Seeker Friendly Churches as Church Marketing
With the rise of Yuppie Business culture in the late 1980s and 1990s, Churches tried to boost sagging attendance by applying the marketing principals of the MBA degree. This spawned numerous "Doctorate of Ministry" (DMin) degrees in various seminaries, focused on church growth and marketing. This led to what has been termed "Seeker Friendly Churches"; churches who felt that the way to increase attendance was to water down worship and the Gospel and give the "masses" what they were looking for -- exciting, entertaining worship and messages in brief, easily consumable "sound bites." i.e. bringing Television into the churches. Originally the idea was to attract non-believers by making the Gospel "accessible", expecting that the new members would then join small groups and be witnessed to by knowledgeable, Bible literate believers. The new members would then receive the Gospel and come to faith. Unfortunately, however, in most such churches, with emphasis on attracting members through loud exciting Rock music (sometimes with flashy light shows), and "preaching" focused on 12-step self-help messages, frequently accompanied by a dearth of actual scripture reading, "coming to faith" has come to have very little meaning other than joining a type of Christianish club, and those who truly are believers find little to help them grow and mature in faith. Marvin Dawn discusses this: "The pole of truth is essential to keep the Church alive with theological content and depth. The pole of love is necessary to minister to those who need the truth. To cling tenaciously to truth in a way that excludes the uninitiated is to lose love in a gnostic superiority. On the other hand, to be driven only by a marketing analysis of what people 'need' is to lose the uniqueness of the Church's truth in a false attempt at love. Going to the extreme at either pole loses both poles entirely. Unloving truth is not true, nor is untruthful marketing love at all." -- Marva J. Dawn, Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for the Turn-Of-The-Century Culture (C) Copyright 1995 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.