American Churches and Corporations: How Churches are Going Corporate

Just as corporations in America are pushing religion and spirituality, churches in America are adopting values and practices from the corporate world. They have mission statements, management teams, consulting services, and so forth. Whatever happened to the simple gospel of Jesus? Whatever happened to simply taking up a cross and following Jesus?

The Economist reports:

Forget those local worthies who help with the vicar’s coffee mornings and arrange flowers. American churches have started dubbing their senior functionaries CEOs and COOs. (North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia, even has a director of service programming. Can Chief Theological Officers be far behind?) And forget about parish meetings in which people bat about random ideas on how to keep the church going. America is spawning an industry of faith-based consultancies. ...

Willow Creek is based on the same principle as all successful businesses: putting the customer first. Back in 1975 the church’s founder, Bill Hybels, conducted an informal survey of suburban Chicagoans, asking them why they did not go to church, and then crafted his services accordingly. He removed overtly religious images such as the cross and stained glass. He jazzed up services with videos, drama and contemporary music. And he tried to address people’s practical problems in his sermons.

Can there really be any question but that churches like these take at least as much, if not more, from contemporary American culture as they do from the Bible and ancient Christian traditions? That by itself isn’t a problem, though; the real problem occurs when these Christians begin to imagine that they are following a “true” Christianity which is independent of culture, time, class, place, etc.

[T]his rapid growth brings problems in its wake too—problems that usually end up forcing churches to become yet more business-like and management-obsessed. The most obvious challenge is managing size. You cannot just muddle through if you have an annual income of $55m (like Lakewood in 2004) or employ 450 full- and part-time staff (like Willow Creek). Such establishments need to set up a management structure with finance departments and even human-resources departments. They also need to start thinking—like Mr Hybels—about the relationship between the religious leadership and the management team.

Another problem is subtler: how do you speak directly to individual parishioners when you have a church the size of a stadium? ... Growth in religious organisations is proving just as addictive as it is in corporate ones, and successful churches are reaching deep into business theory to feed their habit. They use strategic planning and strategic “visions” to make sure they know where they are headed.

They need to have visions and mission statements in order to know what they are doing and where they are going? One would think that they would get all the vision and direction they would need right form the Bible or, if necessary, from Christian tradition. They are looking to sources which aren’t just non-Christian but, in many ways, exhibit values which are contrary to many aspects of Christianity.

There is no shortage of criticisms of these fast-growing churches. One is that they represent the Disneyfication of religion. Forget about the agony and ecstasy of faith. Willow Creek and its sort are said to serve up nothing more challenging than Christianity Lite— a bland and sanitised creed that is about as dramatic as the average shopping mall.

So much for the idea of taking up your cross and making sacrifices — perhaps Jesus had it all wrong.

Another criticism is that these churches are not really in the religion business but in the self-help trade. Mr Osteen and his equivalents preach reassuring sermons to “victors not victims”, who can learn to be “rich, healthy and trouble free”. God, after all, “wants you to achieve your personal best”. The result is a wash: rather than making America more Christian, the mega-churches have simply succeeded in making Christianity more American.

Jesus taught his disciples to serve others; American pastors are teaching people to just help themselves. They are certainly being helped by this message, getting rich of off telling people what they want to hear rather than trying to get them to change their lifestyles.

The Economist argues that these churches are responding to a demand in the market and give people the choice they desire. That’s a very business-like defense and is what you would expect a magazine with a name like Economist to say. If this were a business, it would be fair defense too — but whether churches and religion should be treated like a business is precisely the question which is at hand, therefore, this “defense” commits the fallacy of begging the question.

Furthermore, the defense that the leaders of these churches hold very traditional, even fundamentalist, beliefs only raises more questions than it answers. Is this fundamentalism getting through despite the glitzy format? Or is the fundamentalist message actually propagating further precisely because it is sneaking in under the radar while people’s vision is jammed up with bright lights and loud music?

The Economist doesn’t even hint at these issues, much less give them serious attention. All in all, just the sort of superficial “journalism” we’ve come to expect from them.

 

Read More:

• Religious Right
• Religious Right News