Posted on 11/27/2006 7:42:46 AM PST by Alex Murphy
BARRINGTON, Ill. -- As dusk settles on this neighborhood of 1920s 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 Frazee, a pastor at the Willow Creek Community Church, says a prayer.
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.
It's the first night of "The Table," a new program offered by Willow Creek - a nondenominational megachurch that regularly draws several thousand people to its services at a 155-acre campus nearby, in South Barrington. "The Table," however, is deliberately kept small as Willow Creek seeks innovative ways to meet the changing needs of churchgoers searching for ways to express their faith.
Willow Creek's shift in strategy mirrors moves by other houses of worship across a number of denominations to overhaul the programs they offer to build their congregations. These organizations say they are modeling their outreach practices on proven business and marketing strategies - not unlike what Wal-Mart is doing by adding more-fashionable clothes or what Borders is doing with its smaller "express" bookstores - to reach potential new members or to keep existing ones. They are also changing how they deliver those messages, using videocasts on cell phones and other new technologies, including an increasing emphasis on blogs and podcasts.
Bill Hybels, the founding and senior pastor of Willow Creek, has used business-world strategies - notably branding and word-of-mouth marketing - to help the church grow from 125 congregants 30 years ago into the megachurch it is today. While Hybels says he does not use marketing techniques to spread God's word, "we do attempt to harness the full potential of modern technology and business strategies to communicate with our members and our community."
He has also brought in advisers like Frazee, who use business ideas to spread the message of the church. Frazee said many of his ideas grew out of a friendship he had with a Texas developer. "I mentored him in spiritual matters and he mentored me in transferable concepts to the church from his world of business," Frazee said. "I would say it was one of the many factors that led me down a path to the 'Table' concept."
The new messages - from Willow Creek and other nondenominational churches to mainstream denominations like the Episcopal and the United Methodist churches - tend to focus on connectedness, theology and shared values.
For the last three years, the United Methodist Church has been running a broadly based national advertising campaign with the tagline: "Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors." By the time the campaign ends in 2008, it will have spent $20 million; the effort includes print and cable TV advertisements. The church will then begin a new four-year campaign focused on younger people.
The United Church of Christ has spent close to $3.5 million on television ads that gained attention earlier this year when CBS and NBC refused to broadcast them, saying they implied that other churches rejected people based on their lifestyles.
This year, the church will spend around $50,000 to advertise on Internet blogs in the weeks before Christmas. By clicking on links on the blogs, viewers will be able to see the ads the networks would not run. The church says that this will be its largest Internet advertising effort to date.
"What makes this kind of advertising so effective is that it reaches an audience that isn't in the traditional church cycle," said the Rev. Robert Chase, the Church of Christ's communications director. "But they are still looking for a spiritual home."
As a sign of how powerful some of these new marketing efforts can be, 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 proximity, Frazee said, so that people began to meet neighbors who weren't just like themselves.
"In the early church, people didn't get on their camels to go to Bethany to worship," said 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."
Willow Creek, which says it has 6,100 participating members, advertised "The Table" on the home page of its Web site, www.willowcreek.org, and used the site to match members' high school districts with a "Table" in their neighborhood.
While megachurches like Willow Creek are still among the nation's fastest-growing places of worship, a study released last month by the Institute for the Studies of Religion at Baylor University found that academics and religious leaders say that people seeking religion today want something else from churches. This is encouraging churches to develop new messages and new ways to spread them.
"The shifts aren't antithetical to the megachurches, but it does have something to do with the difference between how baby boomers worship and how younger generations want to worship," says Robert B. Whitesel, who teaches at Indiana Wesleyan University and the author of "Inside the Organic Church: Learning From 12 Emerging Congregations" (Abingdon Press, $18).
"The younger generation sees the megachurches as too production-oriented, too precise," he continued. "They want church to be more authentic. There is a feeling among this generation that there has been a waning emphasis on the spiritual."
The United Methodist Church is finding similar trends in its early research into how to reach Generation X - people born in the 1960s and 1970s, the generation that followed the boomers - as it tries to reverse a decline in membership.
"They want a more traditional understanding of religion and faith," said the Rev. Larry Hollon, general secretary of United Methodist Communications, the marketing and outreach arm of the church. "The contemporary worship that we've come to see in the past couple of decades appeals to the baby boomer, but younger generations connect with a more traditional style of worship." he said.
While denominations like the United Church of Christ hope to use advertising to rebuild their membership totals, Willow Creek's intentions with "The Table" are more about retaining the congregation than increasing its size.
"This can't be primarily about making Willow bigger," Frazee said. Instead, he said, he hopes that these experiences will extend the idea of church beyond the notion of practicing in one specific place.
"For a business, creating an experience may provide a means to an end, such as selling a product," he said. "But for the church, the experience of community and belonging is our end. It is the sense of belonging with God both here and in the kingdom to come."
He has also brought in advisers like Frazee, who use business ideas to spread the message of the church. Frazee said many of his ideas grew out of a friendship he had with a Texas developer. "I mentored him in spiritual matters and he mentored me in transferable concepts to the church from his world of business," Frazee said. "I would say it was one of the many factors that led me down a path to the 'Table' concept."
Nancy Pearcey, in her book, Total Truth, discusses the trend toward using business tactics in the church...and not doing "the Lord's work in the Lord's way." She asks a very important question, does God bless work done in His name, but employing marketing and business tactics that don't necessarily honor Him?
Just wondering if anyone's doing "The Whole Counsel of God, Including the Parts You Don't Want To Hear" as a marketing strategy.
I dunno, but a year or more back some FReepers were trying to convince us that "the Whole Counsel of God" can be found just in the epistles of the Apostle Paul. They went on to claim that anything Paul failed to mention by name in his epistles (i.e. Hell, eternal punishment, etc) can be excluded from the "Whole Counsel".
My counterargument was that it takes all sixty-six books of the Old and New Testament to express the whole counsel of God. They, in turn, appeared to be arguing for a much smaller sampling, i.e. "The Whole Counsel of God, Excluding the Parts You Don't Want To Hear".
FReepers were trying to convince us that "the Whole Counsel of God" can be found just in the epistles of the Apostle Paul.
At a guess, neo-Marcionists or some extreme variant of dispensationalism.
Nancy Pearcey, in her book, Total Truth, discusses the trend toward using business tactics in the church...and not doing "the Lord's work in the Lord's way." She asks a very important question, does God bless work done in His name, but employing marketing and business tactics that don't necessarily honor Him?
Which gets dangerously close to the dreaded regulative principle of worship ("oooouuuuuuuuu").
[sigh] -- sounds like yet another book I need to put in the queue to read.
There is nothing novel about Christians meeting in their homes for prayer, instruction, and fellowship.
I teach Biblical Worldview classes, and have read many of the books on the subject. This is one of the best, written by a "disciple" of Francis Schaeffer, and a co-author with Chuck Colson.
Good book, btw.
CC&E
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