Church Business – Part 2

... and worship as customer service.

I suggested in the first article of this series that churches need an exorcism of business thinking and talking, hoping to briefly show that those sort of visions for leading the body of Christ are not simply misguided, but outrageously wrong.

Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash

Apart from a lengthy discussion of the Church and her mission – which I hope to work toward at some point – I do not think the corporatizing of our worship and worshipping communities can be glossed over. As far as I am concerned, it is not a take-it or leave-it proposition; instead, it is a profanation.

It has become accepted wisdom that church planters should find out what the other churches in their cities are doing, and then purposefully create something different. Discover what people dislike about the churches that currently exist, and then offer the exact opposite of those findings.

Worship “Experiences”

The argument goes like this: we need a multiplicity of churches to cater to various types of people and personalities. And, of course, there appears to be a self-evident truth here. People do have different tastes in music, dress, preaching, architecture, aesthetics, kids environments, and so forth. It would seem only logical that churches should be malleable enough to accommodate all preferences, able to create an almost fully-customizable “worship experience” where each and every piece – from the parking lot to the preacher’s jokes – fulfills our expectations week after week. Picking a church is akin to picking services from a spa menu, but for spiritual things.

Where in the world did we get the notion that the Church’s call to worship was meant to appeal to our tastes and preferences? First, I think it comes from the corporatizing of “church.” There are certainly deeper issues at play, there always is. But somehow we embraced the idea that we were to form the Church, rather than the Church form us. I think it’s even betrayed in our new language – a worship “experience” – meaning we are to create a certain type of feel and mood that reaches the specific people we are targeting. Rather than worship being service, being “ministry to the Lord” (Acts 13), it is a product that can be measured and scaled, perfected then licensed.

Each new iteration of “church” is usually undergirded with a couple of mantras set to the tune of: “We’ll do everything short of sin to reach people,” or, “To get results we’ve never got, we have to do something we’ve never done.” Consequently, we resort to increasingly outrageous theatrics and tactics that drift ever more away from the historic expression of Christian worship, and, like our mantras promise, they have certainly given us results we have never gotten before. Just not in the ways we imagined.

Corporatizing has confused why we even bother gathering weekly to begin with.

“Outsider” Focused

One philosophy is that our Sundays should be about reaching the lost. We call it being “outsider” focused. But this has a caveat: good leaders, I am told, know their demographics. The lost we are talking about look and live a particular way: they have a specific income, a certain level of education, and are in selected age range. Once we have that dialed in, then we can tailor our gatherings to provide an experience so entertaining and dynamic that they’ll do anything to come back the next week. We have to make it POP! Deliver the Wow Factor.

In this model, we have one job – get them to return. We give them free stuff. We call them, but not too much, and text them, but only according to finely-tuned schedules created by marketing best-practices. We craft environments for their kids hoping it will be a mini-Disney World, or at the very least be better than the other kids churches in town.

Of course, being hospitable is a Christian virtue.
Seeing every new visitor as in a sales funnel on their way to becoming a future “giving unit” is a carnal vice.

If the idea of only appealing to certain segments of our city is not proof enough of our corporatized stupor, virtually every new church claims to be aimed at the exact same segment – young families.

The elderly? They should find a traditional Baptist church and spend their last years there.

The middle-aged? Well, our gatherings aren’t really for them either, but we need their money, so hopefully they’ll stick around.

Single people? They need to hurry and get married so we can start treating them as normal, functioning adults.

The super-passionate? Quick! Hide them in a small-group!

The traditional? Lighten up.

The result is our churches become nothing more than an assortment of pop-culture fare with this type of speaker and that type of music and those types of groups. Pastors are forced to become customer service representatives whose sole focus is getting a repeat customer. This way, when the first-time guest doesn’t return and we didn’t close the sale, we can tell ourselves, “We’re just not for everybody.”

“Insider” Focused

The next philosophy is the opposite of “outsider” focused. Instead, it is “insider” focused. Here the aim is to minister only to those who are already members of our church. Our preaching and teaching is to coach them on how to get ahead in (the American way of) life. Keep your bills paid, raise kids who make good grades, retire wealthy, vote correctly, etc. Oddly enough, preaching becomes both easier and harder when laboring under this paradigm.

It becomes easier in that we don’t have to study very much. Sermons are modified TED talks with a few verses underpinning them. In fact, the book “TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking” is now a highly-recommended homiletics text, so even the ill-studied can preach, so long as they keep it short, can tell jokes, and can incorporate trendy phrases at key points.

But, preaching is also harder because we need gargantuan levels of creativity and money to keep us “relevant,” or what we actually mean: competitive. The moment another church can do it bigger and better, off the parishioners go.

We claim the goal of either strategy is ultimately to reach people – code for grow large or go multi-site or become an influencer.

We are hungry to do something that has never been done before.

But if we are not doing what two millennia of Christians have already been doing, then we are doing something else other than what the Church is called to do.

It is simple, but is worth repeating: the Church is His, not ours.

We do not make of it what we wish.

We do not need to work on it.
It needs to work on us.

We gather to habituate ourselves to worship, acts which train our passions toward their proper and final End, enacting in our very bodies the reality that God is the future of the world.

We gather to hear texts the Church has assigned, allowing them to carry us along throughout our Church Year, transforming the way we mark and name time itself.

We gather to confess what it is we believe, deeply rooting ourselves in the ancient deposit of the Faith.

We gather for shared prayer, burdened by the brokenness of this Age yet waiting for the promised resurrection of the Age to come.

We gather for confession, for forgiveness, for mercy and grace to renew us for service.

We gather to tell and retell Jesus’ story, culminating in sharing his broken body and spilled blood presented the Table.

This is not a corporation.

It is the communion of saints, both living and dead, joining our collective voices together in procession, leading creation in adoration of God, only then to be sent back into the world to love and serve Lord.

Alleluia, alleluia.