Expanding Parable® Church Programs Reach Pastors and Congregations
Parable® Stores mark October with Pastor Celebration Events
San Luis Obispo, CA — For Parable® Christian retailers October means Clergy Appreciation Month and kicks off more church marketing opportunities than ever before.
Every fall, Parable offers its member and franchise stores a kit and strategy guide to host a community-wide event that honors local pastors. This year, 65 Parable® member and franchise stores are hosting the Fall Pastors Breakfast as part of October's Clergy Appreciation Month. Included in the event kit are several thousand dollars worth of product to give away to attending pastors, special pastor certificates for new product and a guest speaker DVD presentation played at the event to encourage attending pastors. This year's featured speaker is former pastor and current Walk Thru the Bible president, Chip Ingram. In the DVD presentation, the popular author shares about his struggles as a pastor and challenges pastors in the audience to spend more time with God.
Also, Parable will provide its stores with another kit and strategy guide for a pastors breakfast to be held this spring. Tyndale Publishing and Dr. Erwin Lutzer, author of The DaVinci Deception, have agreed to create the guest speaker DVD for the Parable® Spring 2006 Pastors Breakfast event. The event coincides with the May 19, 2006 release of the movie The DaVinci Code based on the novel with the same title. In addition, for the first time next year, Parable is offering its stores a Youth Pastor Event kit and strategy guide with an emphasis on helping stores connect with local youth pastors and their youth groups.
"Our Parable® pastor events are more popular than they’ve ever been," says Marilyn Largent, Parable's Vice President of Wholesale Marketing and Sales. "Because the history of our pastors breakfasts is so strong, we know that through cultivating relationships with church leadership, we build their trust in us and in our products."
Since 1999 Parable has offered programs to help its retailers connect to their area churches. Recently, Parable along with Zondervan, Thomas Nelson and DaySpring went one step further by hiring a well known branding consulting firm to study pastors and their needs from a Christian bookstore. The psychological study done by BrandTrust found church leaders are willing and eager for their congregations to read books that foster a closer relationship with the Lord, the church and each other. The BrandTrust findings also unveiled specific areas the Christian retail store needs to address to successfully partner with local churches.
"The findings from the BrandTrust Pastors Study were great confirmation that pastors want the local Christian bookstore to offer workshops, pastor events and other activities that help churches serve their congregations," says Steve Potratz, Parable® founder and CEO. "The need for pastors and congregations is great, and Parable's objective is clear: to build church relationships and to understand what the churches want from us."
The Parable® family of companies includes: The Parable Group, providing catalogs and comprehensive marketing services to independent, locally-branded Parable Members nationwide; Parable Franchising, offering a nationally-branded turnkey business plan for opening and operating new and existing Christian retail stores; and Parable Interactive, serving as a ministry partner hosting hundreds of web sites. Parable, America's Leading Christian Retailers®, is based in San Luis Obispo, CA.
