Boyink! - Spring Forward on the Web

When the church started, they decided to appeal to a new generation of chuch goers who feel uncomfortable in the traditional churches most of us attend. So, they invested in video, audio, computers, multimedia, and making the end-to-end church experience better than their competitors. Full Post >>

More.  Better.  Bigger.  Louder.  Customers. Competitors.  Bleeding Edge.  Future Growth.  The gnawing feeling in my stomach grew deeper and deeper as I read this post about the technology used in a large southern church.

I know I’m in reactionary mode yet, having recently left a church that is on this same meal-plan, but there just seems to be something inherently wrong with this picture.

I’m not finding the right words to say what I’m feeling….I think part of it is just the money being spent on this stuff, and the mental image of 19,000 people on a given weekend sitting in their bleeding edge, high tech, high-structure, highly-programmed “experience” every weekend, while “out there” are people who need to hear the message.

Build it and they will come?  Or go and make disciples?

Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.

1. Mean Dean on June 10, 2004

   I’ve thought hard and long on this issue well before this issue.

   19,000 ... more proof that the Body continues to get itself into long-term trouble as we stray from our Jewish roots.

2. Frank Johnson on June 11, 2004

   From my favorite modern author on pastoral theology (Eugene Peterson, Working The Angles):

   “Pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationery and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn’t the remotest connection with what the church’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries.
       A few of us are angry about it. We are angry because we have been deserted. Most of my colleagues who defined ministry for me, examined, ordained and then installed me as a pastor in a congregation, a short while later walked off and left me, having, they said, more urgent things to do… ...It is bitterly disappointing to enter a room full of people whom you have every reason to expect share the quest and commitments of pastoral work and find within ten minutes that they most definitely do not. They talk of images and statistics. They drop names. They discuss influence and status. Matters of God and the soul and Scripture are not grist for their mills. The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shop-keepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeepers’ concerns: how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.”

   It’s depressing.

   Frank

3. Michael Boyink (Author) on June 11, 2004

   I was reminded last night of this post, from the RealLivePreacher:

   http://blogs.salon.com/0001772/stories/2004/04/09/allTheRightQuestions.html

4. kevin on June 11, 2004

   It’s curious to me how this church (and most churches these days) ‘market’ themselves as if they are selling something. I also noted the many references to football, baseball and concerts—as if they were competing for people to come to church instead of go to a game. It seems like the emphasis is on getting people in the door instead of “making disciples” as you noted.

   Its unfortunate that we treat technology as an end, instead of a means to an end. (I’m certainly guilty of this at times.) The fact that we display a message on the screen is more important than the message itself.

5. Michael Boyink (Author) on June 11, 2004

   Kevin - good to hear from you again.

   Make no mistake - the emphasis at this type of church, in our experience, is getting people in the door.

   We were encouraged weekly to “do the ask with your unchurched friends”, “the ask” being “ask them to come to here”, not anything related to their status as a Christ-follower.

   But I went down this path myself…taking the church through several branding excercises while building the site, determining brand attributes, differentiation, etc.  It’s all too easy to do…

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