Evangelical Churches + MBAs = ?!?!

[ds1973]

I ran across this article last week:

Earthly Empires

How evangelical churches are borrowing from the business playbook

http://yahoo.businessweek.com/magazine/con...34001_mz001.htm

While it makes me sick, it is interesting the way they have leveraged business practices to swell their ranks:

- Positive messages

- Strategic use of "loss leaders" (eg free food) to keep the customers coming.

- Understand your customer (culture, interests, etc)

- Elimination of centralized, top-down decision making can result in a nimble organization that responds quickly to market demands.

- Importance of "public relations"

- Diversity of services providing "one stop shopping"

Interesting outakes from the article, my comments in bold:

"Pastor Joel is one of a new generation of evangelical entrepreneurs transforming their branch of Protestantism into one of the fastest-growing and most influential religious groups in America. Their runaway success is modeled unabashedly on business. They borrow tools ranging from niche marketing to MBA hiring to lift their share of U.S. churchgoers. Like Osteen, many evangelical pastors focus intently on a huge potential market -- the millions of Americans who have drifted away from mainline Protestant denominations or simply never joined a church in the first place."

Which mysticism is more dangerous??

"savvy leaders are creating Sunday Schools that look like Disney World (DIS ) and church cafés with the appeal of Starbucks"

"they scrap staid hymns in favor of multimedia worship and tailor a panoply of services to meet all kinds of consumer needs, from divorce counseling to help for parents of autistic kids. .... To make newcomers feel at home, some do away with standard religious symbolism -- even basics like crosses and pews -- and design churches to look more like modern entertainment halls than traditional places of worship"

"evangelicalism's theological flexibility gives it the freedom to adapt to contemporary culture. With no overarching authority like the Vatican, leaders don't need to wrestle with a bureaucratic hierarchy that dictates acceptable behavior."

Interesting revelation from other churches:

"there are growing tensions, with some mainline Protestants offended by their conservative politics and brazen marketing. "Jesus was not a capitalist; check out what [He] says about how hard it is to get into heaven if you're a rich man," says the Reverend Robert W. Edgar, general secretary of the liberal National Council of Churches."

I give the reverend credit, he's got that one right. Jesus was NOT a Capitalist.

They hire Harvard MBAs:

"Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., formed a consulting arm called Willow Creek Assn. It earned $17 million last year, partly by selling marketing and management advice to 10,500 member churches from 90 denominations. Jim Mellado, the hard-charging Harvard MBA who runs it, last year brought an astonishing 110,000 church and lay leaders to conferences on topics such as effective leadership."

They suck the kids in and then take over the weak minds of their parents:

"Kids are often a prime target audience for megachurches. The main campus of Groeschel's Life Church in Edmond, Okla., includes a "Toon Town" of 3D buildings, a 16-foot high slide, and an animatronic police chief who recites rules. All the razzmatazz has helped Life Church quadruple its Sunday school attendance to more than 2,500 a week. "The kids are bringing their parents to church," says children's pastor Scott Werner"

Some relatively good news at the end though:

"The ranks of Americans who express no religious preference have quadrupled since 1991, to 14%, according to a recent poll. Despite the megachurch surge, overall church attendance has remained fairly flat."

I tried not to quote too much of the article, but it was pretty long. Anyway they get their message out in simple easy to understand jargon. This is one thing that has always bothered me about the population. It's so much easier for people to tune out and accept religious ideas (easy, the priest/minister tells you what to think and how to live) than to actually engage their minds to understand and integrate a philosophy like Objectivism into their lives.

We're surrounded by sheeple....

Demetrius

[Eric Mathis]

I ran across this article last week:

- Positive messages

- Strategic use of "loss leaders" (eg free food) to keep the customers coming.

- Understand your customer (culture, interests, etc)

- Elimination of centralized, top-down decision making can result in a nimble organization that responds quickly to market demands.

- Importance of "public relations"

- Diversity of services providing "one stop shopping"

It strikes me that these churchmen are realizing their goal in a very rational fashion: by grasping what goes on in the real world, specifically what motivates people. Perhaps more knowledge of the science of marketing could benefit Objectivists and other advocates of laissez faire.

[ds1973]

I agree. My wife is a smart, rational woman (we're both engineers) but she is not someone who enjoys reading deep non-fiction material (like OTPOAR). There must be a better way to "package" Objectivism such that its core concepts can be marketed to the masses.

Fiction, such as Atlas and The Fountainhead, are great examples of packaging Objectivism for "the masses". My wife loved those books.

Edison was part inventor but much of his success stemmed from his being part salesman. Never underestimate the importance of sales and marketing. You can have the best product in the world and if you can't market it, you lose to the competition who can.

Demetrius