Part Three: Deserting its Missiological Call: When Mass-Marketing Method Drives Mega-Church Message

Deserting its Missiological Call: When Mass-Marketing Method Drives Mega-Church Message

Part Three: Business Principles vs. Biblical Principles

For parts one and two, see the posts directly following

Market-driven churches employ business strategies and incorporate them into a philosophy of ministry. Advocates of using business techniques have identified their advantage. Marketing enables churches to determine that which motivates consumers in order to produce a given response. If a church understands the interests of the surrounding community, it can tailor its ministry programs to attract those within the community into the church. By drawing these individuals into the church, marketing methods facilitate the flow of resources into the church. These resources include both people and funding. Marketing techniques promote cost efficiency, providing ministries with the education to make informed decisions regarding ministry effectiveness versus cost expenditure. This encourages ministries to prioritize the most important programs and discontinue those that are least effective. Therefore it also promotes a smooth organizational flow.[1]

George Barna explains church marketing:

Activities such as advertising, public relations, strategic planning, audience research, product distribution, fund-raising and product pricing, developing a vision statement, and customer service are all elements of marketing. When these elements are combined in a transaction in which the parties involved exchange items of equivalent worth, the marketing act has been consummated.[2]

By creating a vision, hiring those who share the vision and are willing to promote it, and following a set of guidelines to implement the vision, the product may be successfully marketed. The entire process is organized, structured, and linear, moving from one fixed point to another. In capitalizing on these techniques, the church progresses toward a goal using “the same wisdom and savvy that characterizes any for profit business.”[3]

Marketing techniques such as the advertising of events, visitor follow-up procedures, and providing sufficient parking spaces for congregants are crucial in church ministry. Without this structure, the church would lack organization, which in turn would impact the effectiveness of its ministries. When these procedures are seen as a means to a greater end, churches successfully implement organizational methods. The danger enters in when the church markets the Gospel by catering to the felt needs of consumers rather than directing them towards the Word of God to meet their real needs. When the Gospel is compromised to attract newcomers, the church has crossed the line. Gilley clarifies, “…it is one thing to market the church; it is another to market the Gospel.”[4]

Churches must remember that attractively advertising their ministry programs, providing fringe benefits to members, and offering a warm greeting at the door does not guarantee that individuals will have encountered the transforming power of Jesus Christ by the time that they exit the church building each week.[5] David Wells argues:

[The market-driven church is] replete with tricks, gadgets, gimmicks, and marketing ploys as it shamelessly adapts itself to our emptied-out, blinded, postmodern world. It is supporting a massive commercial enterprise of Christian products, it is filling the airways and stuffing postal boxes, and it is always begging for money to fuel one entrepreneurial scheme after another, but it is not morally resplendent. It is mostly empty of real moral vision, and without a recovery of that vision its faith will soon disintegrate.[6]

Perhaps the market-driven church has created too polished of a product to realize its desperate need for God, and it is at this point that the church has lost its moral vision. Self-reliance corrupts submission to the will of God. A church that asks God to bless its plans after those plans have already been established misses the point completely. The church must become utterly reliant upon God. When leaders of the church learn to rely on God, they light the spark that sets the congregation ablaze. God works powerfully in and through a body of believers whose minds are fixed on Christ and who are surrendered to His calling. Pastor and teacher Henry Blackaby writes, “When a church realizes it all depends on God, not them, and will together yield their lives fully to Him, God begins to work. It doesn’t depend on numbers, status, skills, or even resources. The future depends on God and on His people who will hear Him, believe Him, and obey Him.”[7]

The church led by the Holy Spirit is not guided by business philosophies inspired by marketing specialists; rather, it is guided by biblical principles of spiritual growth directed by the Holy Spirit. David Wells skillfully articulates the difference:

A business is in the market simply to sell its products; it doesn’t ask consumers to surrender themselves to the product. The church, on the other hand, does call for such a surrender. It is not merely marketing a product; it is declaring Christ’s sovereignty over all of life and declaring the necessity of obedient submission to him and to the truth of his Word. When the church is properly fulfilling the task it has been assigned, it is demanding far more than any business would ever think of asking prospective customers. Simply put, the church is in the business of truth, not profit. Its message—the message of God’s Word—enters the innermost place in a person’s life, the place of secrets and anguish, of hope and despair, of guilt and forgiveness, and it demands to be heard and obeyed in a way that not even the most brazen and unprincipled advertisers would think of emulating. Businesses offer goods and services to make life easier or more pleasant; the Bible points the way to Life itself, and the way will not always be easy or pleasant. At most, businesses are accountable only to stockholders and a variety of regulators; the church is accountable to God.[8]

Footnotes:
[1] Robert Stevens and others, Concise Encyclopedia of Church and Religious Organization Marketing (Binghamton: Hawort Reference Press, 2006), 12.
[2] Barna, Marketing the Church, 19, quoted in Gilley, This Little Church, 35.
[3] Barna, Marketing the Church, 26, quoted in David F. Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), 276.
[4] Gilley, This Little Church, 37.
[5] Ibid., 42.
[6] David F. Wells, Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), 180.
[7] Henry Blackaby, What the Spirit is Saying to the Churches (Sisters: Multnomah, 2003), 29.
[8] Wells, God in the Wasteland, 76.