Marketing: zeitgeist of the late-modern* Church

What is clear from my own experience and research into church planting and megachurch models is the widespread adoption of an advertising and marketing paradigm. In short, success for a church is predicated on the attractional capabilities you bring to the crowded marketplace for consumer attention. Church leadership models have been transformed to mirror business structures, and the economic language of marketing has been adopted in the church right along with it. Over the past half century, this amounts to a paradigm shift in church ministry that has profoundly impacted the Church, leading to a rearrangement of congregations where larger churches with economic resources and compelling marketing have tended to get larger, and smaller churches have tended to get smaller or phase out. It has been zero sum.

It is the advertising and marketing paradigm of evangelism that makes the entry of other commercial media into the sacred frame of the church possible—even attractive to pastors and church leaders. Taken together, these contribute to the critical theological issue behind marketing and advertising messages invading the church. Advertising has its own ideology, whether it be used to do outreach, or allowed into the church context in order to underwrite ministry. Sut Jhally, communication and media professor from the University of Mass., provides a brief explanation:

“[Advertising] provides a particular vision of the world—a particular mode of self validation that is integrally connected with what one has rather than what one is—a distinction often referred to as one between ‘having’ and ‘being,’ with the latter now being defined through the former.”
- Sut Jhally

An advertising and marketing paradigm of evangelism and theology internalizes an exchange mentality in both the evangelist and the target—one where salvation can be “obtained.” It is made into a transaction. Not one where people are purchasing an object with money but, rather, one where their payment is in the form of their conscious attention. Their regard toward God and their conversion is objectified nonetheless. Christianity is possessed—something one “has” rather than what one “is.” In this way, faith is mediated through the advertising and marketing paradigm.

I’ve often heard the advertising and marketing paradigm vigorously defended by some pastors from the perspective of evangelism and outreach to the lost. Most recently, it turned up in an article from the Christian Science Monitor, “Churches seeking marketing-savvy breed of pastors,” quoting one marketer-turned pastor “with a heart for marketing”:

“It’s the medium of marketing that’s used to get a message across [in today’s culture], whether it’s an election or you’re trying to sell a product. But in this case, we’re just trying to hear the hope of a new life that is eternal.”

But what is at issue is the ideology of marketing and advertising in the culture we live in, and how it acts upon the messages it carries because of that ideology. The “medium of marketing” is not a values-neutral conduit in this culture—it’s much more than a dumb pipe, to borrow a term from the technology world. Again, Jhally succinctly nails this point:

“[Advertising] constantly propels us toward things as a means of satisfaction.”
- Sut Jhally

Here we find that the scripture has much to say that should move us away from an economic metaphor of salvation and the overall advertising and marketing paradigm. Following Jesus is about finding our identities, and life, “in” Him (John 15, and all over the NT). We are described as His children (Matthew 5, and all over the NT). The church is described as His bride (Matthew 25, and several other places in the NT). None of these identities are objects that we can “have.” They are ways of being that can only occur “in” Him.

How can we evangelize people through mediated messages that objectify them and the Kingdom without recognizing that the result will be groups of people conditioned to view their faith and their formation as something they must obtain and consume? If anything, the results from the much discussed Reveal Study (from Willow Creek) confirm as much. Of course, if you want to see this study in full, they would like to sell it to you. The paradigm runs deep, indeed.

*Note: I use the term “late modern” concerning the advertising and marketing paradigm because I feel it more accurately describes contemporary culture with specific regard to consumerism and mediated consciousness. This does not mean that I reject the overall notion of postmodernity in terms of the other elements of the socio-cultural shift that it attempts to define.
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