What has the church ever done for me? A critique of "consumer mentality" in the Church.
It is more than 25 years since evangelist David Watson, in his book Discipleship, highlighted with devastating accuracy the truth about too many Christians in Europe and North America: 'Christians in the West have largely neglected what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. The vast majority of western Christians are church-members, pew-fillers, hymn-singers, sermon-tasters, Bible-readers, even born-again believers or Spirit-filled charismatics, but not true disciples of Jesus. If we were willing to learn the meaning of true discipleship and actually to become disciples, the church in the West would be transformed, and the resultant impact on society would be staggering. This is not an idle claim. It happened in the first century.'
The criticism was aimed at the apathy he saw around him in British congregations, an apathy that is as old as humankind and that will remain a challenge as long as the church exists here on earth. But sometimes human frailty is exacerbated by prevailing trends or questionable philosophies. What makes Watson's words more relevant than ever is that in the ensuing quarter of a century we have embraced an approach to evangelism that has further complicated and confused the entire area of Christian commitment and dedicated discipleship. I refer, of course, to the marketing mentality that has driven so much of our thinking on how to reach those outside our doors.
Customer Not Always Right
It would be foolish to dispute that the application of marketing strategies and tools to the work of the local church has brought with it some real gains. It cannot be wrong to identify the felt needs of our communities and to determine which of those needs our resources will allow us to reach in the name of Christ. That is no more than highlighting what simple Christian compassion and everyday common sense should teach us. Equally, seeker-sensitive services that aim to be understandable and accessible to our not-yet-Christian neighbours are far more desirable than acts of worship and witness that take place without any reference to the thought-forms and mores of the prevailing culture. Obscurity and embarrassment do not commend the gospel!
But that's not the complete picture. Marketing methods can be useful tools for any church; unquestionably they have helped many congregations to develop a clearer sense of vision, an improved stewardship of resources, a much more strategic approach to ministry, and a more effective and persuasive communication with the world outside the walls of the church building. The problem arises, however, when the use of such methods leads us uncritically to embrace a marketing mentality. That leads us into a plethora of questionable assumptions that have serious implications for our theology and missiology.
When marketing values dominate church thinking, a subtle but significant change takes place. We forget the one whom we are called to serve, the one who should be setting our agenda. Jesus himself was always aware of people's felt needs, he was accessible to crowds and individuals, and he spoke in language and taught in stories they could understand. All of that would please a marketing consultant! Yet his agenda was formed not by the wants and needs of those around him, but by the will of the Father who sent him. It must be no different for his followers today.
The customer is not always right in this business. Too much emphasis on a doctrine of personal fulfilment will cause us to neglect the reality of human fallen-ness. The gospel is more a medicine for the sick (who often do not realize their true condition) than a marketed product for the wealthy. Marketing brings about a transaction in which both parties are equal, but the gospel is all about grace for those who can offer nothing in return. God provides for us what we didn't know we needed and what we don't deserve. As needy sinners we do not purchase a product for self-improvement; rather, we gratefully receive an offer of life without which we have no hope. When we as Christians proclaim any other message-even from the best of motives-it becomes a travesty and abdication of the gospel.
Field of Dreams Theology
At one level, a marketing approach to mission has acted as a wake-up call to church congregations. It has forced us to critically examine our presentation of the gospel, to ask how others see us, and to make use of the multimedia tools that our technological age provides. At a deeper level, however, it has tended to lead us into a complacency of which we are often hardly aware. It has led us to assume that there is actually very little wrong with what we are offering, and that most of our neighbours will hurry to our doors if we just improve the presentation and smarten up the package. It is, in truth, an approach to mission that works best in a culture where people have left the church in their own lifetime or are one generation removed. It is a strategy for reaching the recently 'un-churched' who still retain an interest in and have an instinctive sympathy for the church and its message.
The real truth for most of us in the West, however, is that we now live in a post-modern, post-Christendom culture in which the vast majority of our contemporaries view church as being utterly irrelevant to their lives. Furthermore, in much of Europe and the West we are seeking to reach not the "un-churched" but the hard-core "non-churched" who have had little real contact with the Gospel or organized religion for several generations. We are wasting our time and energy in seeking to answer the question, "How do we get these people to come to church?" The simple and hard truth is that most of them never will-not as we presently exist in too many local settings.
What we need is not better marketing, but a rediscovery of what mission really means and how it is effected in a much changed world. The real question for us is not "How do we get people to come to church?" but rather "How do we take church and the Lord of church into our communities?" The task is not to market our product more effectively or to make our services more attractive so that the world will come to us; it is to go to where people are, both literally and imaginatively, as we live out the gospel in our communities. In his book Church Next, Eddie Gibbs expresses it this way: "The church will need to re-enter as a missionary presence with an apostolic stance, living adventurously as a subversive movement, realizing afresh its total dependence on the Lord."
Author and speaker Tony Campolo once challenged a group of Salvationists. Referring to a popular Kevin Costner baseball movie, he said, "The problem is that you have a Field of Dreams theology. You think that 'if you build it they will come;' that if you build a new facility or a new program, the world will come to you. But Jesus told us to go." That, in a nutshell, is the calling and mission of the church (and especially of the Army).
The task will not be an easy one. It will involve us in understanding and engaging with our culture in a deeper and more effective way than we have been doing. We will need to give up all our claims to a privileged and powerful position in the nation. We are not to be a moral majority standing in judgement on society, but rather a subversive minority living and serving that society in commitment to and shaped by the Spirit of Christ himself.
In The Church Between Gospel and Culture, George Hunsberger and Craig Van Gelder write: "The present crisis for the churches is not a matter of regaining lost ground or turf. It is not about asserting the claim that we should again hold the privileged position for [the nation's] moral and spiritual guidance. Rather, it has to do with the need to encourage the encounter of the gospel with our culture. It will mean learning how to be a church that by its nature lives always between gospel and culture, recognizing, on the one hand, the cultural dynamics that shape us as well as everyone else in this society, and, on the other hand, hearing the gospel that calls us to know and value and intend things in a very different way."
Church or 'Shopping Mall'?
The logical conclusion of a mission strategy based on marketing practices will be the creation of a body of consumers rather than the body of Christ. If that strategy is based on meeting felt needs, what happens when those felt needs are met? We are left with the possibility that the church has, in effect, rendered its message and mission obsolete. Consumers shop around. When they have made their purchase they inevitably move on to the next 'must have' item on the list. Church is just one more stop in the "shopping mall" of personal satisfaction and fulfilment.
Our real task is not primarily the personal fulfilment of our 'customers.' Rather, it is to bring men and women into a loving relationship with the living Christ so that they might become fully committed followers. Success is not to be measured by the number of attendees who obtain the maximum level of personal satisfaction, but by the extent to which people learn to live lives of sacrificial service to their neighbours for the sake of the gospel. Our effectiveness is evidenced not by the popularity of our programs but in the maturity of our members.
Dawn Haglund, in Robert E. Webber's book The Younger Evangelicals, denounces the impact of consumerism on the membership of the church when she says: "I'm not sure that the church is much different than the American culture. I find that sad, disappointing and disturbing. Church has become a place of consumerism. People come to get their needs met. The church is about giving people what they want-making them comfortable. Maybe we've reached more people, but I'm sceptical if we've participated in transforming lives."
Insofar as that is true, it is a hideous caricature of what we are called to be as members of the body of Christ. It is time to replace marketing with mission, easy consumerism with costly commitment, self-fulfilment with self-sacrifice, and passive pew-filling with passionate discipleship. Anything less-however powerful or successful the church is perceived by others or perceives itself to be-will represent a total failure to be the church in a watching, waiting and desperately needy world.
by Major Chick Yuill, U.K. Territory