David McElroy

When I was about 24, I got a contract to produce a marketing campaign for a large church in Tuscaloosa, Ala. I wasn’t really qualified for the work — especially the television and radio portions — but one of the deacons involved in the selection process was the father of a friend of mine. He asked if I was interested and then set up a meeting with the pastor. I somehow talked my way into the contract.

At the time, I was convinced that churches needed to be using clever and impressive modern advertising to grab the attention of people who didn’t normally attend church. That’s what every modern organization did, so it seemed to make sense to me. I wanted churches to dump their staid old images and be creative in their graphics and copywriting. That approach sold Coke, Tide, Rolaids, Pepto Bismol, Dial soap and Chevrolets. Surely we ought to be doing the same thing.

My advertising campaign was a failure. The TV commercials were generic and boring. (I still have them on old U-matic tapes somewhere.) The radio spots were adequate but forgettable. The flyers for posting on college campuses were actually pretty decent, but I’m not sure anything was ever done with them. And the half page ad in the newspaper was a disaster because the local newspaper flipped my sunrise picture — what a cliche — and the picture and the copy didn’t match.

At the time, I blamed the relative lack of success of the campaign on my inexperience and poor execution. But as I’ve observed church marketing over the years — and thought a lot about why churches do the things they do and what they’re supposed to become — I’ve completely changed what I believe. I’ve decided that all of my beliefs about church “marketing” were wrong.

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I don’t know why I remember this so clearly, because it wasn’t a big deal. It was an argument with a girlfriend in college. Why does it stand out this many years later? Probably because I knew I was wrong, but I was too prideful to admit it.

For most of my college years, I drove a red Volkswagen Squareback just like the one above. I can feel nostalgic about it now, but it seemed like nothing other than a 10-year-old underpowered economy car with no air conditioning at the time. (In an odd coincidence, a history professor I had at the University of Alabama who happened to be named Dr. David McElroy also drove an identical car.)

I happened to be dating a woman whose father had driven this car as a company car when it had been new 10 years before. Fairly early during our relationship, we were in that Volkswagen one day on some holiday when she asked me to turn my lights on, even though it was broad daylight.

She explained that her father had always told her it was a good idea to turn lights on for holidays, because more people were likely to be driving drunk or otherwise impaired. Anything you could do to aid visibility was a good idea, he had told her.

I refused.

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Packing a house where you’ve lived for more than 20 years is a bit like an archeological dig into your own life. It can stir up a lot of buried thoughts and feelings.

Looking at the past version of yourself can sometimes tell you something about the present.

I moved last week, so I’ve spent a lot of time lately going through drawers and boxes, trying to figure out what to save and what to throw away. Each layer of things from the past seemed to represent something different.

When it comes to paper, I’m a bit of a packrat. I keep my notes, records, random ideas, cards, letters and dozens of other types of things too difficult to categorize. And with each bit of paper or file or box, there’s a story that comes with it.

I dug up many relics of the days when I was in business for myself, back when I owned a couple of small publications and a typesetting company. There were also plenty of things related to my community newspaper days working for other companies in a series of small cities. There were detailed profit-and-loss statements from newspapers 25 years ago, along with lists of story ideas and design concepts for some of the newspapers. There were faded awards and paste-up sheets and even a pica stick. (Hardly anybody even knows what a pica stick is anymore.)

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