Marketing That New-Time Religion : Methodology, Not Theology, Is The Secret Behind The Latest Boom in The Church Business

On Dec. 1, 1994, Kathy Younge found a lump under her arm and immediately made an appointment with her doctor. The next day, the physician confirmed that Younge’s melanoma had recurred.

When Younge walked back into her house, she reached for the phone and made one call--not to her family, not to a friend--but to her church, Saddleback Valley Community Church in Mission Viejo. She left a message for the “prayer team,” a group of 28 church members who respond to some 200 individual prayer requests each week. The next morning a woman called to ask Younge for details so she could pray more precisely. She offered to have someone accompany Younge to doctor appointments, and then checked in every few days. Younge, who is in remission, credits God with her healing; she credits Saddleback with her emotional equilibrium.

“The church is here to be your family,” says Younge, a 35-year-old flight attendant who has no family in the area. “They’re really your support team down here because we don’t have Jesus around to touch and talk to us. That’s what I feel church is for.”

Recalling her story on a recent Saturday night, Younge watches as about 2,000 people flow out of the ethereal white tent in which the first of Saddleback’s four weekend services has just been held. For the first 15 years, Saddleback’s congregation had no home of its own, outgrowing one high school gym after another and eventually pitching this 2,000-person capacity tent on its new property in Mission Viejo. This fall, the church moved into a new $6-million worship center that con hold 3,200. They hope to build a 7,500-seat sanctuary in the next five to seven years.

The parishioners--mainly white, in their 30s and 40s and dressed in Ralph Lauren casual--are a small army of data points confirming a sociological trend. Saddleback, which doesn’t publicize its affiliation with the Southern Baptists to avoid scaring off those why shy away from traditional churches, has evolved from a place of worship and spiritual counsel to a social and economic safety net. It has services ranging from worship and Bible study to financial planning and 12-step programs. Deftly, intentionally, the pastors here are reaching the untapped baby-boomer market, making Saddleback the fastest-growing church in the country--with nearly 10,000 regular attendees.

“We’ve never focused on making the church bigger,” says Rick Warren, who founded the church in 1980. “We just focused on meeting individual needs, and people flock in.”

Saddleback is not alone. Business theorist Peter Drucker calls the growth of “megachurches” (churches with more than 2,000 attendees) the most sociologically significant phenomenon in the last half of the 20th Century. The rise of these conservative evangelical churches is all the more conspicuous, he says, because small, more traditional churches are closing their doors at a rate of 50 to 60 a week. The hardest hit, church-growth experts say, are the more liberal wings of the Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran and other main-line Protestant churches.

Drucker likens churches to an evolving marketplace. When a company fails, he says, it’s often because it has held onto outmoded assumptions about its ever-changing customers. He says that’s precisely the mistake that mainline Protestant churches are making.

“They still operate on the assumption that you go to church because that is what you do, which was a perfectly sound assumption in the 1940s,” says Drucker. “Respectable people went to church, period, and the church didn’t have to do anything to attract them.”

But as a generation of Christian evangelical ministers is finding, baby boomers are no longer automatic attendees. And while coaxing them back into the pews does not require a hard sell, it does require a savvy one. A few demographic studies, some principles from sociology--and most important, meeting the “felt needs” of the “unchurched” customer, in church-planners parlance--is drawing worshipers by the hordes and raising a few theological eyebrows.

“For large parts of American conservative religion today, you can say there’s no need for God,” says Os Guinness, author of the book “Dining with the Devil,” a critique of the megachurch movement. “Because the management insights and techniques are so good, you don’t need God in the preaching, you don’t need Him in the growing. You can grow a church and flourish a church without anything supernatural at all. But that’s dangerous.”

Fast-growing churches dispute this claim, saying that popularity doesn’t necessarily mean shallow theology. They add that all the marketing in the world would fail if they were not offering something that people want: a deeper sense of meaning.

“They’re not marketing just to grow numerically, because then you just become a business,” says George Barna, author of “Marketing the Church” and 20 other books on church and society. “You may do marketing that brings people in, but they’re not going to stay unless there’s something deep and meaningful spiritually.”

If this phenomenon was unique to megachurches, it would be merely an interesting footnote. Churches with 2,000 or more members compose less than 1% of American churches. But across the country and across denominations, church leaders are noting the success of megachurches and applying market principles to jump-start small, often dying churches or to start new ones from scratch.

Unlike televangelists, this generation of ministers does not rely on their on-air charisma to expand and finance their churches. Rather, they count on word-of-mouth recommendations to advertise and the personal commitment of tithing attendees to cover expenses. In a variety of ways this new breed of churches, which are certainly more than fairly represented in Los Angeles, sells a product that is not a particular denomination, theology or even Protestant Christianity itself. What they offer, they say, is the prospect of a changed life. And hundreds of thousands are taking them up on it.

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It was a pilgrimage of sorts, with more than 1,000 pastors from 37 states and 40 denominations gathered in Saddleback’s white tent this past June. They were attending the Eighth Annual Saddleback Church Growth Conference, and they came with one basic question: How can we grow like Saddleback?

During the next four days, founding pastor Rick Warren outlined the nuts and bolts of expanding a church. First of all, he informed the crowd, theology is nothing without an audience. “We hear a lot of pastors say, ‘Well, if you just pray, if you just preach the word, then your church will grow.’ Folks, it’s just not true.”

What is true, he said, is that baby boomers drop out of church because they see it as irrelevant. But they remain hungry for answers to their problems--divorce, alcoholism, unemployment, or an uneasy feeling that success is not enough. And those “felt needs” have created a vast new market for the church--about 60% of the U.S. population, according to a Gallup Poll.

Warren was well aware of this statistic when he drove from Fort Worth to Mission Viejo with his wife and 4-month-old daughter in January of 1980. Twenty-six years old and fresh out of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, he had studied the U.S. Census figures and discovered that Mission Viejo was the fastest-growing part of the fastest-growing county in the United States. A few days later, Warren and his wife were knocking on doors, asking residents why they felt people didn’t go to church, and what advice they had for his new church.

“When I first got here and started talking to people and asking them, what would you look for in a church? I didn’t know that was a marketing study,” Warren says. “I just thought, if I’m going to reach people, I’ve got to talk to them.”

With the tenacity of a detective, he researched the characteristics of his target audience, the “unchurched” in Orange County. Borrowing some ideas from Robert Schuller, who turned his Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove into a nationwide ministry, Warren compiled data on where these people lived, their demographics, their cultural values (“psychographics”) and their religious background. He boiled down all the statistics to create a target customer: “Saddleback Sam, a well-educated, 35-year-old man, with an average salary of $51,000, who prefers the informal over the formal and is skeptical of organized religion.

Warren openly admits he geared his services for men. “At our church, we say our target is Saddleback Sam, not Saddleback Samantha,” he notes. “Our target’s the man, because if we get him, his wife is coming and his children are coming.”

Saddleback Sam drives everything the church does. Warren preaches in a sports shirt, borrows heavily from TV (skits, testimonials) and talks in literate, funny modern language. The service is timed to the minute, never running over an hour. The bands are contemporary and professional, with musicians like Habib Bardwell, former keyboard player for the Beach Boys. But most important, the messages are primers for life’s problems.

“Today, in America, the church must learn the culture and language of the 1990s to communicate,” Warren says. “Now that may be a marketing principle, but it’s also just a biblical principle that says: Start where people are. Jesus started where people were, not where he wanted them to be. So when he’s with fishermen, he talks about fish. When he’s with farmers, he talks about sowing seed. He started where people were, and he moved them to where people needed to be.”

At a recent service, Warren finished up an eight-part series on personal finance management. Drawing from the experience of Solomon, “the wisest man in history, who also happened to be the wealthiest,” Warren walked the rapt parishioners through biblical principles of budgeting. As he talked, people filled in the blanks of an outline they had been handed before the service, tucking them away for future reference as they left the tent at the end of the service.

“You get it on Saturday or Sunday and you can use it on Wednesday,” observed Timothy McFadden, 36. Added Dave Dickerson, 31, “Every time I come, it’s like he knows my problems and is talking to me in a room by myself.”

In church-growth terminology, this service is called “seeker sensitive,” meaning it’s geared for the uninitiated rather than the more experienced Christian. Like many other seeker churches, Saddleback offers a more theologically rigorous service during the week. On Wednesday nights, the congregation breaks up for small group studies on the Book of John, for example, or issues specifically facing parents.

The weekend service is only one component of the church, like the anchor store at a shopping mall. Indeed, Saddleback is modeled after a shopping mall, attempting to meet every need of the church “shopper,” from large-scale worship services to specialty programs--79 in all that range from job placement and voice lessons to veterans support groups and financial counseling.

On Friday nights, there’s a co-dependent women’s group. It is one of 14 12-step recovery groups Saddleback offers to about 500 people each week. In this meeting, 23 women sat in a circle, speaking in turn about their spouse’s addiction to alcohol or drugs. One woman, an unmarried mother of five with twins on the way, said later that it marked her first visit to the church. “I drove four hours to get here,” she said. She planned to return the following week because she was “desperate, and God is my last resort.”

The woman embodies “felt needs” in the extreme. But for the less needy, or for those less involved, the sheer size of a megachurch can be intimidating.

“We got lost in the crowd,” says Terry, who left Saddleback four years ago for a 200-member Presbyterian church. Going to church “would almost be like walking into a department store: If I did happen to see someone I had seen before, I was very surprised.”

According to Carl George, a church-growth consultant of 17 years and author of several how-to books on growing a church, megachurches lose an average of 50% of their attendees every two years. “And you ask yourself, how is this possible? Well, it’s simple, neglect will turn people away.”

George says studies indicate if a person does not make seven new friends in the first year, that person will leave the church. But because small churches are failing so quickly, the megachurches “are sustaining themselves just on the basis of new blood transfusions.”

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Such problems, however, seem like the gnat on a charging elephant. Saddleback and other market-oriented churches have irrevocably transformed the business of church in the minds of parishioners and other church leaders.

Well before his first service, David Stoecklein, founder of Inland Hills Church in Chino Hills, made the same door-to-door survey as Rick Warren had done 10 years earlier. The result was the equivalent of Saddleback Sam: Chino Hills Charlie, a white baby boomer with 2.5 children, who prefers the casual over the formal and is skeptical of organized religion. So starting in February, 1991, Stoecklein gave his Assemblies of God congregation sermons with modern, relevant messages that can be used for problems during the week, complete with the fill-in-the-blank outlines.

So developed is the church-growth concept that one can pick and choose among megachurch models. For example, Stoecklein patterned his services on Willow Creek Church, a famous megachurch in Barrington, Ill., by making it highly polished, carefully timed, and often including a drama that ties into the theme of the sermon. The skit leading into the Father’s Day sermon, for example, portrayed the “family man” as an endangered species in a zoo, and the script was purchased directly from Willow Creek for $15.

“We don’t water down the Gospel, but whatever their hang-ups were, we were willing to cater to those so they would have some ears open to hearing what the Bible says about living life,” says Stoecklein, 35. “People that have a churched background, they’re the ones that come in and say, you can’t do it like this. But we have a seat for them in the back, if they want to stay, because we don’t cater to them.”

Now, four years after the church opened its doors, it draws 550 adults and 250 children each week into the auditorium of Ayala High School, and they’re planning for 1,250 in two years. The church says it’s waiting to build its own church, as Stoecklein doesn’t want to construct a church that the congregation might outgrow in another five years.

The success of Inland Hills, modeled as it is on a church from another denomination, points out a key characteristic among fast-growing churches: It is methodology, not theology, that determines whether a church will grow. “Seekers”--those attendees who are new to church--are usually not looking for a particular theology, and often these market-savvy churches play down that they are affiliated with any denomination at all.

Many traditional Christians bristle at what they see as the cavalier attitudes of seeker-friendly churches. Critics like Michael Horton, president of Christians United for Reformation, say these upstarts often treat Christianity like a product, playing up the benefits while rarely mentioning the harder issues, such as sin and repentance.

“If you get them in by marketing strategies, you have to keep them in by marketing strategies, and the product has to do what it promises,” Horton says. “The problem is, Christianity has never promised to give us self-esteem, it has never promised to save our marriages, it has never promised to raise happy kids in a negative world. Christianity promises to reconcile sinners to a holy God.”

“What the critics should do is look at the churches that are losing people,” counters Lyle Schaller, a church consultant and author of 35 books on church leadership. “And the churches that are losing people in substantial numbers are not losing them because they have a very demanding presentation of the Scripture or because they’re biblically orthodox. They’re losing people because they’re dull, boring and irrelevant.”

Those words resonate with the ministers of seven inner-city Lutheran churches in Los Angeles. A few weeks ago, they gathered at St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church in Downtown Los Angeles, ostensibly to plot their strategy for a rebound. But as they listened to the consultant they hired, the ministers looked inexpressibly tired, flattened by watching their congregations dwindle year after year to the point where their pews are, at most, half filled. Theirs is a specifically urban phenomenon; “white flight” has reduced them to largely German American enclaves in a sea of Latino and African American families.

As a last resort, they contacted Carl George, probably the most famous of the estimated 5,000-plus church consultants in the country.

George says that the Lutheran ministers have a choice: Do they try to retain their shrinking white culture, or do they adapt to the ethnic surroundings?

“The issue always for the people is, will we circle our wagons and become a bastion of our kind, or will we extend ourselves and turn our assets over to another ethnic group that has a similar faith? Some churches change blood,” he says, “and the churches that can’t accommodate, die.”

Many of the ministers believe they have made big efforts to boost their congregations already, including putting on church fairs and going door to door to meet their neighbors. They listen as George outlines his proposed, but only one minister seems to take to the new ideas: the Rev. Glenn Lucas, a young African American minister, whose race and age match his community. In other words, the kind of minister who would, according to church-growth theory, naturally attract more attendees.

Lucas, who leads St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church, has no problem with a marketing approach; after all, he says, it’s biblical. “I think Jesus marketed his movement very well,” Lucas says. “The miracles were marketing. The truth of the matter is, he did those signs in order to draw people to him so that he could then proclaim the message. I think that’s what the church needs to do today.”

*

A robed pastor stands on the stage, accompanied by three “interpreters” who will help him explain the Scripture from Ephesians. “Sing and make melody in your heart to the Lord!” he cries. There’s silence as a woman flutters her hands, signing the words for the hearing impaired. “Jam!” shouts a punk rocker, interpreting for the youth. And for the politically correct, a prim woman in a business suit intones, “Enjoy your own personal choice of musical expression, being especially sensitive to the tonally challenged, the rhythmically impaired and the musically inept.”

The congregation erupts in laughter and applause echoes through the gym of Royal Oak Intermediate School in Covina. After the Saturday night service, a half-dozen staff members from New Song Church, a conservative Baptist church, critique the music, the drama, the preaching. They worry about transitions, one-liners. The service went over by four minutes and 23 seconds--should it be shortened?

This is church for Generation X--smart, funny, geared for a crowd used to the split-second edits of MTV. New Song calls itself “The flock that likes to rock,” and the professional-sounding band--they’ve just cut their first CD--does give church the ring of a jam session. So do the parishioners, hanging out in T-shirts and jeans or short skirts as the band packs up.

“I checked out three or four churches, and New Song seemed to be the only one where I fit in,” says Adam Lamar, 30. “It’s like all the churches around here, it’s either families with little kids or old people.” At New Song, the average attendee is 28 and single.

If Saddleback is a shopping mall, New Song is a boutique, filling a niche ignored by traditional churches. New Song opened its doors in 1986, when founding pastor Dieter Zander asked several players on the high school soccer team he coached to come to church with him. They declined, dismissing church as old-fashioned and geared toward the elderly.

So Zander started his own. Since then, he has been hired away by Willow Creek--further evidence of growth knowing no theological boundaries--and New Song has mushroomed to three services drawing more than 1,000.

“One reason people are coming from other churches is that the traditional church has struggled with how to do a program for this age group,” says Paul Kaak, 30, whose spiked hair and goatee do not immediately suggest a career as a pastor. “They’re kind of the people in between.”

They are also a generation ripe for spirituality. According to a survey by Barna Research Group, which does market analysis for churches, 91% of Generation Xers say they believe in God or a higher power. But they’re skittish of formal religion, and so the New Song staff tends to shun formal marketing plans. Early on, for example, they did figure out their demographic target--”New Song Neil”--but they quickly dropped it.

“If we talk too much about marketing to baby busters, they’ll think, that’s fake, don’t make me a market segment,” Kaak says. “And so, while that is the people we believe God has called us to be intentional about reaching, we’re also careful about not making that a big deal.”

Baby-boomer churches try to offer meaning to a generation that has had some degree of success. But for many busters, professional success, family, stability are still somewhere off in the future. What Generation Xers want, says Robert Logan, a church-growth consultant who advised New Song in its early stages, is a place to belong.

“They have not been as well connected in their families, and they have a higher percentage of fragmented families or virtual absentee parents through work,” says Logan, a vice president at CRM, one of dozens of church-growth consulting firms. “And so the need for an authentic community, an authentic relationship with God and others, is a major theme.”

He could be describing the group meeting each Tuesday night in Mike La Fond’s house in Covina. Sitting around a coffee table laden with generic cola and tortilla chips, 12 men in their 20’s and early 30’s open the meeting with a prayer. After 30 minutes of Bible discussion about man’s role as spiritual leader in the family, the conversation turns personal. One man talks about his shyness in speaking to friends about Christ; another haltingly tells of an early sexual encounter he had with a man. It’s a raw discussion, peppered with insights on sexuality from the Bible. After two hours, two men pick up their guitars and the group sings three worship songs.

“This church, to me, it’s everything,” says Kendall Behnke, 34, who joined after an unhappy divorce and later met his current wife at New Song. “For eight years, my whole life has been around here.”

While this may sound like a TV testimonial, there are apparently enough Kendall Behnkes to create the demand for more New Song churches. This spring, the church “planted” or started a daughter church with a similar style in Rancho Cucamonga, and plans to open another in the Pasadena area next October.

*

Perched on a small plot in East Los Angeles, Church on Brady will never be a megachurch or a boutique. For one thing, it doesn’t have the space for the people or their cars. A more limiting factor is the racial mix of the congregation. According to church-growth theory, a congregation like Brady’s--half Latino, a quarter white, a quarter Asian and others--is a recipe for church failure. It’s too poor, too diverse, too alienated to fuel yuppie-style growth.

Yet today the Southern Baptist church is growing just as quickly as white suburban churches like Saddleback and New Song, though it doesn’t obviously cater to the unchurched. In the past 18 months, attendance has jumped from 500 to 700 people. And in the last decade, the church has planted 14 new churches overseas and another 14 in the United States.

“If we’re not at 10,000 in 15 years,” says senior pastor Erwin McManus, “we probably did something unhealthy.” To get anywhere near that target, an urban church like Brady won’t be able to grow large, as Saddleback has. It will have to franchise.

“What we’re asking ourselves is, what does the church of the future really look like?” says McManus, 36, who served as a consultant on church franchising for several years before arriving at Brady. “And most likely, the church of the future, if it’s in L.A., isn’t going be able to buy enough land to house 50,000 people. And so if we’re going to reach that many people in the name of Christ, we have to think outside of properties, and begin thinking, how do we meet in multiple locations?”

“It’s like McDonald’s,” adds Carol Davis, Brady’s director of ministries. “They don’t grow one central McDonald’s in town. They get out in the communities where the people are and make themselves available. And so when they want expansion, they don’t grow bigger facilities, they grow more units.” Sitting in her office, Davis plucks a thick white binder from her shelf. It contains Census data for every ZIP Code for the City of Los Angeles and its suburbs, over which Davis has overlaid more interpretive information, the kind purchased by any company testing out a new product: the education level of the residents, the kinds of jobs they hold and their income level, and their values and lifestyles.

Using this kind of data, Davis says, allows them to figure out where a church might be welcome, what kinds of programs to offer and who to send there. She says in the 90002 area code (Watts), for example, the church would probably offer job-skills classes rather than long-term financial planning programs.

Demographic analysis can also avert certain failure. Davis says a young church planner wanted to begin a church in Diamond Bar. After looking at the demographics, Davis found that most people in the area were in their early 40s and held middle- or upper- management jobs. The prospective church leader was in his 20s. “Well, that’s not going to work, because he doesn’t have credibility. And so we’re going to save him several years of agony by saying, That’s not it, that’s not a match.”

This kind of language raises the hackles of critic Os Guinness. “A hundred years ago, a church might have said, should we start a new church? We’ll pray about this,” he says. “Today you don’t need to do that. Good telemarketing, good sociological profile, good this, that and the other, you can have the whole of ‘doing a church’ without any need of God at all.”

McManus agrees such techniques present a danger in theory, but ignoring them poses a bigger risk. “If you do not understand the context in which God has placed you, the kinds of people that God has surrounded you with, the world view they have, the values they have,” McManus says, “you’re not going to be able to communicate with them. And to me that is a crime. You have the most important message in the world, and you don’t even know how to be heard.”

The most successful marketing tool for the church is, in fact, the stories: Nancy Ingold, a former alcoholic who now runs the “clean and sober” program. Miguel Espinoza, a former addict who spent time in prison before meeting his future wife at a rehabilitation clinic; they’re married and expecting a child. Ray Portillo, who shed his $300-a-day heroin habit six years ago and now works with addicts.

“I saw Christians that truly lived out what the Bible said,” adds Twyla Richards, who moved to Los Angeles from Texas to join Church on Brady. “I saw that people lived their lives differently because of this church.”

This, then, suggests a more fundamental reason people are returning to church: It’s not only about what churches offer, but about what people need.

“In all these dynamic churches, there’s the expectation that God is going to show up, and that God is going to change people’s lives,” says consultant Robert Logan. “And no matter what other things are going on, there’s that sense of expectancy and anticipation.”