JPCC

Marketing and branding practices are well-established among contemporary megachurches (Ellingson 2013; Mautner 2010). Defined as Protestant religious organizations of 2,000 or more people (Thumma and Travis 2007), megachurches often experience rapid growth and expansion, and are labelled a secularized form of religion (Ostwaldt 2003) because of their business-like approach. Proselytizing the Gospel occurs alongside the selling of merchandise such as music, self-help books, television ministries, self-improvement events and hosting of annual conferences that attract global attendees. In a U.S. context where both marketing originated (Bartels 1962) and megachurches flourished, church marketing is big business (Mautner 2010). Religious organizations are exhorted to compete in a ‘spiritual marketplace’ (Miller 2002; Roof 1999) and develop their ‘faith brand’ (Einstein 2008), differentiating themselves from other churches and offering products and services that can be packaged and marketed like any other consumer good. This trend towards the marketization of religion reflects broader social trends in many Western countries where previously non-commercial sectors, such as education, healthcare and not-for-profit welfare, are reframed around the model of the market.

However, outside Western and North American contexts, the branding of megachurches is potentially more complex and fraught, particularly in countries where Christianity is not the dominant religion. In this chapter, we present a case study of a young megachurch brand Jakarta Praise Community Church—operating in the world’s largest Muslim majority country, Indonesia, where there are longstanding tensions between religious and racial groups but also the largest emerging middle class in Southeast Asia. We show how this church is able to construct a brand in this context, through a process of story-telling that blends elements of globalization, marketing and transnational affiliations, attractive to an upwardly mobile middle class. We focus in particular on how it responds to the potential conflicts and inconsistencies characterizing its environment. While the normative ideal of a brand is that it should appear stable and cohesive, they are inherently paradoxical and generated at the nexus of contradictions (Christensen, Morsing and Cheney 2008). Heilbrunn (2006) explains this idea with reference to differentiation, an element central to brand identity. A brand needs to communicate it is somehow new, different and better than what is currently available. Yet it cannot be totally new or it would be too strange, perhaps unintelligible. A brand therefore has to make a claim of novelty in relation to what currently exists and using familiar resources. Brands thus embody tensions between difference and similarity, novelty and familiarity that only make sense in relation to particular contexts. In this case, JPCC constructs its own purpose and meaning through its brand story in relation to a politically volatile, economically growing and socio-culturally complicated context that is both predominantly non-Western and non-Christian. Through an affiliative strategy that mirrors and reinterprets the Hillsong Australia church model, it is able to differentiate itself from other well-established traditional and denominational Christian churches, and navigate the complex Indonesian religious, political and social context by constructing a version of church that appeals to an aspirational, consumer-oriented and modern Indonesian churchgoer.