Church Marketing Sucks

The L.A. Times covered church marketing and technology today in an article called “God’s Call Comes by Cellphone”. A few interesting quotes include:

“We dare not change the Gospel. But the method of delivery? We better change it for each new generation.” -Mark Beeson of Granger Community Church

“You can sit in an ivory tower and whine all you want about ‘This isn’t the way it was done in 1500.’ We’re here to help people. If there’s a tool out there that can help us reach them, why wouldn’t we use it?” -George Barna of The Barna Group

Of course not everyone is thrilled with churches blindly embracing technology. Andrew Careaga, a youth pastor, blogger and author of e-Ministry: Connecting with the Net Generation, worries about spirituality becoming just another item to check off the to-do list: “a five-second spiritual fix, you’ve seen the verse of the day and you’re done.”

“Technology always seems to be a Faustian bargain. It encroaches on our ability to unconnect with the world and connect with God.”

And that’s always the rub with technology. But others are more concerned about the danger of church marketing in general:

Theologian Philip Kenneson voices another concern: When churches measure success by how many times a sermon is downloaded, Christianity becomes just another consumer product.

“There’s a danger that it encourages people to see the church as a service agency, there to meet their particular needs” rather than to help them serve God, Kenneson said.

“It’s easy to reassure yourself that you are, in fact, a Christian because you’re … consuming Christian products,” he said. “Then I don’t have to love my neighbor or pray for my enemy or … take on any of the messy, difficult demands of the Gospel,” said Kenneson, an associate professor at Milligan College in Tennessee and co-author of Selling Out The Church: The Dangers of Church Marketing.

(link via Tony Morgan)