Church marketing in the business pages

“Prepare Thee for Serious Marketing,” an article about church marketing techniques in Sunday’s New York Times, appears on the first page of the Business section — an unusual place for a religion article in the Times. But that’s because this article looks at how churches are borrowing the latest marketing techniques from the business world.

Reporter Fara Warner starts out with Willow Creek Church, the granddaddy of evangelical mega-churches in South Barrington, Illinois. Warner visits an example of Willow Creek’s newest venture in marketing and member retention:– a program called “The Table” that sounds remarkably like the old Unitarian Universalist “Extended Family” programs from the 1970’s, which you can still find in some Unitarian Universalist churches (my dad belongs to an “Extended Family” group in his Unitarian Universalist church in Concord, Mass.). Warner tells about Randy Frazee, one of the many pastors at Willow Creek, as he hosts a “Table” in his home:

As dusk settles on this neighborhood of 1920’s bungalows and old farmhouses northwest of Chicago, Randy Frazee strums a banjo on his front porch, waiting for his dinner guests to arrive. No cars line his curb because everyone who is coming lives within walking distance.

Once the 12 guests — ranging in age from about 7 to 70 — and the Frazee family have gathered around three tables set end-to-end, they join hands, and Mr. Frazee says a prayer. A meal of barbecued brisket, cheese potatoes, and green beans follows.

Throughout the evening, conversation occasionally touches on favorite scriptures and “walking with the Lord.” The guests tell about their best and worst moments of the week. As dinner wraps up, Mr. Frazee asks one of the couples to talk about “how Christ walked in their life.”…

…a total of more than 6,000 people recently attended several hundred weekend “Tables” in the neighborhoods surrounding Willow Creek’s campus. These “Tables” supplement small groups that the church has already organized around people with similar interests — like mothers, singles, or teenagers. But the idea of “The Table” was based on [geographic] proximity, Mr. Frazee said, so that people began to meet neighbors who weren’t just like themselves….

I don’t think you’ll find much talk of “walking with the Lord” at a Unitarian Universalist “Extended Family” group — after all, we do use a different religious lanugage. But the point of “Extended Families” and “Tables” seems much the same: to get church people to meet in an informal setting. As usual, the Willow Creek folks are very aware of the marketing strategy that lies behind this program:

Corporate marketers have been using similar events for years to try to create closer connections with their brand. Nike, for example, has worked with gyms on new workout routines to make its brand visible beyond sporting goods stores.

For churches, events like the ones created by Willow Creek are meant to offer members a similar closeness, albeit for a more profound purpose: religious worship and discussion.

“In the early church, people didn’t get on their camels to go to Bethany to worship,” said Mr. Frazee, who created similar programs as pastor of a church in Fort Worth before he joined Willow Creek in 2005. “We have adults who seem to have suffered a spiritual stroke. They go to church, but they have forgotten that wonderful sense of hanging out, that basic expression of fellowship in their neighborhoods.”

In other words, church people seem to want some unstructured hang-out time from their churches.

Warner goes on to report that the mega-churches are watching generational trends closely. The Baby Boomers like big, corporate-style worship services with thousands in attendance, but the next generation (described as people born in the 1960’s and 1970’s) is looking for churches to be more “authentic.” Warner interviews Robert B. Whitesel of Indiana Wesleyan University:

“The younger generation sees the mega-churches as too production-oriented, too precise,” [Whitesel said]. “They want church to be more authentic. There is a feeling among this generation that there has been a waning emphasis on the spiritual.”

Mr. Whitesel siad this shift was changing the focus of what a religious leader does at a church. “The boomer church has the paster at the top who is supposed to figure out what the church is,” he said. But in the newer churches he studies, he added, “the pastor has more of a marketing function in understanding what the congregations wants and finding ways to provide that.”

“The pastor has more of a marketing function” — that sounds pretty mercenary and cold-blooded. But I’ve been thinking that it might be possible to take advantage of this generational trend in a way that doesn’t seem quite so mercenary. Maybe we can frame this marketing concept in terms of how leadership should happen in a church. Instead of having pastors as CEO’s, it looks like we need to develop an understanding of the pastor as “servant-leader” who helps facilitate grass roots expressions of spiritual needs. Corporations are finding out that they have less and less top-down control over their brands, as consumers make the brand their own. So too with churches, I think: with the newer generations, we’re going to have to move beyond a centralized top-down hierarchical control of a church or of a denomination, towards a new understanding of non-hierarchical shared leadership.

Translate that back into marketing terms, and you might find that instead of advertising in conventional media, churches might be better off using new participatory media like — well, like blogs — media where you can tell me what you think.

On retreat: Autumn watch

Wareham, Mass. I was sitting at the breakfast table talking to some ministers whom I hadn’t seen in a while, when Rachel, the program chair for this retreat, came around and said the morning’s program was about to begin. The other ministers filed in to hear the rest of the presentation by Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd. Even though I strongly disagreed with Dowd’s presentation last night, where he described an eco-theology grounded in a grand narrative of the universe, I felt that I should keep an open mind and go hear more. Then I thought to myself:– Would I rather sit indoors and listen to someone talk theology, or would I rather go outdoors to take a long walk? I went quietly upstairs to get my coat and binoculars, and slipped out the back door of the retreat center.

Cloudy and cold this morning, a real mid-autumn day. Birds filled the bushes along the edge of the retreat center’s lawn: Gold-crowned Kinglets, Yellow-rumped Warblers, Song Sparrows, catbirds, cardinals, and even a Hermit Thrush. I bushwhacked to the edge of the little estuary. As I came down to the edge of the salt marsh, a Great Blue Heron squawked, crouched, and leapt into the air, tucking his neck back and slowly pulling his long legs up against his body. Some of the trees surrounding the salt marsh were already bare of leaves; one or two maples still covered in brilliant red leaves; the white oaks shone dull gold in the subdued light; a few trees were still green. The tide was quite high, and I skirted the high water through the salt marsh hay. One high bush blueberry, a bush about five feet high growing right at the edge of the marsh, was covered in deep, glowing red leaves; I only noticed that small bush because the trees around it were already bare and grey.

After a long walk, I wound up on the Wareham town beach. A fisherman stood at the far end of the beach, where the sand ends in a little spit sticking out into an estuary winding up through extensive salt marshes.

“Catching anything?” I said.

“Not today,” he said. “Caught a little striper yesterday.”

I said that was pretty good; it’s late to catch a striper this far north.

He was feeling talkative, and we chatted idly for a few minutes. “What are you looking for?” he said, noticing the binoculars hanging around my neck.

“Ducks,” I said. “The ducks should be here by now. But I’m not really seeing any. Maybe because it’s been so warm, and they’re just not moving down onto their wintering grounds yet.”

“Yeah, that’s what they’re saying about the stripers this year,” he said. “They should be gone by now, but it’s still warm so they’re staying up here.”

Every year, the story is a little different. The fall migrants generally move on at about the same time, but a Hermit Thrush might stay a little later than usual. The striped bass run south, but one year that might leave a little earlier or later than another year. Some years a few maple trees hold their leaves a little longer, or a blueberry bush turns a particularly bright red. The same story is told year after year, and it’s always the same but always different. That’s the only grand narrative I care about, a grand narrative that’s not told in words.

Grand narratives at the ministers’ retreat

Wareham, Mass. At noon, I got in my car and drove down the interstate to Wareham, to a retreat center where the district ministers group is having its annual retreat.

The featured presenters at the retreat are Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow. Dowd and Barlow travel around the continent spreading a new gospel, the good news a religion based on evolution, which they call “creatheism.” Drawing heavily from the writings of Brian Swimme, Ken Wilbur, and Thomas Berry, Dowd started out his hour-long presentation tonight by asserting that their creathism is a “meta-religion” that can encompass any other religious position, including atheism.

My immediate thought was, who needs a new meta-religion? If we have learned anything from the post-modernist movement, we have learned that these grand meta-narratives, these grand stories that claim to encompass everything else, have tended to be more destructive than constructive. Postmodern thinkers point out that some of the greatest tragedies of the modern era come from meta-narratives — the grand narrative of Nazism, a story of a white Aryan race ruling all other “races”; or the grand narrative of a colonial power like Great Britain, a story of colonialism told to justify tiny Britain ruling over the entire sub-continent of India. I’d rather cast my lot with Mahatma Ghandhi than the colonialism of Edwardian England.

As Dowd talked, I began to realize that an implicit assumption of any meta-narrative is that everyone is going to agree with it, is going to buy into it. What happens if I don’t buy in to creatheism? I’m sure Dowd won’t try to forcibly convert me, but he did say that everyone else’e religious position is, in fact, a subset of his religious position. I’m sure if I told him about my version of Transcendentalism, he’d tell me that I was, in fact, a creatheist just like him. Except that I’m not.

I think Dowd has accepted a certain mid-20th C. idea that in the end all religions have the same goal; different religions may take different paths to get there, but they’re all trying to arrive at the same mountaintop. Dowd uses the metaphor of those Russian nesting dolls, and he says that all other religions can nest inside his meta-religion. I don’t buy that idea. Mark Heim, a theologian at Andover Newton Theological School, has said that different religions not only have different paths, they also have different final destinations; the Christian’s heaven is not the same place as a Buddhist’s nirvana. I tend to agree with Heim, that different religions are not necessarily commensurable.

I was bothered by a few other minor points. One example: Dowd gave an overview of his “evolutionary arrow,” which he said was such an important concept that he sometimes gives an hour-long presentation on it. But I feel his evolutionary arrow, which starts with bacteria evolving into multi-cellular organisms and ends with the United Nations evolving into a better form of world governance, doesn’t work. It is not accurate to say that the evolution of bacteria is the same as the creation of the UN. Nor does evolution in the strict Darwinian sense mean “change in directions which make me feel comfortable.” Dowd seems to believe in “progress onwards and upwards forever.” After the horrors of the 20th C. (genocide, ecological disaster, things like that), some of us now question whether we were making any progress at all. We also began to wonder if part of the problem with the 20th C. was that uniformly applied solutions, which supposedly would result in progress for everyone, really only benefitted a few powerful people.

Another minor point that bothered me was Dowd’s use of the terms “day language” and “night language” to refer to the difference between what I would call mythos and logos. It’s not a bad distinction to make, but Dowd’s terms don’t accurately reflect the difference between the two kinds of language.

More than anything, I was bothered by Dowd’s pedagogical style. He depends on attractive “Powerpoint” slides to create continuity through his presentation. I felt he used his slides string together a series of basically unsupported assertions. Many of his slides had stunning National Geographic style photographs of plants and animals and landscapes, but because the photographs had nothing to do with the text printed on them, they only served to distract you from careful evaluations of Dowd’s assertions. In short, Dowd uses a rhetoric designed to persuade you, and to prevent you from thinking too deeply about what he says. The result is a presentation filled with half-truths (and some outright inaccuracies) that sounds plausible, but that prevents deep thought, so that you can easily be carried away with what he says.

Although a question-and-answer session was scheduled for the end of his presentation, Dowd decided to skip the questions and answers in order to show yet another video. I slipped quietly out the back, and went upstairs to think and to write.

Away from Internet for 3 days

I’ll be at a ministers’ retreat until Wednesday, and as far as I know I won’t have Internet access at the retreat site. I’ll still be writing each day, but it looks like I won’t be able to post anything until late Wednesday. See you then! We do have internet access here — no wifi, but a good fast ethernet connection.

Making progress…

One of the most important uses for technology in church is to increase accessibility. And one of the projects I’ve been slowly working on is trying to figure out the best way to make and distribute audio recordings of worship services, for members of our congregation who can’t make it to church for whatever reason.

In terms of distributing audio recordings of worship services, right now the best solution here in our church is probably putting the audio recordings onto CDs. Yes, I would prefer to distribute audio recordings via our Web site, but many of the people who would like to get audio recordings of worship services either don’t know how to use a computer to download audio files, don’t own a computer, or don’t have high-speed internet access (New Bedford is not a wealthy community, and some of our members cannot afford computers or high-speed internet access). But CD players are so cheap now, we think we can count on everyone owning a CD player.

In terms of making the audio recordings during the worship service, up until this week we have been stymied. We need to be able to process the audio recordings (cleaning up sound through compression, and deleting certain elements of the recording such as personal testimonies or requests for prayers during the worship service), and the easiest way to do that is using a computer and audio processing software (we use GarageBand on my Mac). I have been reluctant to record onto CDs because of their time limitations (about 75 minutes of recording time, not really enough to squeeze in prelude, worship service, and postlude). Fortunately, our music director, Randy Fayan, has a day job working for Avid, a company which makes digital media creation tools.

Randy borrowed a nice little digital audio recorder — it’s about the size of a deck of playing cards — which will record about 17 hours of monoaural audio in mp3 format (at 128kHz), onto its 1 gig flash memory. Yesterday we put the digital audio recorder on the pulpit and recorded the worship service, and then downloaded it onto my computer. It was incredibly easy. The sound quality was excellent, and the recorder picked up nearly all of the worship service with pretty good quality.

We still have a few problems to solve. We like to plug the digital audio recorder into the amplifier that provides sound to persons with hearing difficulties, but if we do that we will have to set up another microphone to pick up the piano. Then there’s the issue of processing the audio file. I spent yesterday afternoon editing the audio file we made and trying different compression rates, but I can’t spend four hours every week doing that and I’m going to have to learn how to process the file in less than an hour. Then we have to decide if we want to make the audio file available via our Web site, which may mean paying for more bandwidth — which we really can’t afford, and which won’t help us with our main goal of making worship services available to shut-ins.

Right now, it’s still a work in progress. But it does feel like we’re making some real progress.

Autumn watch

Early in the morning the sound of heavy rain on the skylight awakened me. I rolled over and went back to sleep until the alarm awakened me for good.

The morning’s drive east on Interstate 195 was spectacularly beautiful: gray, low clouds, light spattering rain, trees and bushes along the highway vividly yellow and red. One tree, a particularly transcendent shade of red, standing next to the highway, almost made me drive into the next lane.

I arrived at the cemetery twenty minutes early. About ten cars were already parked near the grave site, people sitting inside them to avoid the rain. The man who had died loved the outdoors, and really the weather was perfect: about sixty degrees Fahrenheit, light drizzle, soft breeze blowing occasional drops of rain from trees. The wet weather brought out the yellows and reds of changing leaves; but most of the leaves in the cemetery were still green, and the wetness made them look lush and verdant.

At the reception after the service, I talked with someone who repeated the truism: a sudden death is easier on the person who dies, harder on the family and friends who have to cope with the aftermath. Then one’s mind takes up the other possibilities. If you knew you couldn’t die suddenly (that is, with no real knowledge of your death except perhaps a realization that came simultaneously with death), which would you prefer: to spend a week dying and suffering (with the sudden blinding realization that this is it), or to spend six months dying and suffering (time enough perhaps to tie up some loose ends), or to spend twenty years gradually declining? Then: Which option would you prefer for someone you love?

I had to rush back to the church to check in with the secretary before she left. The fire alarm panel at the church failed suddenly and spectacularly last week. The panel sent an alarm to the fire department, but didn’t sound the alarms in the building, so when several fire trucks showed up the people in the building didn’t know what was happening. No fire, but then the fire department couldn’t reset the panel, leaving our building without an alarm for a week until we could get a replacement installed. I discovered that I would rather have a working fire alarm panel, and know when the building was burning down, than not now at all.

By the time I got back home, it was half past one. I desperately needed a walk, and the rain was holding off at least for the moment. When I got down to the waterfront, I saw two red triangular flags flying above the Wharfinger’s Building: gale warning. But on my walk across the bridges to Fairhaven, I felt very little wind.

On the way back, I stopped on Pope’s Island, bought the New York Times, and sat down in Dunkin Donuts to drink some coffee, eat a doughnut, and read the paper. The news from North Korea is not good. Half an hour later, when I thought to look out the window, a rising wind was blowing rain at the big plate glass window. The predicted storm had arrived. I started walking back.

The wind blew hard out of the south. When I got up onto the swing span bridge, there was nothing south of me to slow the wind. The wind blew raindrops at thirty degrees from the horizontal; the raindrops looked like lines not drops, the way rain is pictured in the old Japanese woodblock prints. Rain hit my face and ran down into the corners of my mouth, and it tasted of salt; the wind so strong it picked up sea-spume and mixed it with the rain.

When I got home, my trousers were soaked, but my new raincoat had kept the upper half of me dry. I quickly changed and got ready to leave for a dinner engagement in Brookline.

Driving in nightmarish traffic: an hour-and-a-quarter drive took two and a half hours. Rain so thick it got foggy, the blower in my car couldn’t keep up with the dampness, I had to keep swiping the inside of the windshield to be able to see. Trying to drive defensively. Parked the car, got on the subway, the usual delays. Time to think.

Time to think.

By the time the dinner was over, the cold front had moved in, and I pulled up the hood of my raincoat trying to stay warm. But I could breathe freely again. The cold awakened me in the middle of the night. I didn’t come awake enough to close the window, but I managed to pull another comforter over me and then, snug and warm, slept until late morning.

Hardcore for the what?

Being middle-aged now, and not living in Boston, I think I can be forgiven for not reading the Weekly Dig. But that meant I missed this article on Hank Peirce, now minister at the Unitarian Universalist church in Medford, Mass., formerly a roadie for a number of hardcore punk rock bands. The unfortunate title for the article is “Hardcore for the Lord” — somehow, I think the writer didn’t quite grasp the essence of Unitarian Universalism. And there’s no mention of the punk rock worship services Hank did ten years ago at the Middle East in Cambridge. Still, it’s fun to read about a now-respectable minister’s former life. (And thanks to Philocrites for publicizing the article on his blog.)

RSS may pose dangers

According to a comment to this blog entry on Mat Mullenweg’s blog (he’s the guy who is the founding developer of WordPress), it looks like spammers or other evil types could use RSS feeds to deliver “nasty payloads” to your computer. Even a blog written by someone you know and trust could be hijacked to deliver bad stuff to your computer via RSS. While this hasn’t been documented yet (that I know of), it looks like it’s only a matter of time.

The main entry is also worth reading:– spammers are finding out ways to hack into blogs to insert invisible content. This serves as yet another reminder to keep our blogging software current — and to have clean back-up files of key data and files, just in case we do get infected.

Nature and City: a preliminary checklist

How do you find Nature in the City? I’ve been developing the checklist below to help focus my own thoughts on this question. I suspect some of you may be thinking along the same lines and may have things to add. So even though this is merely a preliminary checklist, I’d thought I’d publish it here and see what you can add or correct.

Basic assumption: City isn’t separate from Nature or divorced from Nature; rather, City is an ecosystem (or collection of ecosystems) that is a subset of wider Nature. (Corollary: humans are not separate from Nature, they are an integral part of Nature.)

Purposes of the checklist: To remind me of what to look for to stay aware of the City ecosystem. To remind me of how City ecosystem affects my emotional and spiritual mood.

  1. Astronomical phenomena
    • Sunrise and sunset times
    • Sun’s angle of declination
    • Moonrise and moonset
    • Phase of the moon
    • Length of daylight and its effect on mood
  2. Meteorological phenomena
    • Precipitation: departure from seasonal norms
    • Temperature: departure from seasonal norms
    • Major weather events and their effects on mood
    • Climate and its effect on organisms
    • Climate and its effect on mood
  3. Plants
    • List of plant species
    • Trees: when they leaf out, when they lose leaves (N.B.: not just deciduous trees, conifers lose some needles every year) (include impact on mood)
    • Annual plants: when sprout, when flower, when go to seed
    • What organisms eat the various plants
  4. Birds, mammals, and other vertebrates
    • List of species observed
    • Birds: times of migration, breeding, nesting, molting
    • Mammals and other vertebrates: times of breeding and raising young
    • Predator/prey relationships, and/or food sources; times and locations of feeding
    • Habitat for each species
  5. Invertebrates
    • Seasonal appearances of invertebrates (e.g., cicadas)
    • Eating, breeding, other
  6. Interrelationships between humans and other species
    • Humans as food sources (e.g., squirrels and human trash, pigeons eating bread crumbs, etc.)
    • Humans as habitat providers (e.g., raptors which nest on skyscrapers, rats living in subways, etc.)
    • Species humans kill (e.g., roadkill, rat traps, etc.)
    • Emotional and spiritual effect of other species on humans
  7. Other?

Thanks to Mike for prompting me to post this.