Marketing the Church
Marketing Magic Over Covenant Relationships
We’ve created a rather large marketing machinery and management bureaucracy in order to keep people interested in the goods and services of American consumer faith, and this machinery must be continually expanded in order to maintain momentum.
In the typical attractional church model, more and more resources are poured into facilities, programs, and products that will appeal to faith consumers – and more and more shallow consumers are attracted. At a certain point in this growth curve the deep discipleship of people in the church becomes a logistical impossibility since greater amounts of resources are required to maintain the marketing machinery necessary to continue attracting.
This produces a dilemma: highly committed and skilled people are required to keep this machinery going – but shallow consumers, by definition, are not highly committed. Therefore the burden of maintaining this machinery falls to a few professionals and a minority of highly devoted volunteers who believe that all this effort is just a necessary aspect of preaching the gospel. Thereby a very deep divide is created in the church between those who are producers and those who are merely consumers.
Because this ecclesiology begins in the external realm (attendance at the main event), people adapt to the behavioral mandates of church culture before any significant spiritual formation has a chance to occur. This means that Godly character rarely penetrates deeply into the heart of the majority of the people because it actually doesn’t have to. As long as you maintain an absence of crisis, you’ll continue to enjoy the benefits of membership.
This creates a kind of church “purgatory,” where non-disciples maintain the delusion they are actually Christians while actual disciples are severely under-resourced for a deep life of faith. Those who really are committed tend to carry the major burden of maintaining the machinery, while simultaneously laboring under the debilitating effects of spiritual malnourishment.
In this way the market-driven, consumer-spectator model of attractional church actually destroys disciple-making. The best intentions of leadership make little difference; the model simply short-circuits itself.
The good news about Church attendance statistics is that while emerging generations are largely rejecting the Church, they still view Christ himself favorably – in fact, they view us unfavorably, precisely because “Christianity [...] no longer looks like Jesus” (Barna 2007: 52). Therefore, the hope of the Church lies in its ability to recover it resemblance to Jesus Christ; we must become eikons again, for our own sake, for the sake of the world, and most of all, for God’s sake.
For all these reasons I am convinced that the prevailing attractional, consumer-spectator model of Church is part of the problem, but at the very least the data strongly confirms that it is incapable of solving the problem. Fresh models must be explored that place the reliable formation of the human spirit back in its proper place as the purpose of our entire ecclesiology.
[...] This is how marketing works, and successful churches have mastered the approach. Abraham Maslow would be proud. But brands by nature (unlike the gospel) don’t require a commitment in our life practices. They just require that we buy them. This approach has been reproducible for churches because, as born and bred American consumers, we’re trained from an early age to wear our brands as an identity (I’ve already written about marketing and consumerism in the church here and here) [...]