What You Can't Copy From Another Church

You’re scrolling on a Sunday night, and a church you follow drops a new series that stops you cold. The art is clean, the concept is sharp, and you can tell from the comments it’s landing with people. Before you’ve finished looking, you’re already picturing it at your church, the same look, the same structure, dropped into whatever you launch next. That instinct is mostly a good one. Reusing what works is how creative people have always worked.

Is it wrong to borrow ideas from another church?

Every artist you admire built on someone who came before them. You take what another person made, turn it, reshape it, and end up with something that carries your fingerprints instead of theirs. A font is a font, whether you set your headlines in it or the church across town does. A layout, a color idea, a smart way to structure a launch, these are shared tools, and they belong to all of us. Copying craft was never the problem.

So if borrowing is normal and good, it helps to be honest about the moment it turns into something else.

What makes another church’s work feel worth copying?

Sometimes the thing you’re reaching for isn’t the design at all. It’s the church. Their series art teaser worked because it was the honest expression of something real happening among those specific people, and you felt the pull of that and wanted it for yourself. You can copy the graphics. You can’t copy relevance because that gets earned in one place, with one unique community, over time.

A few years ago, when I was the communications director at a church in Atlanta, a church down the road started copying almost everything we made, and it taught me more about identity than being copied ever should. They took our logo and set it in a square instead of a circle. Their name was even close to ours. Our sermon series art, our website, our social posts, all of it showed up on their feed a few weeks later. I took it as a compliment and didn’t mind it for myself or my team. What I noticed over time was that it wasn’t helping them reach the people they were placed there to reach. They were handing their community a slightly altered version of us instead of the thing only they could have made that would have tied directly back to who they were as a church.

Are you called to create or just to copy?

Here’s the part that costs you the most, and it has nothing to do with your church’s reputation. God made you a creative on purpose.

When you reach for another church’s finished work, you skip that whole process. You stop growing, and you cut yourself out of the thing you were made to be part of.

I’ve felt that pull plenty of times. It’s easier to want what another church is doing than to sit with what God is asking me to make right where I am. But every time I’ve copied instead of created, the work has come out hollow, and I’ve come out smaller on my creative journey.

How do you know when admiration turns into envy?

Underneath the pull to copy is usually envy, and envy is repressed enough that most of us won’t call it what it is. It grows out of tying your personal identity to what you make. When something you create succeeds, it feels good, and you start wanting that feeling more than you want to do the real work. Sometimes the pressure comes from a pastor who genuinely wants the church to grow and points to what’s working somewhere else. Either way, the same thing is happening. You’ve begun measuring your church against another one by numbers someone else defined.

Paul gives the church a picture of this in 1 Corinthians 12. He writes that if the foot says, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body (1 Corinthians 12:15 ESV).

That picture stays with me every time I catch myself sizing my church up against another. He’s describing people inside one church, but the same truth holds one level up. Your church is a part of the larger body, and it’s meant to be a hand where another church is a foot. We aren’t called to be the same as the church down the road. We’re called to be the church together, each one carrying their own flavor of the Great Commission into the specific corner to which it was given. Envy is the signal that you’ve stopped seeing that church as a partner and started seeing it as a threat to compete with and conquer.

What should you ask before copying another church?

When the pull hits, or when a pastor asks you to copy something outright, slow it down and sit with it before you open the design file. Three questions move the conversation from the look of the thing to the heart of it.

What is it, from the outside, that actually makes this worth wanting? Name the real thing, not the surface.

What was that church’s leadership living and leading through when they built it? Their work came downstream of their calling, and yours has to come downstream of yours.

What can we learn here, adapt, and grow into something that belongs to our people? That last word matters. Our people, not theirs.

Answer those honestly and you usually find you don’t want their campaign. You want the clarity and conviction underneath it, and that’s a thing you have to build, not borrow.

The church down the road isn’t running the same race you are. You’re both under one commission, reaching the same city, each built to reach people the other never will. So make something that could only have come from your church, in your place, with the people God actually put in front of you.