Catering to the Customer

What is the driving force behind the market-driven churches? Dr. David Wells offers keen insight in answer to this question from his excellent book, The Courage to be Protestant. Dr. Wells' observations clearly imply the fact that market-driven, seeker-sensitive church models are sadly motivated by what attracts the flesh, rather than exalting Christ and spreading His fame:

"If we are going to market the church and its gospel, where are we going to start? We start, of course, with our customer. What does the customer want? The conventional wisdom is that seriousness is the death knell of successful churches. In an age of entertainment, such as our age is in the West, we have to be funny, engaging, likable, and light to succeed. So, seriousness must be banished. Preserve the taste but the cut the calories.

That is the recipe seeker-sensitive strategists and pastors are following. It is their response to their perception of this changing public, and it matches the change Miller Brewing Company made from regular beer to Miller Lite when Americans became more weight conscious. If Miller can follow the changing habits of American consumers, so can our leading evangelical pastors!

Regular Christianity, many now think, does not go down easy and smooth; Christianity Lite does. A church that is serious, that is still regular...well, what can one say? It will stand out like an organ stop, if that still makes sense now that organs are becoming as rare as dodo birds. And how better to signal the change than by replacing the old-fashioned sermon with a personal chat from a barstool, or by replacing the serious discourse from the pastor with a drama whose very format carries with it a sense of entertainment?

There really is no end to the innovations that are possible as churches think of different ways to attract and accommodate consumers. Some churches, for example, allow those who attend to express themselves on walls devoted to sacred graffiti. Those who come can draw, paint, and sloganize their feelings into life. And how about a table laden with Play-Doh from which to build shapes that express how they are feeling that day? These are the tricks of marketing du jour. This is probably not what Jesus had in mind when he said his Father had hidden truth from the "wise" and revealed it to "little children" (Matt. 11:25)!

One of the ways of making the experience of going to church more pleasant is to offer choice. Consumers want to be able to choose the style of music they hear, the kind of worship they participate in, and to have a say in what they hear from the barstool up front. (The barstool, by the way, is what replaced the Plexiglas stand in many avant-garde churches, which, in turn, had replaced the pulpit.) Having a wide array of choices, after all, is the way the world is going" [pgs. 28-29].