“How am I going to make my message resonate this week?” It’s a question church leaders often grapple with when preparing a sermon or speech. Tips for solving this problem are presented in the book, “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.” While “Made to Stick” is not touted as a “Christian” book, the marketing ideas shared by co-authors Chip and Dan Heath are relevant for today’s churches. The book’s premise is that presenting ideas in specific ways can make them easy to understand and remember. Implementing this concept can help churches stand out in their communities, and pastors make more of an impact on their congregants.

Chip Heath, a graduate business school professor at Stanford (and a Church Solutions Conference & Expo keynote speaker), and his brother, Dan, a consultant at Duke Corporate Education, propose that sticky ideas can be placed into six categories: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotional and Stories (SUCCES). The authors clearly define each of the six characteristics, providing entertaining anecdotes of urban legends and famous advertising campaigns to make the traits easy to remember and apply. John F. Kennedy’s famous “Man on the Moon” speech is given as an example of “unexpectedness,” and theWendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” campaign is used in the chapter on credibility.

Although there is only one church example in the book (Saddleback Church’s creation of “Saddleback Sam,” the typical unchurched person living in the area), churches will find the book’s overall advice applicable for their messaging. The book promotes using stories rather than statistics, a technique that many church leaders already employ. The authors also encourage using simple, smart statements to get your message across, and they particularly eschew the use of abstract mission statements. The book also praises proverbs as the original sticky messages that have been passed down through generations. While the proverbs used in the book are folksy instead of biblical, the premise remains the same.