Our church has gotten involved in strategy planning and marketing. Help me understand how this language and these endeavors are not just crass worldliness.
Strategy planning and marketing are practices used by for-profit businesses and corporations, often to great effect. Planning is a deliberate effort to analyze the core mission and values of a corporation and to develop strategies to fulfill them. Marketing is a business practice that studies consumers to determine ways to reach more customers with a product.
Do churches pursue strategy planning and marketing principles in crass, unholy ways? Of course. Taken to extreme, business practices can reduce the gospel to a product and people to consumers of religious services. When churches use planning and marketing to discover what people want, it is tempting to fashion the gospel to their liking. The gospel is compromised; the ministers substitute techniques for the Holy Spirit in order to achieve a quick sale; the recipients of ministry are left with froth instead of substance. The use of business methods to manipulate results may create institutional and numerical success, but at the expense of God's kingdom.
In The Jesus Way, Eugene Peterson gets to the heart of the matter: “We can't gather a God-fearing, God-worshipping congregation by cultivating a consumer-pleasing, commodity-oriented congregation. … We can't suppress the Jesus way in order to see the Jesus truth. The Jesus way and the Jesus truth must be congruent. Only when the Jesus way is organically joined with the Jesus truth do we get the Jesus life.”
This, however, is only one side of the case. Churches can, even should, use strategy planning and principles of marketing. Here's why:
First, a church is a spiritual community, birthed by the Holy Spirit to proclaim the story of redemption, to demonstrate the love of God and to make disciples. But a church also is a human institution, a nonprofit organization with a budget, property and employees. The spiritual mission of a church can be advanced best by wise business practices. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Second, Jesus followed a strategic plan. He initially instructed his 12 disciples to skip the Gentiles and Samaritans and go first to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” — target marketing. He told them what to say, what to take and leave behind, what to do when they were welcomed and rejected and whom to fear — strategy planning. Before he ascended, Jesus gathered his friends and said their mission was to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8).
Many practices used by businesses are neither sacred nor secular. They are value-neutral. How we use them determines whether they are worldly or godly. So use what the world supplies, but do it in a way that does not compromise the gospel.
Michael Clingenpeel, Pastor
River Road Church, Baptist, Richmond
Right or Wrong? is sponsored by the T.B. Maston Chair of Christian Ethics at Hardin-Simmons University's Logsdon School of Theology. Contributors include Baptists in Virginia, Texas, Missouri and other states. Send your questions about how to apply your faith to btillman@hsutx.edu.