Building Loyalty to God

It seems strange to hear about building loyalty to God, doesn’t it?  Loyalty seems like such a secular word, not a word that inspires faith.  And yet, what is loyalty?  It is faithfulness, devotion, allegiance, fidelity, trustworthiness, steadfastness.  Loyalty, while used more secularly, does speak to what we want for ourselves and others; deep and abiding commitment to God.
 
Why do I bring this up?  Because the entire point of the book Marketing God is to use marketing techniques to assist parishes and ministries help people become loyal to God.
In my career in marketing, my primary focus was to inspire loyalty for the product or service I supported.   Why?  Because when someone uses a product (or service) and learns to trust it, they become loyal to it.  The advantage of that is that they no longer have to think about the decision, they know automatically what they trust and what they will use.  What would happen to society, to our world, if that concept was applied to God?  Can you imagine a world where no matter what happened, everyone’s first thought was always let me check with God, let me ask God?
 
I was at daily Mass when the idea of writing a book called Marketing God came to me.  I must say, I panicked.  There was no way that I, a Heckler (truly that is my last name), was going to write a book entitled Marketing God, that felt wrong to me on every level!  So, I prayed about it and during the rosary, the thought that came to me was “If you can help people be loyal to batteries, can’t you help them be loyal to me?”
 
How could I say no to that?  That phrase meant a lot to me, for you see, I spent a chunk of my career marketing Energizer batteries, and we were highly focused on driving loyalty.  The answer to the question posed of me in prayer was a definite yes.  Yes, I can take what I know and help people become loyal to God.  That is the entire point of the book Marketing God. 
 
Today the podcast for Marketing God launches and the point of the podcast is to offer insights and tools that can help parishes and ministries reach more people and help those people become loyal to God.  This first week of podcasts are all about foundational concepts, and we begin with the end in mind.  The week’s category is called Getting Started with Foundational Concepts. For those following along in the book, we start the podcast with Truth 40: It Is All About Creating Loyalty.  We also address other core concepts such as evangelization and marketing (Truth 28), the idea that marketing and branding feel like bad words (Truth 2), the criticality of focusing on mission (Truth 16) and the importance of being your best (Truth 20).
 
All the podcasts for this week dropped overnight.  So, you can listen to one a day or all at one time, whatever works best for you. In the description of each podcast is a link to a worksheet that you can use to help you consider and reflect on the topic for your parish or ministry.  You can find the podcasts on any of your favorite podcast apps or at media.donnaaheckler.com.  We hope these tools help you, your parish and ministry inspire those you support to become loyal to God!