A Stomach Churning Morning

There is only one station that my boss will allow us to listen to at the Pie Shop. In fact, we listen to it whether we want to or not—CBC Radio One is compulsory listening at Robertshaw Pies. So this morning, I was mindlessly making my lemon tart mix when I hear the topics for today on the program “The Current”. One of those topics was described with the following teaser: “What happens when a new breed of church mixes salvation and salesmanship to put posteriors in pews”? That’s right, we’ve hit the big time, folks: today’s topic was church marketing. The first part of the story was about a particular church in Ontario, a Mennonite church at that, which, in the eyes of many, seems to have a particularly marketing-based feel to its services. Not knowing the church particularly well (although I have been to its sister church in Winnipeg) I can’t really comment on it. The second part of the story was an interview with an actual church marketer (is anyone else a little green at the thought of that being a real thing?). This marketer said that what’s really going to grab people is “experience-based marketing”. We should be selling the experience of church, because, as he puts it, “it’s not just what you sell, but how you sell it.” So who should the church look to for guidance in this area? His two suggestions were Disney and Starbucks, two of the great experience-based marketing geniuses. Starbucks sells ambience—it sells ‘cool’. And when you go to Disneyland, you’re “buying a smile on [your] child’s face.” So when it comes to churches, you’re buying an experience you’re looking for from religion. If there was ever any doubt that consumerism has invaded the church, those doubts should be long gone.

As if that didn’t make me queasy enough, then came the main tagline: that, if you have a good product, “the product will sell itself…marketing is most successful when the product delivers on the promise it makes”. The product—by that, I’m assuming we’re referring to Jesus, right? So if we ‘sell’ Jesus, and if He ‘delivers’, then we hop in the shower and they leave the money on the nightstand and everyone goes home happy, right?

I’m going to get in so much trouble for this post.

To hear the story, visit http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2006/200605/20060502.html