Churches As Marketing Institutions

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from my husband, Dr. Todd Green. He specializes in Modern European Church History and specifically on the concepts of secularization and church/state relationships.

When I’m not busy preparing lectures and grading papers for undergraduates, I spend many of my waking hours thinking about how the modern world has changed the way churches operate.  I find it helpful to think of this change in terms of marketing.  Churches in the modern West must operate as marketing institutions.  This was not always the case.  Five hundred years ago, there was no real market when it came to religion.  One church dominated the landscape and had a virtual monopoly on religion.  The Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth century didn’t really change this.  Throughout Europe, each nation had a state-supported, tax-funded church that did not allow rival churches to operate.  People had no choice but to participate in the state church.  This meant that churches didn’t have to cater to the religious demands and desires of the people. Why should they when their survival depended not on the whims of the people but on the favor of kings, princes, and governments.

Things are different today.  Much of the West is characterized by a relatively open religious marketplace. This is particularly true in the U.S. Taxes and government coercion no longer provide a safety net for religion.  In other words, for churches to survive, they must attract members and convince members to make voluntary contributions of money and time.  Churches can do this only if they are successful at marketing their “product” and doing a better job of it than other religious communities (not to mention secular institutions).

Not everyone may be comfortable with thinking of churches like this, but this is the legacy of the modern world.  Churches must now go to great lengths to try and read the market, to gauge what potential “consumers” are interested in when it comes to a church, and to respond to these demands.  Contemporary worship services, childcare, youth groups, book clubs, fellowship activities, indoor gymnasiums - these are just some of the products that churches offer to people who are shopping around for a church home.  And this does not even touch specifically on theology.  Plenty of churches package doctrinal positions as products in the hopes of attracting like-minded consumers.  So if you are theologically opposed to gay marriage or to the Iraq War, all you have to do is find the church that includes the “right” position in the packaged product it is offering to consumers.

Churches that know their market and better respond to it are churches that survive and grow. So the debate in a given church over whether to have a rock band perform at a Sunday worship service is not simply a debate over musical tastes within the congregation.  It’s a debate over how to respond to the market and to the potential demands of consumers (in this case, likely younger consumers).

There is a pitfall to navigating the religious marketplace.  Churches can become so concerned with meeting the demands of the marketplace that they wrongly equate success with growth in membership and revenues.  But is this really the standard of success that churches should follow?  Can’t the market be wrong?  Doesn’t the church have a responsibility to challenge consumers when their demands amount to bad theology? 

A market-driven church will always struggle to find the courage and the will to challenge people to reexamine what they are demanding to begin with. Movements such as civil rights never would have succeeded if not for the courageous churches that chose not to follow the whims of the religious marketplace, particularly since there were plenty of Christians in the South who demanded segregation and who did so for religious reasons. 

It’s true that if churches are going to survive in this day and age, they must take seriously the demands of the religious marketplace.  But if churches are going to have a positive impact on the world at large, they will have to learn to rise above market demands when the need calls. I may be a heretic for saying this, but I think there are far more important things for churches to consider than their own survival and self-preservation.