Paul never built a crowd.

Part 5 ended with the team — the people Paul picked, developed, sent back, and recognized by name. That’s the inner ring of a connected-community. Now let’s look at the whole connected-community: the people they served. Rooms full of strangers, city after city, becoming brothers and sisters — who kept the church growing and going long after Paul left.

Here is the truth about the lie the world and advertising agencies want you to believe. Mass marketing does not work. It hasn’t for a long time. Be honest about why we keep trying it anyway: a big crowd looks like a nice big result.

The father of modern marketing, Philip Kotler, describes it as a ladder. Marketing 1.0 was product-centric — the mass market, one message for everybody. Marketing 2.0 turned to the customer — demographics, segments, specific things marketed to specific people. Marketing 3.0 went deeper, to psychographics, where segmenting now looked more like value alignment. And then Marketing 4.0, connected-communities — people who believe and who advocate. From Henry Ford to today, that’s a pretty fair marketing timeline of the last hundred years. It’s also a fair comparison of what Paul was doing in the first century. He never built a crowd. He built communities, and then connected them.

27 — Crowds turn. People stay.

Paul drew crowds. I’m aware.

In Lystra the crowds decided he was a god and tried to sacrifice an ox to him. Same chapter, same crowd, a few verses later: having persuaded the crowds, they stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city. In Ephesus a crowd shouted for two hours, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! Paul’s friends wouldn’t let him near it. And Athens — Part 2 told that one: the biggest stage he ever had, some mocked, and two names believed. Remember Dionysius and Damaris?

I see a pattern. Crowds are loud. They can turn on you. The two names are the story. Part 2 called this synagogue-first — go where shared context already exists, permission over interruption. Part 3 called it one city at a time. This same pattern spans his whole life: Paul preached to anyone who would listen, and then he stopped counting the crowd and started counting the people.

Reach is not relationship.

A campaign that reaches hundreds of thousands of people and a connected-community of a dozen or a hundred are not the same thing in different sizes. They’re fundamentally different things. Most brands spend everything on the crowd and very little on those already at the table. Paul did the reverse. The question for you isn’t how many people you reached this month. It’s how many know you. Or, more pointedly, how many you know and could name.

28 — Values, not demographics.

Ask most marketers to describe their people — their target market/audience — and you’ll get an ideal customer persona or avatar, showcasing all the demographics: age, income, zip code, industry. Objective facts. Useless? Maybe not. Interesting? Maybe at best. Meaningful? I’m not so sure. Not one of them tells you why anyone does what they do.

Paul’s connected-communities broke every demographic there was. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. All the objective facts are overridden by a common, unshakeable belief. A slave owner, Philemon, and the runaway slave he’d lost, Onesimus, got the same letter — and Paul told Philemon to receive Onesimus back no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother.

Imagine that story set in the Civil War. It would be an epic tale. This was the Roman Empire! Why do we miss how radical what Paul said and did really was? What tied these men together wasn’t a profile — owner and property, on paper. It was something shared — if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Paul’s word for what that made them was brothers. Family. Not a metaphor he reached for once. It was his operating language. He wrote to brothers in every letter. He described his own work in Thessalonica as like a nursing mother taking care of her own children and like a father with his children. The deepest form of connected-community there is has a name, and the name is family.

The marketing word for these subjective and intangible identifiers — connectors — beyond race and gender, beyond the demographics … is psychographics: what people value, believe, fear, feel, and want. And maybe most importantly, why. More than the objective data that identifies a person, marketing succeeds when we understand the subjective makeup of who we are and why we do what we do. Marketing is finding the people like us — or, as Seth Godin puts it, “people like us do things like this.” Not the people who look like our best customer on a spreadsheet or in the mirror. The people who share the core driving thing.

You can’t demographic your way to that. The people who belong to your connected-community belong because of a value they’d defend, a problem they’ve all lived, a belief about how the work should be done. Find that. Name it. Build around it. The demographics take care of themselves — and they’ll surprise you.

29 — Generosity, hospitality, the table.

Notice the order.

First, generosity. The Macedonian churches — Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea — were poor, and they were the most generous people Paul ever knew: their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity. Nobody asked them. They were begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in relief for strangers in Jerusalem they would never meet. Philippi sent Paul help once and again when nobody else did.

Why did they give? Not because a campaign told them to. It was simply who they had become. They’d been given everything, so giving was what they did — a practical way to love each other, a way to take part in the work, a thing that gave glory to God. That’s a value, demonstrated. Something every brand with a buy-one-give-one program has backwards. Values you assert are marketing copy. Values your connected-community lives out are proof.

Generosity isn’t the strategy. It’s the fruit.

Second, hospitality. Paul puts the two in one breath: Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. Generosity that opens a hand becomes hospitality that opens a door. Lydia’s first move after believing was come to my house and stay. Gaius was host to me and to the whole church. Paul wrote to Philemon, prepare a guest room for me. Every city, somebody’s home.

Third, the table. Antioch is where the followers of the Way first got their name — in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians — and it’s where the message first lived at a mixed table. Jews and Greeks eating together, which in that world was not a small thing. It was actually a huge thing. When Peter drew back and separated himself from the Gentile table because the wrong people were watching, Paul opposed him to his face. In public. Over a meal. Corinth got corrected, hard, because when you come together the meal had turned into a status contest. The message was taught in the synagogue and argued in the agora — the rooms from Part 3 — but it became a lived reality at a table.

Generosity, then hospitality, then the table. A value you live, a door you open, a place people gather. That’s how a connected-community gets built. There’s no honest shortcut through the steps. If you only ever address people, you have followers. When they gather around what you’ve made — and eat, and talk, and see each other’s faces — you have a connected-community. It’s easy to see how this applies to your personal life. But it should apply just as easily to your marketing strategy. Model what you want to see lived out by your customers. To influence the community, inspire it!

Then, the thing mass marketing cannot do. Paul was in Thessalonica a few weeks before he was run out of town. He wrote back to the church and told them what he’d been hearing on the road: the word of the Lord sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaia — everywhere — so that we need not say anything. Read that as a marketer. The founder left. The message kept traveling. Everywhere. The connected-community had become the channel. Not because he asked them to share. But because people talked about — more than that, they lived out — the things they value and love.

That’s customer-ing. A crowd needs you in the building. A connected-community carries the message when you’re gone.

Run it this week.

• Count the people, not the crowd — write down how many of the people you reached this month you could name. Meaning, you know them beyond the objective facts. If you wrote them a birthday card, it would not just say “Happy Birthday,” but would be personalized with something like, “I can’t believe little Timmy is off to college!” How many do you know like that? That number is your connected-community. Start there.
• Name the connector(s) — one sentence for what your people share that no demographic captures. If you can’t write it, ask three people in your community — it won’t take hundreds. It’s amazing how obvious it is once you hear it.
• Find the table — name the one place your people actually gather because of you: a room, a call, a group, a counter, a meet-up. If there isn’t one, that’s the project.

Next — Part 7, what’s left: what Paul did when the opposition came, why his name means small, and the goal that was never the conversion.

Questions, answered.

Isn’t a big crowd better than a small community?

Only if your goal is to be heard once. A crowd faces you; a connected-community faces each other. Followers wait for the next thing you send. A connected-community gathers, gives, and talks about what you’ve made when you’re not in the room — which is the best marketing money can’t buy.

How do I find what my people value?

Ask, and listen to the words they use. Read your reviews and testimonials word for word. Sit at the table — the counter, the call, the group — and pay attention to what they defend, what they complain about, and what they thank you for. The value is usually in the thank-you.