling?
Missing the mark in any of these areas compromises your church’s credibility and impact.
Case Study: When Signals Don’t Match
Imagine a church that positions itself as “welcoming and community-driven.” The website highlights hospitality, the signage uses phrases like “You belong here,” and leaders often speak about openness and connection.
But on Sunday morning, first-time visitors find no greeters at the doors, confusing signage inside, and little follow-up afterward. The gap between the declared personality and the lived experience leaves guests feeling disconnected and disappointed.
This is the cost of mixed signals. A church can say all the right words, but if the culture and systems don’t back it up, people believe what they experience—not what you claim.
A 5-Step Audit to Check If Your Church’s Personality Is Sending the Right Signals
- Ask people directly.
Ask members or visitors: “If our church was a person, what three words would describe us?” This reveals how people currently perceive you. - Compare it to your intent.
Write down the traits you want your church to embody (your intended personality). Does what people say match what you desire? Or is there a gap between your vision and their perception? - Audit your touchpoints.
Review every place people encounter your church, including your website, social media, signage, and in-person experience. Do they all reflect your intended personality, or do they feel outdated and inconsistent? - Check for honesty.
Don’t claim to be “welcoming and modern” if your systems are clunky and your culture isn’t healthy. People notice when words and reality don’t match. - Refine for uniqueness.
What makes you different from the church down the street? Identify what sets you apart and lead with what’s distinct about your call.
A consistent brand personality expressed through messaging, culture, and experience builds a reputation that attracts and keeps people.
Why Brand Personality Matters
When your intended personality shows up consistently and aligns with actual experience, it builds trust and emotional attachment. Research shows that these traits play a central role in creating credibility and loyalty over time (Keller, 1993).
Barna Group studies confirm the same pattern in churches: people are far more likely to attend, return, and stay engaged when a church’s message and identity line up with the reality they encounter in its community life and culture (Barna Group, 2022). On the flip side, when personality and experience are out of sync, people lose trust—and they don’t stick around long enough to grow.
Bottom Line
Your church is always communicating something through words, actions, and experiences. The question is whether those messages are helping or hindering your mission. When your church’s personality is relevant, honest, unique, and positioned well, you’ll attract the right people and build lasting trust.
So, here’s my challenge. Set aside 30 minutes this week to run through this audit. Be honest about whether your church’s personality is sending the wrong signals and take the first step to fix it. That’s how you move from being just another church people notice to being a community they believe in.
