TruthBook Religious News Blog

By JEFF STRICKLER, Star Tribune
June 13, 2009

A Church Is A Business

Eyes roll when Rabbi Hayim Herring tells his fellow clergy that they should spend an hour a day on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Listeners at his seminars exchange smirks when he says blogging should be considered mandatory. They look aghast when he recommends posting short video clips from their sermons on YouTube.

It's a lot better than the reaction he used to get.

"They used to look at me as if I'd just said a four-letter word," said Herring, the former senior rabbi at Beth El Synagogue in St. Louis Park and now the executive director of STAR (Synagogues: Transformation and Renewal). But in its seven years, the organization has seen more converts to what many call one of the dirtiest words in religion: marketing.

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Labels: Facebook, Jeff Strickler, marketing, MySpace, religion, Twitter, YouTube

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Monday, March 24, 2008

Marketing The God Business

by Laurence D. Cohen

Few enterprises know the marketing challenge of attraction and retention more profoundly than the God business, the churches, religious denominations and faiths and cults and Obama worshipers.

It was sort of easy in the old days. Your parents were some sort of Presbyterians or something, you burst from the womb — and a new Presbyterian was born.

The latest national survey on religion from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life suggests a marketplace more akin to fast food and cars. The general market leader, Protestants, is losing market share faster than Ford and General Motors. Protestants will soon be less than 50 percent of the American market.

Even among Catholics, where brand loyalty was pretty high, Hispanics are gravitating to the evangelical products — and remaining Catholic customers are calling the 1-800 number and demanding to speak to a manager.

Disgruntled Prayer People

The Catholics did a major brand overhaul a while back, modernizing and updating the product line and sales pitch. As you might expect, many of the existing customers were furious. They don’t want no suburban, guitar-strumming, banner-waving Mass with a cool, new post-Vatican II liturgy and a with-it priest.

There are few barriers to entry in the American religion market; the Hindus and Buddists can open up a church on the corner with much the same ease as more mainline American faiths — and even among the mainline Protestants, there is a casualness among the faithful as to where they attend and to what degree they claim allegiance to one denomination or another. Crest and Colgate receive more loyalty than that.

The Pew survey suggests that about half the adult American population has changed religious affiliation.

The need for sharper marketing among the mainline Protestants has been apparent for years. A poll in 1996 indicated that the only thing most Americans knew about the Lutheran faith, for example, was that it was some sort of religion.

Some of this loss of marketing focus and denominational identity was intentional, of course. One suspects that many students at Wesleyan University in Middletown don’t know why the school is, or was, called Wesleyan — and at Trinity, students might be somewhat fuzzy about why the Book of Common Prayer was the volume of choice in the Trinity College chapel. Yale recently dropped the chapel’s formal United Church of Christ affiliation, without prompting a religious war or even a whimper.

The turmoil in the religious marketplace may or may not be a “crisis.” Many of the Founding Fathers encouraged such competitive energy, to avoid the tyranny of a dominant faith. James Madison praised America’s multiplicity of faiths, “for where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest.”

There’s a hint of anti-trust law in that. Praise the Lord.

Labels: affiliation, Catholic, Laurence D. Cohen, marketing, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, protestants, religion

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Sunday, November 25, 2007

A business model for saving souls

By Manya A. Brachear | Tribune religion reporter
November 24, 2007

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For more than three decades, Willow Creek Community Church has defined its success by tallying the throngs who walk through its doors.

But a survey recently revealed something the South Barrington mega-church hadn't realized: Some of its members had become unsatisfied, saying they felt abandoned on their spiritual journeys.

The research yielding this uncomfortable revelation came from the business world. Using a model originally designed to find what emotionally drives consumers to buy perfume, running shoes and insurance, each of Willow's members was placed on a spectrum of belief, ranging from curious about Christ to seeing Christ at the center of their lives.

It then pinpointed what kind of spiritual formation works best for each believer.

Willow Creek Association paid for similar surveys at 30 more churches, with similar results. Now Willow is offering to conduct surveys at 500 more churches around the world. More than 1,500 churches from 14 denominations applied, including Methodist, Lutheran and Roman Catholic.

"We are doing an exemplary job with people who are far from God and just beginning to explore Christian life," said Rev. Bill Hybels, Willow Creek's founder and senior pastor. "But there were some unpleasant surprises we had to face. If people are not feeling supported by the church, they don't grow in faith."

The business model doesn't sit well with all Christians. Some say the survey fails to grasp that not all things spiritual can be measured empirically. Though Rev. Erwin Lutzer of Moody Church commends Willow's intentions, he says it's risky to measure applause.

"The marketing approach might have some benefit, but we must be careful that we simply not consider our members to be customers who we need to satisfy," he said. "The care of souls is very different from the goal of satisfying shareholders. We must be willing to give people what they need, not just what they want."

But surveying customer satisfaction is part of how Willow became a model mega-church.

In 1975, Hybels spent six weeks knocking on doors to find out why people stayed home on Sunday mornings. Some didn't like the way pastors pestered them for money. Others described church as "boring," "predictable" and "irrelevant."

Hybels decided to "defer to the customer except where it conflicted with Scripture." With simple sermons, rock 'n' roll and no collection plate, Willow took off, growing to nearly 20,000 members.

Recently other mega-churches have left Willow in the dust by drawing even more members and retaining them. To figure out why Willow was static, Hybels turned to noted consumer scientist Eric Arnson.

For 25 years, Arnson studied consumers for Fortune 500 companies such as Nike and Procter & Gamble. He revolutionized the insurance industry by gauging buyers' attitudes toward risk and redefined the perfume market by mapping customers' romantic sentiments.

To do something similar for churches, Arnson "segmented the market" by defining churchgoers' relationships with Christ and placing them on a scale of Christian maturity. Questionnaires probed the circumstances that brought people to Willow and sought to rate their experience since then.

Arnson discovered that two-thirds of those surveyed traced spiritual growth to difficult times in their lives such as addiction or personal loss.

He also interviewed nearly 300 people who had left Willow; about half said they did so because the church was not helping them grow. Those who came to Willow 30 years ago said they were hearing the same message though their faith had matured.

"What we need is a different framework that says each of us is at a different place," said Greg Hawkins, Willow's executive pastor. "Creating a different lens for people would quite honestly generate higher satisfaction with the church."

Jerry Thornhill and his wife are among the seekers who came to Willow Creek based on its reputation as a relevant and welcoming place. And it was. "When we first started there, we really loved it," he said.

But after a few years, Thornhill said, "We felt like we were kind of stagnating."

Thornhill, who is a veterinarian. , only had time to attend church once a week, so he relied heavily on the message from the pulpit to stoke his faith. He found the guidance he was looking for at Harvest Bible Chapel, another mega-church in nearby Rolling Meadows.

Labels: business, church, Manya A. Brachear, marketing, spirituality, surveys, Willow Creek Community Church