New-Time Religion : Megachurches Master the Art of Marketing for the Masses

Pastor Tim Timmons looked at the poster of the Christian punk rock band that had been booked into his church auditorium and wondered when the phones would start ringing.

“Their picture was just atrocious,” Timmons said, “the worst thing you’ve ever seen in your life.”

When the phones did start ringing, church board members were on the line.

“They said, ‘What are we doing in our auditorium?’ ” Timmons said. “ ‘Who is this group?’ I told them, I’m the pastor and not the youth man. We pay him a lot of money to be the youth man, and I want him to be the youth man. If he screws up, we’ll fire him. And if he makes it, we’ll crown him king.”

Now, four years later, Timmons can afford to look back and laugh. “It turned out to be one of the most wonderful things we ever had for young people. They packed the place, danced in the aisles. It made our board believers--if you can get kids to come, it builds bridges.”

South Coast Community Church, which Timmons started with 430 people who peeled off from another Newport Beach congregation, is one of Orange County’s “megachurches,” claiming an average Sunday morning attendance at three services and Sunday school of more than 6,500 people. And as Timmons looked out from church property at the undeveloped adjacent Irvine hillsides, where thousands of new homes are expected to be built, you can almost see his eyes glaze over.

That’s because Timmons, like many of his Christian brethren in the county, knows how to get people-- lots of people --to come to church.

They are clergymen to whom words like “retailing” and “marketing” and “packaging” are as palatable in the pulpit as John 3:16. Their techniques can be as sophisticated as direct mail and public opinion surveys or as splashy as the singing birds and 20-foot-high JumboTron video screen in the sanctuary of Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove.

Their strategies can be the use of guest stars on Sundays, ranging from U.S. Speaker of the House Jim Wright to former Harlem Globetrotter Meadowlark Lemon, or the booking of rock concerts on Friday nights after football games.

At some churches, the lure is even more fundamental and profound. Church grounds that a generation ago may have been home to ice cream socials, Bible school and a softball team have been turned into prolific social service networks, replete with day-care centers and preschools, gymnasiums and athletic fields, drug and alcohol counseling centers for teen-agers, and meeting places for Overeaters Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous.

The schedules of events are sometimes staggering. At the Crystal Cathedral, for example, a recent Sunday morning program listed 37 activities from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.

In some cases, the vision takes on prodigious proportions: Timmons said his church plans to spend $25 million over the next 10 years on expansion, to include an office complex, an elementary school, a second auditorium and perhaps a high school. The grandest plan calls for adding 27 acres to the church’s current 14 acres.

One county pastor called them the “full-service churches.” And while not all pastors and church observers agree, some say it’s the nature of the county--where people are used to top-drawer entertainment and personalities--that makes them resort to marketing for the masses.

“You go case by case, but we push hard that if it’s not illegal, immoral or fattening, we try to do it,” Timmons said. “We feel like we don’t want to come out smelling like a church, we don’t want to have that air about it, because sometimes there’s a piety that goes with that that doesn’t smell well.”

Whatever form it takes, the goal of many churches appears to be the same: to tap into the huge pool of potential churchgoers in Orange county, which is mistakenly perceived as some kind of latter-day Bible Belt where every family goes to church every Sunday. Rather, statistics suggest that thousands of families are finding other things to do with their Sunday mornings than go to church.

For example, 58% of Californians don’t claim church membership--the third-highest per-capita figure in the continental United States, according to 1980 figures (the latest available) from the Glenmary Research Center in Atlanta. The national average of so-called “unchurched” people is 41%, the center’s statistics show. California, Oregon and Washington form what one expert on church growth describes as “the Unchurched Belt of America.”

C. Peter Wagner, professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, said there is no reason to assume that the percentages for the county are significantly different. “You have a high divorce rate in Orange County,” Wagner said. “Marriages are on the brink of disaster. You have a rock generation of baby boomers who have . . . their view of institutions and what they think they ought to be.”

To find out what people want from a church, Mike Carlisle, pastor of Capistrano Valley Church, a few years ago commissioned a Nielsen survey.

“There were two important issues,” Carlisle said. “The most important was, does the church have credible leadership? And the second thing was, is there something for the whole family?

“That’s not typical of the U.S. as a whole, but it is for Orange County, where we’re living in a full-service mentality,” Carlisle said. “Everywhere you go, it’s very market oriented in Orange County. When people look for a church, they shop like they would do when looking for the best deal for a new car. They go where they have the best service.”

Carlisle conceded that the wholehearted embracing of modern marketing has been “a little bit of a surprise because churches don’t think in marketing terms, because it’s so much showmanship, so Hollywoodish. It doesn’t fit the image of a church. It’s hard to picture Jesus out hawking for members.”

However, Carlisle said, the underlying goal of the church’s program is to meet people’s needs. It was a theme universally echoed by pastors interviewed for this article.

“We haven’t done anything frilly,” Carlisle said. “People’s needs are really the same. You still need to have meaning and purpose and direction in life. They have an inner need for something that’s real behind the glitter, tinsel and high tech.”

The glitter palace of the county is the Crystal Cathedral of Robert H. Schuller’s Reformed Church in America. With more than 20 books under his belt and a long history as an advocate of “retailing” religion, Schuller is the county’s patron saint of church marketing. The special effects used at the church’s current “Glory of Christmas” show--where horses and camels walk down the aisles--are of Hollywood back lot and Las Vegas quality and make the Crystal Cathedral as much a visual feast as a place of worship.

“A church has to find the needs, to establish the needs, and it has to be done with excellence,” Schuller said. “Part of these are the needs of beauty. Beauty is not a luxury; it’s a human necessity. And that (includes) architecture. So you don’t have a tacky building. If you’re going to do a television program, it shouldn’t be tacky.

“You pay a price for such excellence. Obviously, excellence means it’s a rarity. If it’s not a rarity, then it becomes a norm. And once something is the norm, you don’t excel.”

Former minister Lyle Schaller is a church consultant for the Yoke Fellow Institute retreat center in Richmond, Ind. He encourages churches to use direct mail and whatever other sophisticated advertising or self-promotion they can afford.

“The word marketing bothers a lot of people,” Schaller said. “It doesn’t bother me. Some people associate it with business. But I think of it simply as letting people know you exist. Direct mail is marketing, and I approve of that. TV is a very powerful medium; the posters you put in buses. . . . There’s a whole variety of things out there. I suppose the polite term is public relations.”

Wagner is a wholehearted admirer of Schuller’s philosophy: “You can’t do any better than Schuller’s axiom that the secret is to find a need and fill it. The churches that are meeting those needs are growing, and the ones who aren’t are standing still.”

The movement toward more self-promotion and so-called secular enterprises concerns some churchgoers and other observers. Syndicated columnist Ann Landers recently printed several letters from disenchanted churchgoers turned off by what they considered frivolous church services.

Tom White owns two religious bookstores in the county and has about 600 churches as his clients. “It’s something that started with a church paying for space on the church page in the newspaper and saying, ‘We have such and such a speaker.’ Then you find out, ‘Maybe that’s not enough, maybe we need to buy radio spots.’ Before you know it, you have churches contacting ad agencies and saying, ‘Can you handle our accounts?’ ”

White doesn’t think the movement is that widespread. “Obviously, some churches are making a big splash, and maybe there are a lot of smaller, middle-size churches that feel they have to do the same thing. . . . I know a lot of my accounts would feel very awkward with that.”

The question, White said, is one of priorities: “You can pay $45 for a 60-second spot on a local Christian radio station, and if your church can pay for a thousand 60-second spots, I guess I’m just wondering whether that money could be better spent. Before God and themselves, they need to look at the local agency or newspaper or radio station and ask, ‘Is that what we’re all about?’ If they can answer yes, then I see no problem with it.

“If you have an ad budget of 10 grand a month to promote the church, and at the end of the year you can say we spent $120,000 and feel comfortable with that, it’s not for me to say it’s wrong.”

Howard Reeck is vice president of the Orange County Ad Club and an account executive for KYMS, an all-music Christian radio station. He said that the churches “have to get people there, and getting people there is going to give them money in the plate every Sunday. . . . And not only on Sundays. The trick is to keep the parking lots filled seven days a week.”

Reeck is convinced that many people go to the superchurches “to see these pastors work.”

As such, he said, the pastors have to put on a good show. “It’s got to be entertaining, it really does,” Reeck said. “But it seems that the more entertaining it is, the better the message is.”

A good, upbeat music program is vital, Reeck said: “It’s very important that in that half-hour prior to the preacher coming up and giving his sermon that people feel comfortable. I feel that’s part of the warm-up act. It’s like Ed McMahon.”

The Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Irvine has grown from about 250 members to 1,000 in the last six years. Pastor Jim Hale said the church is on a computer list that puts it in touch with incoming residents, who get two communications--one from the church and another from the church’s $1.5-million preschool/day-care center.

Although the church isn’t exactly on the verge of high tech, Hale discovered that any entry into the world of modern-day advertising can cause ripples of protest.

“In the Irvine World News, we did do an ad with some cutesy little picture and (copy) saying something like, ‘Now that the kids have seen Disneyland, isn’t it time to go to Sunday School?’ ” Hale said. “Half our people said it was super, and the other half said, ‘It’s just not us.’ ”

Rick Warren, the 33-year-old founding pastor of Saddleback Valley Community Church, is considered by his peers as representative of the younger generation’s acceptance of the need for modern-day advertising. He has used crisscross directories, flyers and direct mail.

He said: “Our philosophy is whatever tools are available to get the message out. . . . We think it’s important enough to use whatever medium is possible as long as you don’t change the message. The medium is irrelevant. If the future is video, we’ll try to use video.”

Warren’s bottom line: He and his wife began Saddleback in 1980, and it now claims 5,000 regular attendees. To Warren, bigger will mean better.

“There’s a trend all across America moving away from the small neighborhood churches to larger regional-type churches. It’s the same phenomenon with malls replacing the mom and pop stores on the corner. People will drive past all kinds of little shopping centers to go to a major mall, where there are lots of services and where they meet their needs. The same is true in churches today in that people drive past dozens of little churches to go to a larger church which offers more services and special programs.”

Warren’s congregation meets on Sundays at Trabuco Hills High School. It doesn’t use traditional hymn books and, Warren said, “The style is casual, the music upbeat and the message is relevant and practical. Rather than dealing with the hereafter, we deal with what it means to be here right here and now.”

Jim Dunne has been the pastor for the last six months of the 350-member Liberty Baptist Church, next-door neighbor to Timmons’ South Coast Community Church.

“The megachurches in Southern California have a common denominator,” Dunne said. “They all understand the Southern California mentality, which is very different than pastoring a church in the Midwest or the East. It’s even very different than in Northern California. The life style in Southern California--with the beach and the mountains and the desert and sports and entertainment and the weather--is such that there are so many other things to do that most folks want to come to church on Sunday morning and get in and out as quickly as they can.”

Theoretically, that can lead to a faster-paced, more showy presentation, Dunne said. The only danger, he said, is that “you’re constantly trying to outdo and out-spectacular yourself, and after a while you run out of things to do.”

Dunne added: “We pretty much preach the Bible. We train our people that we have a mandate to reach the world for Christ. But I don’t have any hang-ups about anyone else. They can do whatever they want. If it’s successful (in getting people to come to church), I’m for it.”

Carlisle sounded a similar theme: “We live in a media-conscious world. In Orange County, we’re in the shadow of Hollywood, of . . . Disneyland. Anyplace you go, you get the best there is. If someone’s interested in finding a church home, and he walks in and it’s not pretty good . . .

“What I’m saying is that a church has got to do church better than average in Orange County, just to be acceptable.”

That depiction would seem to be a marketer’s delight: a quality-hungry audience looking for the best show in town. It is the kind of stuff of which cutthroat competition is born.

But, perhaps because of the nature of their business, virtually all the pastors interviewed discounted competition as a motivating force.

“If every church in Orange County were filled to capacity, they would hold right at 200,000 people,” Warren said. “That is 10% of the population. So we don’t believe that we’re in competition with any other church. We’re in competition with recreation.”

Michael Winstead, pastor of the 900-member University United Methodist Church in Irvine, offered a mild disclaimer. “I hate to say we’re in competition, but in a sense we are--at least as far as reaching out to people who are not churched in the community. But we don’t make any bones about the fact that we’re not interested in anybody who’s going to another church. We’re not out to proselytize somebody.”

On the other hand, Winstead said, the competition isn’t solely related to the offering plate. “It’s not a matter of competition for money. I don’t think that’s it at all. It’s to provide the kind of service and things people want out of their church, and we’re expected to do a lot more today than we used to.”

Winstead, a pastor for 22 years in Irvine, said: “It causes you some problems. But you have to accept reality, because if you don’t flow with it, you’re really going to lose out.”

The problem, Winstead said, is that as the church grows, “You no longer have that sense of a close-knit family, where everybody knows everybody.”

The megachurches, Winstead said, have become almost like miniature cities. “Anything you want, you can just about get it at the megachurches. They have medical programs, they have counseling, they have things for families, sports events. But that takes enormous amounts of money. It’s almost like you have to keep doing it to survive.”

The Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton, home to radio minister Chuck Swindoll and to 5,000 attendees each Sunday, is typical of the county’s megachurches. Its list of services includes separate programs for men, women, single parents, teen-agers, the developmentally handicapped, widows and widowers, and drug and alcohol abusers. The church also sponsors a safe house for women who reject abortion and need a support system after their baby is born. During a recession a few years ago, the church started a job bank. It also set up a food bank and runs an English-as-a-second-language program.

“To a great extent, churches are picking up the loose ends of community in our big cities,” said Paul Sailhamer, senior associate pastor at Evangelical Free Church.