Finke and Stark maintain that four factors are essential to both economies: (1) organization (or church polity); (2) sales representatives (or clergy); (3) product (or religious doctrine and life); and (4) marketing techniques (or evangelism and church growth).; In other words, supply and demand explain the workings of both economies. They use this thesis to explain the changes that have occurred in the religious landscape, citing as an example the way in which American Protestantism was transformed after the Revolution.
It is not difficult to see how the marketeer's evangelicalism might begin to resemble the old liberalism, the gospel H. Richard Niebuhr once described as consisting in a God without wrath bringing people without sin into a kingdom without judgment through a Christ without a cross. Hawking the church as a product inevitably violates its nature as the gathering of the redeemed for service in God's kingdom and in his world. What is lost is biblical truth. It is not the truth about Christ, his work, or his presence in the church that is important in the modern selling of the church but something entirely different.
It is surely ironic that those who seek to promote the church have adopted strategies that deliberately obscure its essence. The church should be known as a place where God is worshiped, where the Word of God is heard and practiced, and where life is thought about and given its most searching and serious analysis. This, in fact, is what the traditional church has seen as its chief business, however badly it may have been doing this business. But none of this can be marketed, and so it is ignored. The interest turns to how well appointed and organized the church is, what programs it has to offer, how many outings the youth group has organized, how convenient it is to attend, how good the nursery is. The truly important matters are marginalized, and the marginal aspects of the life of the church are made central. Barna shows no interest in the New Testament criteria for those in leadership, such as soundness of character, knowledge of God, understanding of his Word, and an aptness to teach it; he focuses instead on traits valued in modern business, such as self-confidence and managerial skill.
It is not difficult to see how the marketeer's evangelicalism might begin to resemble the old liberalism, the gospel H. Richard Niebuhr once described as consisting in a God without wrath bringing people without sin into a kingdom without judgment through a Christ without a cross. Hawking the church as a product inevitably violates its nature as the gathering of the redeemed for service in God's kingdom and in his world. What is lost is biblical truth. It is not the truth about Christ, his work, or his presence in the church that is important in the modern selling of the church but something entirely different.
It is surely ironic that those who seek to promote the church have adopted strategies that deliberately obscure its essence. The church should be known as a place where God is worshiped, where the Word of God is heard and practiced, and where life is thought about and given its most searching and serious analysis. This, in fact, is what the traditional church has seen as its chief business, however badly it may have been doing this business. But none of this can be marketed, and so it is ignored. The interest turns to how well appointed and organized the church is, what programs it has to offer, how many outings the youth group has organized, how convenient it is to attend, how good the nursery is. The truly important matters are marginalized, and the marginal aspects of the life of the church are made central. Barna shows no interest in the New Testament criteria for those in leadership, such as soundness of character, knowledge of God, understanding of his Word, and an aptness to teach it; he focuses instead on traits valued in modern business, such as self-confidence and managerial skill.
- David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland:
The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.
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