Every year, around the start of the school year, it happens. Also around Christmas and Easter. Whenever a family moves to a new location or often after a family has changed, perhaps when kids move out or after a divorce or a death or a birth in the family, it also happens. Sometimes it happens just because Americans are consumers who like to shop.
What is it that happens? Americans comparison shop for churches. Most American can't imagine finding a church any other way. They like to visit, check it out the feel, taste the coffee, see the nursery, hear the music, meet the people, kick the tires. Church shopping is an American as apple pie.
Andrew Santella over at Salon
looks at church-shopping, why we do and what congregations and clergy respond to the phenomenon:
Since before Election Day, Washington pastors have been lining up to invite the first family into their flock, and outlets from
PBS to the
Wall Street Journal have taken their turn handicapping the many contending congregations. Despite all of this cajoling, the White House
announced that the Obama family is still shopping for a church in Washington.
Except for the special invitations and the presidential-scale press coverage, the Obamas' church search puts them in a situation a lot of American believers are well-acquainted with. One in seven adults changes churches each year, and another one in six attends a handful of churches on a rotating basis, according to the Barna Group, a marketing research firm that serves churches. Church shopping isn't a matter of merely changing congregations: A
survey by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life last year indicated that 44 percent of American adults have left their first religious affiliation for another. "Constant movement characterizes the American religious marketplace," a survey summary said....
....Part of the discomfort with church shopping has to do with the way growing churches attempt to attract spiritual shoppers. That simple marquee in front of a church with the cheerfully homely motto ("Prevent truth decay: Brush up on your Bible") doesn't suffice to recruit worshippers. Web sites stream audio and video of sermons and music to let prospective members shop from home, and consultants help congregations market themselves to the "unchurched" and the merely unsatisfied by deploying focus groups, surveys, product giveaways (free church-branded Frisbees, anyone?), and other tactics borrowed from the commercial realm. The Wall Street Journal reported recently on churches employing mystery worshippers, "a new breed of church consultant," who covertly attend services and evaluate them (Were the bathrooms clean? Was the vibe friendly?) as if they were first-timers looking for a new church.
Diversity in the market place and the consumer habits of Americans can cause us to turn evangelism into mere salesmanship, and reducing religion to a low-demand-on-customer, lowest-common-denominator and even an entertainment driven experience might cause churches to grow but also create churches with huge turnover. Mega-churches know that 35-50% of their membership will turnover every year, so in order to maintain their large numbers, let alone grow, they must practice a kind of volume marketing.
The Rev. Shane Hipps, a former marketing executive and now Mennonite pastor, talked with Christiainity Today about consumerism, the church and why both mega-churches and emerging churches are here to stay. (Presumably that means that we traditional average- to small-sized congregations are also here to stay.)
I make a distinction between three different kinds of consumerism. One is mainstream consumerism; the dominant hegemony that happens in our culture. Mainstream consumerism is mega. Walmart exemplifies this kind of consumerism, as does the mega-church. Boomer consumerism is mainstream consumerism.
Then you have counter consumerism, which is savviness. They are aware that Walmart and [Microsoft] Windows are trying to dominate, and they resist just like they resist mega-churches. But the odd thing is they’re no less consumers. They’re just counter consumers. A counter consumer buys Apple. It is absolutely consumer driven. They are consuming an identity that says we’re different; an alternative from the rest of you.
Santella says:
Church shopping, marketing, and the not-so-sanctified practices that go with them make easy targets for criticism. But competition among churches for worshippers has always been fierce in the United States, to the benefit of American religion and individual churchgoers. The prohibition against establishing an official state religion helped give us the shoppers' paradise that is our religious marketplace. Disestablishment (Massachusetts was the last state to cut ties to its official church, in 1833) meant that preachers had to learn to get along without support from the state. It made the ability to recruit and keep a flock—and get them to give generously—crucial to a church's survival.
We live in a culture driven by consumerism. Even in hard times we are trained to comparison shop, wiegh and filter various marketing appeals for all kinds of things, and we take for granted a certain level of hucksterism that shows everywhere from billboards to the logos on our clothes. In this environment, it is easy to choose to ignore the reality all together (and risk becoming invisible) or to forget that marketing is only a tool for evangelism on the one hand, and to remember that consumer values are what shapes the decision making of many church visitors.
Hospitality ministry, for example, brings both Gospel and cultural realities together: People are looking for a place of welcome and sense of being "at home" in a congregation. Jesus practiced radical hospitality. So can we. Offering a welcoming, inviting and listening church can bring Gospel witness to people in a way that is comprehensible to people who shop as a way of life.
