Paid Advertising & Churches

1. An IFB church in the Twin Cities area upgraded their Christian School's athletic field last year (a really nice job, BTW). On the new scoreboard that was installed, there is a prominent, official "Pepsi" logo at the top- for which the local PepsiCo distributor paid the church a good fee.

2. Some churches have begun to accept paid advertising (e.g. for Dentists, Realtors, Car Dealers, etc.) in some of their publications- for example their monthly newsletters. Here's one example:

http://www.newlifechurch.org/whatshappening/newsletter/dec2004.pdf

Note the advertising disclaimer on the bottom of the second page.

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Questions:

What are some of the Pros or Cons of churches accepting money for (acceptable) product logos or for paid advertising?

What if, in the first example, PepsiCo was to announce that they are merging with Anheuser-Busch? Would the church in question still be comfortable having the "Pepsi" logo on their scoreboard?

Finally, how would you or your church feel about doing these sorts of things?

 

Debby wrote:

My church was in this situation 3 or 4 years ago. We had a major addition under construction, and were re-grading part of our lot to add additional parking. In the meantime, parking was in somewhat short supply. The PetSmart store across the road offered us the use of their lot for our overflow, and in our bulletins we simply had something like "Thank you PetSmart for allowing us to use your parking lot during our construction". I don't believe that the store requested such a byline; I think the church just put it in the bulletins as sincere thanks.