Commodify me, oh Lord, part 9
Friday, March 28, 2008
Megachurch: New revival or economic disease"Disease" sounds really harsh and judgmental. I must have an axe to grind or something. While there may be some truth in both of those statements, the disease hypothesis is not original to me--and it is not meant to be pejorative. It was something I came across in my research yesterday that I think is worthy of some reflection. As far as I can google, it has only been blogged about one other place (here), so this post should almost double its exposure.
In 2006 Mark Chaves (of Duke University Dept. of Religion) penned a cover story for Christian Century that plumbed the depths of the available quantitative and qualitative research to uncover the driving forces behind the rise of megachurches in America since 1970. His findings deserve serious consideration.For the past decade or more there has been an argument in evangelicalism—one I’ve participated in from my own small corner of limited influence. The argument has been over whether megachurches are successful (by the numbers of people attending them) because of their ability to attract the unchurched through innovative outreach methods involving marketing, a consumer experience orientation and large gatherings with the high production values of entertainment media. Critics have argued that overall church attendance in America is not growing, but has stagnated:
“It sometimes is said that the secret to megachurch success is that megachurches have figured out how to attract the unchurched. But overall church attendance is not increasing. The only study I know of that compares very large churches with smaller churches concludes that there is no difference between the two in the percentage of new members who were not previously involved with a church. So the increasing concentration of people in the very largest churches is not a consequence of megachurches tapping into a previously uninvolved population. Increased concentration is occurring mainly because people are shifting from smaller to larger churches, not because people are shifting from uninvolvement to involvement in big churches.”
So what is the impetus for all this megachurch growth—this concentration of more people into larger congregations—which has been accelerating since the 1970s? Chaves. informed by research, offers an increasingly plausible explanation: It’s the economy, stupid:
“…the increased concentration of people in the very largest churches is caused in part by rising costs that make it more and more difficult to run a church at a customary level of programming and quality.
Churches suffer…from ‘Baumol's cost disease.’ This is a phenomenon identified in the mid-1960s by economists William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen. The basic idea is simple: if there is increasing productivity and efficiency in some sectors of the economy, and if wages increase in those sectors, then wages also will increase in other sectors, or else talent will move to the sectors in which wages are increasing.”
Professional church workers (pastors, staff) require ongoing wage and benefit increases to keep pace with life in the U.S. economy. But churches don’t usually have the ability to become more economically productive.
“…churches face ever-rising real costs with no significant opportunities to reduce those costs by becoming more efficient. The only options in such a situation are to sacrifice quality or increase revenue.”
It’s no coincidence that revenues (via giving) for churches have not kept pace since the 1970s, when the evangelical megachurch trend began.
“…increases in donations are not often compared to the rate at which the costs of running a church have increased. Beginning in about 1970 the rate at which donations increased stopped keeping pace with the rate at which the costs of running a church increased.”
Megachurches offer better economies of scale, and their growth is directly correlated to their ability to provide more people with the (customer) services no longer available from smaller churches due to rising costs for operations and labor. The cold, calculated truth is that megachurch growth is being driven mostly by Christians shopping for better service at a cheaper price—the Wal-Mart phenomenon in more ways that one.Chaves offers a theory that, rather than reassuring me in the thought that megachurches have a kingdom impact (I think some do), convinces me that the commodification of the church is far more entrenched in American Christianity than I dared assume. And as it turns out, the church is being commodified by the consumer before the church returns the favor and commodifies the audience and the message.
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Commodify me, oh Lord, part 8
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Rich media, poor churchContinuing with my last post in the “Commodify me, oh Lord” series, I came across this quote from Noami Klein taken from an online interview for the 2004 PBS Frontline report, The Persuaders. She again mentions Disney’s Celebration community like she did in her No Logo documentary, but then adds this additional point:
“It’s one of the ironies of our branded age, that unbranded space. Public space, or pseudo-public space, is now a luxury item that is only really available to the very rich. Once you move up the class hierarchy, things get a lot more tranquil and quiet, and you sort of pay not to be marketed to. HBO is the same in a way. You pay extra not to be advertised to. Bahamas bans McDonald's. When rich people get together, they want to be protected from the brands that they got rich creating.”
Consider what this implies: Given the means, people will pay a premium to avoid advertising. Aside from being further evidence that people prefer not to be constantly sold to, this is the reason that advertisers are looking for ways to fuse product pitches with entertainment. For my own graduate project, it’s one of the reasons the film industry is creating Christian teaching materials to get their promotional product (movies) messages into churches. It’s hard to avoid an ad when you don’t know it’s there. NYU’s Mark Crispin Miller explains this in a Frontline online interview:
“Advertising is just a commercial form of propaganda. What propaganda has always wanted to do is not simply to suffuse the atmosphere, but to become the atmosphere. It wants to become the air we breathe. It wants us not to be able to find a way outside of the world that it creates for us.”Make no mistake. This is the hot strategy of today’s marketing strategists in terms of the multi-billion dollar evangelical Christian market. It is being played out every time a “faith and values” movie, Christian book or major label worship artist recording is released.
The bottom line is that some pastors and church leaders are now looking to these media to co-create the culture of the church community. There is a complicit effort to incorporate these marking messages into church teaching and worship because they allow pastors to leverage the powerful narratives of popular culture, or provide appealing and popular music for worship leaders. In a consumer culture, entertainment media is the ticket to the “relevancy” show. The audience/congregation pays the cost for these goodies by lending their attention to the subtle, hidden promotional message. See the new movie. Buy the new book. Download the new song.
But are we to the point where people may begin paying not to be marketed to in the church they attend? By paying, I mean going elsewhere, driving farther, giving up other perceived social and spiritual benefits, or quitting church altogether. I don’t think we are all the way there yet—although I personally arrived at this juncture two years ago. What is much more likely at the present is that the pervasive “sell” of today’s church culture has become a primary deterrent to reaching those who would otherwise be compelled by the radical, counter-cultural story of the Kingdom.
While Klein makes the comment below based on her concerns about society and culture in general, let’s apply it directly to the context of the church. Speaking about the type of brand marketing taking place today, Klein comments:
“…they've done our market research for us and proven that we actually really do want more than we're getting from our culture, which would mean that we have our marching orders. There are these desires that are being expressed in ways that they're not actually being met through shopping, and it's a challenge to try to meet them in other ways.”
I submit that helping meet the deeper spiritual needs of people (in contrast to their felt social-consumer needs) cannot be done by creating and presenting a sanitized facsimile of consumer culture, or by employing an advertising and marketing paradigm to communicate and engage them. People will pay not to listen—in more ways than one.
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Losing face on the mean streets of NYC
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
We tuned into Charlie Rose last night to get the Wall Street back story on the Bear Stearns bailout from NYT’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. (An extraordinary story, by the way. You may not realize how close the U.S. economy came to a depression-style bank run over the weekend.)Of course, we immediately noticed that Charlie had been assaulted by someone or something recently (see inset picture).
It turns out Charlie took a face-plant early yesterday while walking the streets of New York. He apparently tripped while shuffling along with his MacBook Air, and sacrificed his distinguished good looks for the sake of rescuing the world’s thinnest laptop from an almost certain deadly fate.Charlie is awesome—don’t get me wrong. But does he really need to show off by putting on airs? Sorry. Couldn’t resist that one.
In hindsight, we suggest a nice laptop backpack, providing both MacBook protection and hands-free operation for safer pedestrian endeavors. It may help him save face in the future. Please, somebody stop this post.
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Touch the third great platform
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Last week Apple introduced its SDK for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Whereas often Apple can be accused of over promising (or over hyping) and under delivering, this presentation was a case where they exceeded the conventional expectations of most tech heads. Yes, you’ll need to get the new goodies (starting in June) from the iTunes Appstore exclusively. But the announcement makes it clear that this is a mobile computing platform with the potential for a new kind of software application. 
In short, the coolest stuff you’ll see on an iPhone or iPod Touch hasn’t been coded yet. The sky is the limit. Plus, a $100 million venture capital fund for software endeavors targeting the touch platform, and a strong enterprise push via compatibility with Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, along with Lotus Notes, and the future looks quite exciting. Check out some of the demos they included in Thursday’s presentation.John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm partnering with Apple, sees the iPhone and iPod Touch emerging as the “third great platform” for software makers after the personal computer and the worldwide web. Here’s Doerr quoted in the London Financial Times:
“In your pocket, you have something that’s broadband and connected all the time. It knows who you are and where you are. That’s a big deal. It’s bigger than the personal computer.”
Will it be bigger than the PC? Wait and see.
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Commodify me, oh Lord, part 7
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
What Disney knowsMy research has been on a roll recently, obtaining copies of some key documentaries off the web. I now have access to The Ad and the Ego, Behind the Screens and No Logo. I plan to use clips from each of these in my road show presentation.
Most recently I watched Naomi Klein’s No Logo (2003), which focuses on the negative effects of brand globalization on culture and workers across the globe. There was one instance among many that really stood out to me—and it promises to be the primary example in my closing argument for a commercial free faith movement. Since I was able to obtain the No Logo transcript from the MEF, I’ll paste the specific quote from Klein about branding here, and follow it with comments on what her example means from my perspective:
Because Disney has been at this for so much longer than most companies, they have gone further. …in a sense they’ve reached brand nirvana, they have built a Disney town called Celebration, Florida. You can live your whole life inside the brand and that’s what thousands of families have done, they’ve packed up the kids and moved into the Disney brand full-time, they send their kids to the Disney school, and they elect representatives to the Disney council, so it’s a fully privatized life. What’s interesting about the world’s first branded town is that there are no brands there. If you go to Celebration, Florida you will see not a franchise, no McDonalds, you won’t see any billboards, you’ll see lots of green spaces and parks and kids riding around on bicycles. And Disney says that this is because they built Celebration, Florida as a monument to the ideal of the American town, of public space. Public space is a big part of that. Now that may be true but there’s another aspect of it as well and that aspect is that when you have finally reached your absolute brand nirvana where you have built the dream world in three dimensions and you actually have people living there full-time, the first thing you want to is you want to slam the door behind you. And you want to make sure that there aren’t any competing messages that are in any way interrupting with this perfect synergized, cross-promoted marketing moment.While many churches that subscribe to an advertising and marketing paradigm of evangelism may be trying to learn the finer points of branding and marketing from media giants like Disney, Klein’s example of Disney’s Celebration community in Florida has a great deal more to tell us. Although totally unintended on their part, Disney’s strategic approach with Celebration teaches us two critical things about the commercial media saturation that people live with in today’s culture: First, the fact that there are no brands and overt advertising in Celebration indicates that Disney knows people, given a choice, would not choose to be inundated with marketing and advertising. Advertising overload is ugly, noisy and does nothing but detract from the idyllic community Disney wants Celebration to embody. Their emphasis is on pleasant, clutter-free public spaces. Even Disney tones down its own branding as the people living in Celebration have totally immersed themselves in a single brand environment. Second, Disney knows that any competition for people’s attention is counter productive to the environment it wants to create and provide. Disney “slams the door” on outside marketing influences because it can. It makes perfect sense. Why would you want anything interfering with your customer’s brand experience if you could control it? Since Disney can, they do. Subsequently, apart from the Disney brand, Celebration is a mostly brand-free culture.
What is instructive for The Church about Disney’s Celebration community from a commercial-free faith standpoint? It has nothing to do with branding a church or enveloping people in a 360-degree brand experience for one hour on a Sunday. Instead, we need to think of it in terms of a more radical and counter-cultural opportunity. If people, given the choice, would rather be free of the constant cacophony of selling and marketing, where can they go to find an even temporary refuge? Assuming most people won’t or can’t move to Celebration, The Church should be expressed in terms of local communities that are intentional in maintaining a commercial free context for people. This context, if I’m right about cultural trends, could become more compelling to those outside of the faith over time as the volume level of promotional communication in our consumer culture continues to rise to new heights.Disney’s approach also supports the argument that allowing outside brands and marketing dilutes the community experience they are trying to maintain. Transfer that logic to the local church, where we have an established culture of faith. The entrance of commercial media into this context, through disguised movie, music, publishing and product promotion, can only serve to dilute the relational aspects of church culture by orienting more of the communication in the community toward things, as opposed to persons—orienting people more toward consumption of products, as opposed to encounter with God and others. Since we have an opportunity to defend the sanctuary of our community from the siege of commercial media, why shouldn’t we do exactly what Disney has done? That’s what Disney knows.
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Steampunk that Mac
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
For those unfamiliar with steampunk as a fantasy genre of literature, animation and film, see this wiki. Until yesterday, I had no idea this was also a genre of computer modding. Indeed, it elevates modding to an artistic craft.
The amazing inset pictures are of a steampunk conversion of a Mac Mini. While this type of thing is pretty “out there,” you have to admire the vision and skill that must have gone into this. The keyboard alone is extremely cool. But the ultimate is the case for the Mini itself. The hand-painted lettering and artwork (or maybe it’s decoupage) are amazing. And while the form factor is the same as before, you can totally believe the resulting object is an antique tin box—something your grandmother might keep her sewing needles and thread inside of, rather than a 2.3 GHz Intel dual core CPU.
I’d go another direction for the monitor, however. While this one has the appearance of an antique vanity mirror (flat screen), I’d be more inclined to imagine it as a cinemascope or other period appropriate visual technology held together with some crude brass and machine rivets. Some kind of crude projector and film screen would be fabulous.This beautiful ensemble was created as a wedding gift for the bride, so a more feminine approach is totally appropriate.
I'd love to see this done to a current model iMac--exchange the aluminum for some brass and rivets. Or even my G5 iMac. It's available for treatment in case any enterprising modder is interested. Truth be told, the G5 generates so much heat that I'm sure steam power would be a definite possibility.
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