Should the Church Use Marketing Techniques?

Today’s Church is very susceptible to the market orientation warned against by Philip Kenneson and James Street.  In their insightful book, Selling Out the Church: The Dangers of Church Marketing, they claim the marketing orientation preached by George Barna, Norman Shawchuck, and others changes not just a church’s style, but changes its substance as well.  While the Gospel may remain intact in a marketing-oriented church, the God-given mission of the church has been exchanged for a focus on “effectiveness” and “customer satisfaction,” rather than what the vision for what the church ought to be: “a sign, a foretaste, and a herald of God’s present but still emerging kingdom.”  

            Whole-heartedly adopting what church marketers refer to as a “marketing orientation” does in fact change “the character of the Gospel” and “the self understanding of the community of believers.”  Adopting a marketing orientation produces more than superficial veneers on deeper identities, when in fact such practices become substitute identities – forms of acquired character that has the potential to go all the way down to the core.  Because church marketing defines the purpose of the church solely in terms of attracting the surrounding community, it struggles to reflect God’s character and glory to a watching world.  Instead, church marketing creates a church that reflects the culture rather than shaping it. 

           To be true to its nature and purpose, perhaps the Church needs to stop thinking attractional  – ‘Come and check us out’ – and to start thinking incarnational.  By incarnational mission, I mean the understanding and practice of Christian witness that is rooted in and shaped by the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  We must be sensitive to the considerable effort it takes for someone outside the Christian community to take the initiative to discover an alternative way of life.  As shown by Jesus and his interactions – not just with temple authorities, but with the poor and the rejected – the Kingdom typically lies outside existing religious structures.  In a post-Christian culture where so many have no understanding of the basic Christian message and do not identify with the traditional Christian subculture, we must step out of our building, and take the Gospel into our diverse community.