Marketing the church

The Christian Science Monitor publishes an article on an apparent trend among churches to hire marketing consultants. Of particular interest are the concluding paragraphs:

"Go therefore ..."
Others, however, see marketing as a necessary part of Christ Jesus' great commission: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations" (Matt. 28:19, New Revised Standard Version).

"Marketing and the church, they go hand in hand [because] we're called to bring our message to a community," says Kristal Dove, operations manager at Church Marketing Solutions. But she says not all church leaders should be involved.

"We basically make it so ministers can focus on people and not have to worry about this stuff," Ms. Dove says.

But in the opinion of Mr. London of Focus on the Family, any church leader's success depends at least in part on bringing the best of corporate-marketing tactics to bear on a righteous cause.

"Nearly every pastor is a salesman or a marketer of one kind or another because ... we have a philosophy to sell," he says. "The best marketers and best salesmen will have more converts, will have more people, will take in more money.... Evangelicals are marketers because they're really passionate about their product."

(Emphasis Added)

I am curious what others think about these statements. Clearly, from a media and communication perspective, there is something eminently practical about these statements. However, there is also something unsettling at the same time.

Comments

[myles]

if one returns to augustine, or even the pre-augustinian world, there was mixed feeling on the matter. with the apologists, there were some (Justin) who appreciated the best methods that the world had to offer, seeing them as gracious provision of God. Others like Tertullian, saw no connection between "Athens and Jerusalem". Augustine's metaphor of melting down Egyptian gold, however, tends to hold my more radical tendencies in check by saying that there may yet be something good about the media's turning of the Gospel.

The temptation with that, however, is to use media as the whole package of the Gospel, as opposed to recognizing the limitations of media in its ability to "present the Gospel". I find it hard to say that any media form can embody the weight of a socially transformed/transforming body as the church.

[Steve Bush]

Because marketing and the presentation of the gospel are both forms of communication, definitely there will be many similarities. However, marketing techniques involve a specific conception of the human being: as an individualistic, self-interested, consumer with felt needs or the capacity to be stimulated and manipulated in such a way that felt needs are created. I see this conception of the human being as incompatible with the notion of a church as a community of God's people who are sent to mission of self-sacrifice for the sake of one another and for the sake of the world. So when churches adopt the model of human-being-as-bundle-of-felt-needs, I think inevitably distortion and perversion of the gospel will occur.

[Kevin Hector]

I wonder if Frei's "types" would be a helpful way of thinking about the relationship between proclamation and marketing. An adapted version would look something like this:

Type 1: Subsume proclamation to marketing concerns (proclamation is limited to whatever is marketable);
Type 2: Bring proclamation and marketing together under some common denominator--such as, for instance, a view of human nature or epistemology;
Type 3: Correlate proclamation and marketing--e.g., proclaim gospel in response to market-identified concerns;
Type 4: Use marketing strategies on an ad hoc basis for the sake of proclaiming the gospel, but in such a way that it is always clear who's in the driver's seat, so to speak;
Type 5: Reject any correlations between proclamation and marketing.

This is all off the top of my head, but it seems to me that, if we follow Frei here, we would want to endorse something like Type 4.

[Chris Dixon]

Some of the most scathing comments in the Old Testament are saved for prophets who tickle the ears of their audience. Much of market research driven advertising and communication does exactly this - it just feeds people what they are known to accept. It's a very safe approach. Good advertising is not dependant on market research alone but involves ideas and creativity - a clever ad will beat market research driven rubbish hands down. If church marketers use clever ideas and creativity to present the gospel then that's great, but if church marketing is just reduced to a style makeover [a few hip typefaces, drop shadows and some go-fast stripes] then it does nothing for the advance of the gospel. It just reduces the church to the level of Britney Spears or whoever the lastest 'manufactured pop sensation' is.

[Bryan Murley]

Thanks for the comments.

One of the quotes that particularly struck me was this one: "The best marketers and best salesmen will have more converts, will have more people, will take in more money."

For one thing, I was troubled by the casual inclusion of money into the mix of ways to count what is the "best" sales/marketing pastor.

But more directly, using the standards given, Jesus himself was an incredibly poor salesman/marketer! :-)

[sherman]

I am wondering if perhaps we - the Church - are called to be ADVERTISEMENTS rather than ADVERTISERS of the gospel of Christ.

[myles]

the question, then, is begged: can an advertisement be self-interpretive? can the church be interpreted by itself in its message, or does it require someone to interpret its message, a receptor? if the Gospel needs a receptor, then we must be an advertiser. if not, then the church can be an advertisement. the trick comes in the two translating accurately.

for example, if what i say about the Gospel is not what is enacted by the church, then there is a separation between advertiser and advertisement, and thus, two different Gospels being communicated. can there be a way of communicating the Gospel that does not betray what it is when enacted?

[Bryan Murley]

the question, then, is begged: can an advertisement be self-interpretive? can the church be interpreted by itself in its message, or does it require someone to interpret its message, a receptor?

Very good question, Myles. I hope to respond in more depth later this evening, but for now, the short answer is "no," an advertisement cannot be self-interpretive.

[sherman]

"The medium is the message."
-Marshall McLuhan-

[Bryan Murley]

Myles asked the question which I will return to:
the question, then, is begged: can an advertisement be self-interpretive? can the church be interpreted by itself in its message, or does it require someone to interpret its message, a receptor?

The past 30 years have been the heyday of "reader response" theories in literature and cultural studies, to name just two areas. I'm sure the same has cropped up in theology, but I'm less familiar with the currents in that field.

Two thinkers - Stanley Fish and Stuart Hall - point to an answer to the question you posed. Fish first proposed the concept of "interpretive communities," basically the idea that the interpretation of a "text" lies not in the author, or the text itself, but in the community of "readers." In other words, anyone who comes to a "text" interprets it through a set of learned schema that tint the interpretation. This is seen rather easily in asking two people from different denominational backgrounds (say, Catholic and Baptist to pick two of many) to interpret a particular Biblical passage. Fish's theory pretty much says that the "text" (in this case an advertisement) is *not* self-interpretive.

Hall, on the other hand, said that texts are interpreted along three lines: agreement/acceptance of the "preferred" interpretation; negotiated reading, where the reader attempts to "modify" the reading to fit his/her ideological paradigm; and oppositional readings, which reject the preferred reading altogether in favor of an alternative interpretation of the text. The model has been modified over time, but provides a basic proposition from which to view the question.

That's my long response to the question posed above.

In light of those points, I think I should expand more upon my misgivings of the "marketing" trend proposed in the article.

It certainly seems proper that a church should desire to put its best foot forward in a media environment. To do so requires a quality of materials that is sorely lacking in church media materials these days (surfed any church web sites lately?). In this sense, I think employing a staff person with some sort of "marketing savvy" is justifiable.

But the question then becomes: to what end? And here I am brought back to what might be an extension of the "types" modification proposed above. A church with a marketing plan might find itself in the position of marketing itself as something that it is not. The best way to explain this idea is with an illustration: do you have any idea how many churches have "exciting Sunday morning services" (or choirs, or groups of people)? What are the odds that all of these church services/choirs/ministry groups would really seem "exciting" to someone who is not a member? Are these churches being dishonest? I don't think so. But therein lies the rub with marketing the church. Who are you trying to market to and what are you trying to market to them?

I come back to the quote from the article: "Nearly every pastor is a salesman or a marketer of one kind or another because ... we have a philosophy to sell."

Well, not really. If I understand the faith even remotely correctly, we don't have a *philosophy* to sell, but a life-changing relationship that isn't "for sale." To use the tools and techniques perfected on used cars and laundry detergent as a means of "closing the deal" on a convert to Christianity seems to be at least unsettling.

So I would suggest that any church go through a marketing campaign very carefully, being sure that the message they communicate squares with the truth of their situation (which I think myles is saying as well). To do otherwise risks more damage to the cause than the short-term benefits might be worth.

The question is, do church marketers really do this? Or do they tailor their church's message to the "felt needs" or demographic makeup of their community? Which is really what "marketing" is all about.

[myles]

i think you've seen the same shift in theology over the last 50 years ago, not so much in the felt-needs category strictly, but in the parallel shift away from the neo-orthodoxy towards more communally interpretive theological movements (liberation theologies, post-liberal theology, etc.).

to place communicating the truth of the communal church life at the forefront of this question is interesting: it presupposes that the core of what is at stake in communicating the Gospel is the church, and not things about the church, or the Gospel, or Christ. the quandry is this: church, or at least the people therein, are in some sense communicatable--they can be pointed to and shown, whereas under the model of the quoted material, what is trying to be shown cannot be shown. You can't show a philosophy; you can only incarnate it or show it by way of analogy. Steve?

so, with the shift towards putting the church front and center in considering the message, the shift has gone from the unseen to the seen, in some sense. while i think this model is more correct, it troubles me as i write this to say that this could be all there is, that what we are pointing to is a verifiable result alone. when i see the church, i assume a few things: that it is under the leadership by the Spirit, a worshipping body, et al--but these are intangible qualities, things that, to follow our argument, are non-communicable. to those seeing the advertised church, they are invisible, and thus not part of the interpretation of the message. it seems that, even if we say that the church is the message, that we still run into the problem of self-interpretation, with the church recognizing, as it were, interpretive factors that the observer does not.

[Ochuk]

Ha! I just posted about this at my blog too!

Here is what publisher and marketing genuise Greg Stielstra has to say:

Marketing is NOT coercion. It is NOT preying on the weak. It is NOT tricking an unsuspecting public into buying something it neither wants or needs. There are people who try this, but they are destined to fail.

I believe the very best marketing involves finding people with needs and meeting those needs with your product or service. The more profound the person’s need, the better. The more profoundly you meet their need, the more satisfied they will be. The more satisfied they are, the more people they will tell. The more people they tell, the more of your product or service you will sell. By my definition, then, marketing is nearly indistinguishable from ministry.

[Keith Johnson]

There is movie with Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito called The Big Kahuna that deals with the issue of marketing and Christianity. The movie takes place mostly in one room with only three characters, all of whom are industrial lubricant salesmen at an important convention. One of the salesman is a Christian, and throughout the movie, he keeps trying to "sell" his beliefs in various ways to the other two. Devito's character eventually responds:

"The question that you have to ask yourself is, 'Has it touched the whole of my life?' That means that you preaching Jesus is no different than Larry or somebody else preaching lubricants. It doesn't matter if you're selling Jesus, or Budda, or civil rights, or how to make money in real estate with no money down. That doesn't make you a human being--it makes you a marketing rep.

If you want to talk to somebody honestly, as a human being, ask him about his kids. Ask him what his dreams are--just to find out, for no other reason. Because as soon as you lay your hands on a conversation--to steer it--it's not a conversation anymore. It's a pitch. And you're not a human being. You're a marketing rep."

The point he's raising is that Jesus didn't come as God's marketing rep with a pitch about how he could meet peoples deepest needs. He came as a human being with skin, bone, muscles, heart, teeth, tears, pain, and love and met people as that human being. The movie is trying to say, "Come meet me as a human being, and we can have a conversation. But if you meet me as a marketing rep and look at me simply as the next target of your pitch, then you're just another salesman in a world full of salesmen, and I'm not going to waste my time.

It's an interesting movie, if ever get a chance to rent it.

[Steve Bush]

ochuk, the quote you post from stielstra reveals precisely the philosophical anthropology that I referred to in my comment above. The human being is approached principally as a possessor of needs that need to be fulfilled. The church then, becomes that "vendor of religious goods and services" that strives to meet those needs.

A different philosophical/theological anthropology views humans as agents with the capacity to serve and commune, and whose relentless pursuit of their felt needs in a consumeristic society hinders their ability to serve, give, and love.

This is why I'm uncomfortable with speaking of ecclesial communication as "advertisement" and with the adoption by churches of the logic of marketing along with the philosophical anthropology built into that logic.

[Phil]

As a historian, I'm less inclined to offer a theological critique of this idea/topic than to try to understand the marketing of religion in a historical perspective. A recent book by Andrew Chesnut (a professor of mine at the U. of Houston), _Competitive Spirits: Latin America's New Religious Economy_ (Oxford, 2003), applies the theory of religious economy to the situation in Latin America. Using this model one can examine churches as firms who produce (spiritul) goods and services for customers. Rodney Stark, of course, and Roger Finke have examined this with respect to the history of religion in America (_The Churching of America_), but as a historian religious economy strikes me as an effective tool (and interdisciplinary) when trying to understand America's (not to mention the global) religious marketplace.

I'm writing a paper this fall that will apply religious economy to Lakewood Church in Houston. More to come on this if there's the interest (please excuse the pun).

Below I've posted part of a review of _Competitive Spirits_ I wrote for Fides et Historia.
+++++++
R. Andrew Chesnut’s Competitive Spirits applies the theory of religious economy to Latin America’s contemporary religious landscape in order to “comprehend the dynamics of religious competition and the nature of spiritual production” (4). Religious economy treats faith systems as firms, believers as consumers, religious services as productions, and rituals as products. Chesnut’s innovative picture of religion in Latin America builds mainly on the foundational work of sociologists of religion Peter Berger, who first articulated religious economy in his authoritative The Sacred Canopy (1969), and later featured by Rodney Stark (with Roger Finke), whose The Churching of America (1992) applied religious economy to America’s religious history.

According to Chesnut, the three competitive spirits of Latin America’s religious economy are charismatic Catholicism, Protestant Pentecostalism, and the various strains of the African diasporan religions, namely Santería, Candomblé, and Umbanda. These three religious firms share a Spirit-centered focus, what Chesnut calls pneumacentrism, faith healing, and important devotional elements that meet the tastes and preferences of potential members, otherwise known as religious consumers. In order to stay competitive, Chesnut carefully details, these religious firms must possess a kind of marketing savvy and employ creative sales representatives (ministers).

Pentecostals, for example, offer physical and spiritual healing, conversion, exorcism, and ecstatic powers marketed by pastoral home visits, radio, television, and testimonials and proffered by sales representatives who come from the same socio-economic situations as consumers. Thus, in Chesnut’s estimation, competition and conversion – or competition for conversion – is as much about the work of the Spirit as it is about networking and marketing.

Similarly, charismatic Catholics offer the products of healing, conversion, and pneumacentric experiences but essentially adopt Pentecostalism’s methods to stay competitive. Chesnut calls this appropriation the “Pentecostalization” of Catholicism. According to Chesnut, the Pentecostalization of Catholicism began in the 1970s and 1980s with charismatic impulses within various quarters of U. S. Catholicism and eventually migrated south. Thus, to compete with the Pentecostals, Roman Catholic religious firms in places like Brazil, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala simultaneously critiqued and adopted the savviest features of Pentecostal firms.

The African Diaspora religions – Candomblé, Umbanda, and Santería – offer spirit possession and healing in addition to an amoral cosmos where religious consumers may harm or “curse” those whom they choose. According to religious economy, the diasporan religions are even more versatile, and perhaps more prosperous, than charismatic Catholicism or Protestant Pentecostalism because they do not possess the dualistic universe that is a fundamental part of Christian epistemology. In other words, the diasporan spiritual universe is amoral and consumers can request both ill and harm for their “enemies” without the threat of future recourse by a/the deity.

[Bryan Murley]

Chesnut’s innovative picture of religion in Latin America builds mainly on the foundational work of sociologists of religion Peter Berger, who first articulated religious economy in his authoritative The Sacred Canopy (1969), and later featured by Rodney Stark (with Roger Finke), whose The Churching of America (1992) applied religious economy to America’s religious history.

Gack! Now I'm going to have to go back and re-read the Sacred Canopy. I don't remember reading about "religious economy" the first time through last month. :-)

[Ochuk]

Steve, I agree with you about the "felt needs" approach to humankind. It does indeed ride upon that. However, I think that humanity has a "need"--and diagnosing it properly is the RIGHT thing to do. Moreover, giving the RIGHT solution to righly diagnosed problem is also the RIGHT thing to do.

Am I being to absolutist? :)

[Phil]

Bryan,

I might not have been as clear as I needed to be in the review....Berger addresses "pluralistic" situations in ch. 6 of _Sacred Canopy_ and in this context talks about marketing and competition among churches and religious groups.