Emerging Spirit @ The United Church of Canada Emerging Spirit @ The United Church of Canada

It starts with a simple WonderCafe ad, and soon you're in a Manhattan corner office planning a martini lunch. You too can be an ad executive. One of the great (and overlooked) parts of the Emerging Spirit campaign is the local ad section. They are local ads, and so much more. 

To explain: the local ads are completely adaptable. Many of the local ads are meant to be customised by the local congregation for their own context. They offer rather innocent looking headlines such as "Bake Sale this Saturday," but they are your ticket to the fast-paced world of advertising. 

The light went on for me when I forwarded a copy of the Easter ad ("This Easter you don't have to hunt for a church") to our congregation's communication guru Brenda. She shot back with an email saying, "Are we allowed to dabble a little?" She rewrote the ad to say "Hunting for eggs at Easter? Fun. Hunting for a church? Not so much." Book that flight to Manhattan!

The truth is, Emerging Spirit was always meant to be a congregational-based program. The ads began, the workshops were (and continue to be) offered, and the creative people in congregations responded. When describing the local ad campaign, I have insisted in my workshops that the only limit here is our imagination. Is the ad you're considering not quite right? Write a new one. Have a great idea for a new ad? Make it yourself. Your headline goes here. 

Meantime, if the ad is truly brilliant, post it on emergingspirt.ca.  We're all in this together, and there is no point hogging all the good stuff.