Brad reflects on “Church Growth” strategies which tend toward marketing.

A Jewish God-fearer in a room full of Christians: What structure have we?

many have traded in community for business corporations, at least in structure. I often wonder if instead of formulas for getting more people to Church buildings, what would happen if we had books, conferences, classes, and the like that taught psychology, healthy social skills, humanities, ethics, creativity, and personal as well as interpersonal development? It would seem that “ministry” has become something that is done to people instead of for them. Somewhere along the way, focus shifted from genuinly loving and knowing people to herding them.

Yep. To be sure. It is the failure of “Christian community” in our Churches. It is not community at all, except in the most generally social, “society” type of way. It is not the alternative life that the Church was designed to be, and called to be. People simply are not KNOWN as they want and need to be. But it seems many in the Churches are not even aware of a better way, so programmed we are for the “event experience”.

Brad goes on to talk about the neccessity for the Church to discover its mission by discovering the gifts that its memebers bring to the table, and we do not do this by ignoring the actual journeys of persons. I get sick of heearing what I call “fortune cookie” sermons where there is nothing specific proclaimed to the present world we live in. It is a very general, “one size fits all” general beating around the bush talk. This “general ethic” is a sign, I think, of the abandonment of true community; of accountability to each other for our journeys as individulas, so that we might have SOME CLUE about what we are about. If we are limited to what I call “Church slogans” which come across as MARKETING hype that most can identify as phony or surface, then we are no longer in the Church as the humans that we are, but like cats being “herded” (Brad used the term “herding them”)

Here, it seems the Cluetrain Manifesto is instructive for us again. Get to know the people, and have them know each other. They recognize, as people do when dealing with marketing hype, that it is “corporate speak” and not really interested in them as people. The Church has its own “Church speak”, which, when taken with the usual absence of an emphasis on and a living out of a true relatedness and accountability, we recognize it as hype and not truly expressive of our deepest passions.