My earlier post looked at whether churches really differentiate themselves on activities and amenities, etc. Today, here is a quote from James Twitchell, author of Shopping for God:
“Growth itself is a powerful selling tool…Being able to say you are the fastest growing has pulling power. It implies leadership. Leading is not a measure of quality, however, but of consumption. Take beer for example…Where taste is hard to measure, the invocation of leadership often substitutes for the real thing, even if leadership is in an unimportant category. . . Almost without exception a church claims leadership of some sort. Touting growth and size is one of the few ways of asserting this. If the product was not so good, why would so many people be buying it? Growing churches, like growing businesses, have learned the importance of generating “business at the door.” Shoppers equate crowding with value.”
Have you found this to be true? Every “growing” church (read: contemporary) heralds their growth in some way, that I have encountered. The “hot” church in town draws the crowd, per the Rick Warren playbook….draw the crowd and move them inward to the core. While it “works” in getting a lot of people, I haven’t seen it be particularly effective in making disciples. . . but perhaps that is not the point, or is it?
The number that gets the attention, gets heralded, gets the pastor invited to conferences to speak is the Worship Attendance. How many people can you get to come to one place over however many services you have? If you cross 2000 in attendance per weekend, you have crossed over into rarified status. While it’s great that that many people are coming to hear a sermon (oops, I mean message) and sing some great songs, are they growing? As well, many of these folks are not “Non-Christian” people, but mainly people who have been in churches before and now want to come to this hot new show in town. Church Growth people even invented a term for them: Dechurched or Unchurched. You’ll see it in churches’ marketing “we reach out to the unchurched, the dechurched….” etc.
Twitchell comments on this trend:
“While they claim they target the unchurched, they are really harvesting brand switchers up and down the denominations. . .Rather like Wal-Mart, the megas have almost no brand personality, and ironically, that’s the selling point. Physically they are laid out with eerie similarity, and doctrinally, there’s little product differentiation.”
They may even claim people have come by profession of faith in Christ and that is worth celebrating, to be sure. Having run new member classes for several years at a large church, many did profess their faith in Christ, but they also had been in church before, perhaps a few years ago, or several years ago. Very rare was the person who be defined as “lost” or unChristian, or “not a believer” or not “born-again,” etc. You know, someone who was an actual convert to Christianity. More what we encountered were converts to how this large church “did” church. Is that necessarily bad or good?
Something to chew on, from “the leading blog in the world with godthoughts in the title!”