When I was looking for a church community earlier this year, I asked around, looked online, and noted what churches were meeting in my area. During my search, I realized that, if the church were truly doing its job, I would have already known of their existence, right?
Out here in the Chicago suburbs, there tend to be quite a lot of churches. One morning, on my way to my first visit to Orchard, I noticed all of the different churches and their special promotional signs they put out for this particular Sunday morning. Bright colors, banners, ribbons, balloons...you name it. I found it interesting that these churches had to resort to these types of marketing in the first place.
When you think about it, would someone driving down the road doing their own thing on a Sunday morning actually stop and pull into a church parking lot based on the church's marketing efforts outside of their meeting place? Wouldn't building relationships be the most effective way to get your particular church's name--or Jesus' name--out there? Or better yet, wouldn't meeting and taking action outside the bounds of an institutional, physical church building be more effective?
I came across a post by Alan Knox that asks similar questions:
I’ve been wondering lately what would happen if we started finding signs saying “The church meets here” in more diverse locations. For example, we know from the New Testament that many times the church met in homes. What would happen if someone put a sign in their front yard that said, “The church meets here”? Or, even better, Acts 2 says the church met from house to house. What if that sign followed the believers from one house to another as they met together in different locations?
Taking it one step further, we know that God intends for his children to love and serve others. What if the church met in the most dilapidated house in the community? No, not the most dilapidated house owned by a member of the church, but the most dilapidated house in the community. What would happen if the church met in that run-down house and renovated it as they met together? After remodelling that house, the church could begin meeting in another house in need of repairs.
Some of you may be thinking, how would anyone know where the church was meeting? Isn’t it interesting that the church in the first century was able to meet from house to house, but, in the the twenty-first century – with twenty-first century communication – we don’t think we could meet in different locations. (I have a theory… I wonder if the desire to have one meeting location has less to do with whether or not other believers know where the church is meeting. Instead, we want others to know where the church is meeting so that they will come to the meeting, and we can call ourselves evangelistic, without ever communicating the gospel to anyone. It’s just a theory.) (emphasis added)
I love these ideas. It's interesting that evangelicals are supposed to be the ones most true to their name. They are supposed to be the ones who "reach out" the most. But many evangelical churches have ended up acting just like their mainline nemeses, ossifying in a physical building. Rather than work on the slow, difficult, often-frustrating relational and outward-focusing aspects of being the church, we let marketing do that job for us. And it's doing a sorry job.
Any thoughts? Does this critique of traditional church and church marketing leave any room for growth and discipleship? Or does asking that question assume a false dichotomy?
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