The Business of Winning Souls

Here's an interesting article (link expires one week from today) from an area newspaper about megachurches applying business practices in order to get people in the door. The director of administration of one church that has tried to attract new people by holding rock concerts said, "If you can't get them into your building in one way or another, they're not going to hear your message." That's quite an overstatement but it reflects the commonly held view that the church building is the locus of evangelism. Why does it seem that we're often more interested in getting non-Christians into our sanctuaries than we are in equipping Christians to get the message out?

Kitschianity and Customs

Kevin Hendricks at Church Marketing Sucks wonders why churches so readily mimic logos and catch phrases of popular brands and gives an impassioned plea for sanctified creativity:

You've seen the Christianized versions of every corporate logo, changing Subway to God's Way. As lame as it is, it's one thing on a hokey Christian T-shirt. It's an entirely different thing as a church's official marketing.

I've seen so many churches borrowing from the mainstream world, tweaking logos or commercials to promote their own sermon series. How lame is that? Is parody the highest form of flattery? Are people somehow more interested because it not so subtlety reminds them of the Gap? Or is the idea to make them think it is Coca-Cola so they pay closer attention until the deceit dawns on them and they chuckle to themselves about such creative imitation? Or are people so distracted that the only chance to get their attention is to play off the success of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition?

Would the church of God please rise up and be original? We've been blessed with creativity, so let's use it to come up with something that can stand on its own, rather than make sorrowful copies of corporate imagery.

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost, while sharing Phil Johnson's concern about evangelicalism's proneness to bandwagon jumping, isn't as worired about the fads as he is about some well-established practices that he calls The Seven Deadly Trappings of Evangelicalism.