How An Economic Understanding of the Church Has Undermined Discipleship

 

I was marinating on  Darrell L. Gruder’s book, “Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the American Church,” I came across this fascinating insight that corresponds with one of the reasons why I believe, biblical, Christo-centric, Spirit-empowered missional discipleship is not flourishing in the local church in America.

Pastor/church planter, take time to interact and critically think about this blog.

Parallel with the rise of the “member as volunteer” and the “church as organization” was the impact of economic developments. Recent scholarship in the sociology of religion has brought to light how this aspect shaped the church’s life. In The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, Roger Finke and Rodney Stark argue that the choice made early on in the United States not to have an established religion meant that an economic understanding of religious life and practice was inevitable. They contend that “where religious affiliation is a matter of choice, religious organizations must compete for members and . . . the ‘invisible hand’ of the marketplace is as unforgiving of ineffective religious firms as it is of their commercial counterparts . . . Religious economies are like commercial economies in that they consist of a market made up of a set of current and potential customers and a set of firms seeking to serve that market.” Indeed, they suggest that it is appropriate to use “economic concepts such as markets, firms, market penetration, and segmented markets to analyze the success and failure of religious bodies.” In their view, then, the clergy are the church’s sales representatives, religious doctrines are its products, and evangelization practices are its marketing techniques.11

This model has a ring of truth true it. It describes only too well assumptions about membership, program, structure, success, and purposes that give shape to today’s church culture, “the way we do things around here.” It certainly illumines the current circumstance in which the churches live, a pervasive religious consumerism driven by the quest to meet personally defined religious needs. It also explains the heavy concentration of church efforts to produce and promote programs, concert style worship “experiences” (I added this) and it corresponds with the emphasis in one stream of literature flowing out of the church growth movement. That stream has accepted the commercial image without question by commending strategies for effectively and successfully “marketing your church.”12

But here is the rub. Does this image of church correspond to the cluster of images found for the church in the New Testament? Does it correlate with New Testament speech about the nature and purposes of the church? At the very least, this producer-consumer model separates its notions of church (a religious firm producing and marketing religious products and services) from its members (potential and hopefully committed customers consuming those products and services). Members are ultimately distanced in this model from their own communal calling to be a body of people sent on a mission. The gap between these two notions is great, and it is in the transformation from the one to the other that the present challenge before the churches finds focus.

Did you some of your circuits get blown?  How did this blog impact you?

Marinate on that,

Pastor Derwin