Church Growth Incorporated

Now, Religion in the News, a report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media. This week’s item is from The Sun News.com, February 2005, with the headline: “Churches Turn to Business Tactics—Market segmentation and brand loyalty are terms familiar to many business people in the coastal Carolinas, but increasingly, they are also are part of the daily dialogue of area churches looking to increase their membership in a competitive environment.

“On Tuesday, Brunswick Community College will bring a business and communications consultant onto campus for a free three-hour workshop to help church leaders improve their marketing effectiveness. ‘The American religious tradition has always been one of a consumers market,’ said Bill Leonard, Dean of Wake Forest University’s Divinity School. ‘What has changed recently is the involvement of technology and recruiting church members from television to the internet, and the lack of loyalty Christians have to any particular denomination,’ Leonard said. ‘This kind of entreprenuralism has created a consumer mentality on the part of church goers. People are looking for local congregations that meet their needs at given times,’ said Leonard.

“Brunswick County church leaders, such as Ray Gilbert of Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church, says it is important for churches to understand the principles of marketing so they will know how to best serve and recruit area worshippers.”

Tom: Dave, we have, past programs, books that you’ve written, articles that we write—a great concern that we have is the church looking to the Word of God and somehow seeing something insufficient there. It’s not able to do what the church needs to get done to present the gospel, to minister to people, and so on. Yet, that’s contrary to what the Bible teaches—it is sufficient for all things: 2 Peter:1:3According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue:
See All...,4: “All things (it’s provided us), all things that pertain to godliness through the knowledge of Him, and we’ve applied that, primarily, to psychology. Why did the church have to turn to these atheistic, secular psychologists for something that’s supposedly missing in the Word of God? Now, I would apply that same thing to business. I’m not saying that business is bad, but what does it have to do with the church of God?

Dave: Mm-hmm. Well, Tom, Jesus didn’t use these techniques. In fact, He used the opposite. We’ve gone through it many times. He didn’t say, you know, “Come along, guys, I’ll make you feel good about yourself. He said, “Are you sure you want to follow me? Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests, I don’t have anywhere to lay my head—we’re heading for a place called Calvary outside of Jerusalem. They are going to nail me to a cross. So, pick up your cross right now if you are going to follow me.”

Well, that was hardly marketing. That’s not a big appeal to draw in a lot of people and that is not telling them what they want to hear, and that is not making them feel comfortable. So, this is just the absolute opposite of what the Bible teaches. It doesn’t make sense. The Bible tells me that I am a sinner; the Bible tells me that Christ died for my sins; it’s only by God’s grace and mercy. I am an unworthy sinner; I don’t deserve His mercy. I have to recognize that I am a sinner before I can get saved. That’s not what people want to hear—it’s a hard sell, Tom.

So, what they are saying is, first of all they say, “We’ll change the atmosphere. We’ll give them the kind of music they like, and then we are not going to be negative.” Go to the Crystal Cathedral. You don’t hear Schuller talk about sin, and so forth, it’s all very positive, “uplifting”…

Tom: And not convicting.

Dave: No, it is not convicting, it’s very comfortable. But then the next thing that happens is, it begins to affect the message—you have to compromise the message. I remember a statement by Oswald Chambers, many years ago. He said, “We have to be very careful that in trying to get people to accept the gospel we don’t manufacture a gospel acceptable to people.” So, in order to get people to accept Christ, we have to change Christ just a little bit. We have to change His message, we have to change His teaching, and now Christianity becomes very, very popular. It never was popular, and Jesus said, “If they hated me, persecuted me, what are they going to do to you if you are following me? They will do the same to you

Tom: Dave, in our last segment, we talked about positive-confession and word-faith, and so on, but you moved it up the ladder, so to speak, to the very thing that we are talking about here—to looking for techniques, looking for methodologies that would attract people, and so on. The question I have is can you emphasize something that is biblical to the point where it doesn’t become biblical? The Bible talks about healing, the Bible talks about prosperity, as your soul prospers, all right, but can we isolate certain aspects of the gospel, of Scripture, to the point where it really becomes non-scriptural?

Dave: Well, it’s been said that you can do that—you wouldn’t be scriptural in doing that. Someone has said that all heresy is simply too great an emphasis upon a biblical truth. Well, I question that. If it’s truth, it’s truth. How can I emphasize it too much? But what they are really saying is, if you leave out the whole council of God—you are just thumping away on one note—that can become the foundation for a new movement, or whatever.

But, Tom, we’ve talked about it in the past. The Bible never said, “What we do is set up a church, then we set up a program, and then we try to invite unsaved people in, but we have to appeal to them, we have to please them and attract them.” No, the Bible actually says the church is a place where Christians meet. They meet to worship the Lord; they meet to learn from His Word, be taught and convicted and grow in grace. And then they go out from there, and they win people to Christ. It says, “The disciples went everywhere preaching the Word.” That was how they won people to Christ. They had street meetings, of course; they went to the temple, they went to the synagogue, but they didn’t try to change the worship of the Christians in order to attract unsaved people. That was never the idea in the early church, and it should not be the idea today.