Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Driscoll on Church Marketing

"The assumption that everyone is a customer to be marketed is a great pitfall for those who proclaim the gospel, because we tend to cast God as a product, and as mainstream a product as possible. After all, scriptural teaching about the curse, death as the wages of sin, the flooding of the earth, the killing of Egyptian babies, the slaughter of perverts in Sodom and Gomorrah, and the fiery torments of hell is a tough sell even for the best of marketing firms...Businesses of all sorts shamelessly pander to felt needs, and customers love the benefits they reap from fierce competition. People often take the same approach when they 'shop' for a new church that emphasizes their felt needs and offers more amenities for them to consume...People with this transaction mindset about God and church will even see ministry not as something they do with the spiritual gifts that God has given them but rather as something that is done for them as a religious service by someone else. Consequently, churches pandering to this mindset are filled with consumers who take more than they give and with observers who watch more than they participate."

Mark Driscoll, The Radical Reformission

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