4 - 1997
The future of the church
The Church as an Enterprise
Is it all about marketing or the "product"?
by Theo Christiansen
In the author’s opinion business consultants’ reports lead the churches down the wrong track. Their main problem is not inadequate marketing of their message but the controversy inside the churches themselves over what they should advocate in public. _ Theo Christiansen is a Protestant theologian and works in an ecumenical office of the North_Elbian Evangelical_Lutheran church. The religious market is growing again. The odds are better, if you sell your product well. That is the good news which could have delighted the attendees of a church congress in Hamburg. The Protestant weekly "Das Sonntagsblatt" hosted the event named "The Church as an Enterprise" to show what specific opportunities may emerge from the crisis of people leaving the church and plunging revenues, if one looks at the church as a business enterprise. This implies knowledge and utilisation of commercial tools.
The initiators of the congress were able to reap a well_ripened crop. For a few years now, since around the time when people realised that the constant decline in members implied a real decline in financial revenues, institutions of the two big Christian churches have been turning to the business world for advice and support.
The arch_bishopric of Munich commissioned an Austrian business consultant to assess church structures. The Evangelical Lutheran church of the same city accepted a corresponding offer from business consultant McKinsey. Others decided to explore new paths in public relations without further ado. The dioceses of Limburg, Mainz, Speyer and Trier launched a joint PR initiative, Cologne’s Protestant Church Federation organised a communication campaign "Get involved". The Evangelical_Lutheran Church of Hannover launched a pilot "charm" offensive. Now the first results are on the table. But they are hardly surprising. On the one hand, they show the churches’ major deficiencies in PR and marketing, management and organisation.
Learning from capitalism means learning how to win _ that is the secret message behind the co_operation between the church and business consultants, which plays more than just a minor role.
On the other, and this goes for the Protestant church in particular, they point out that most church efforts are targeted to only 10 to 15 per cent of the congregation. Apart from this core congregation or regular clientele, there are the "indifferent" members who don’t benefit much from the church but are still paying members. (see figure on page 5)
The results beg important questions. For example, what do the churches expect to gain by working with business consultants? And what conclusions will the churches draw as initiators of such studies? Here the vision of a "lean church" emerges, pared down to the bare essentials and ready to get rid of anything irrelevant.
But what is essential for the church? It’s striking that hardly anyone tries to find an answer to this question nowadays. But actually, this would be imperative. McKinsey etc. are right, the churches abound with antiquated views on all levels, necessary conflicts are not settled and procrastination has set in, the bureaucratic structure of the churches is not conducive to self_initiative. It’s true and there should be changes. But would they make the church more attractive in any way? It’s remarkable that the topic at the root of this, the church as a specific "product", takes a backseat to questions of mediation, marketing and structures.
A leaner church _ the hope of the Church of Hannover _ is to reach out more to the people. Restructuring could make it more "customer_friendly", give it a more understandable voice, and invite people to join in. But what is its message and why should it try to win people?
The air gets much thinner up there. But in this repressive mechanism we find a major reason why commercial thoughts are so well received by the church. It is because the successful radiate the glamour of success (although appearances can be deceiving!), which is like balm to the parched, altruistic or even masochistic souls of the religious middle classes. Learning from capitalism means learning how to win _ that is the secret message behind the co_operation between the church and business consultants, which plays more than just a minor role. A study on the PR initiative of the four dioceses Limburg, Mainz, Speyer and Trier, shows how the momentum of market_orientated thought can dominate over everything else. This study by two Frankfurt_based sociologists, who also advise non_church institutions, proves that specific marketing rather harms than benefits the church, as it only encourages the trend towards secularisation. It confirms the suspicion that church representatives themselves no longer believe in the convincing, "self_suggestive power of the message" and would rather capitulate to secularisation.
In contrast, the attempts of the two Munich churches to relate the results of the commissioned studies to their own organisation, are marked by surprising theological banality. They talk a lot of visions, of goals and directions, but what they actually convey are hollow words that would have provoked the same general acquiescence ten years ago as they do today and will continue to do in ten years’ time. For example, staff must affirm that the "faith issue is a focal point of all church activities" and support the church "as an institution".
In addition, one should formulate "ambitious goals", for example, an "active, contemporary and public performance of the Christian mission" or "proclamation of the message". All this is to attract "enthusiastic members" and commit them to the church. But there is no specific orientation on theological, social or political needs. This criticism also goes for the "communication campaign" of Cologne’s Protestant Church City_Federation. It used a different approach, to restructure the relationship between people and the church by its public presence. But it’s difficult to find criteria to measure the success of such a campaign. At least they do mention this problem in their assessment study.
On the other hand, the responsible project leader’s contribution in this study is infused with his satisfaction at the fact that he briefly managed to make the campaign a number one topic among journalists and agencies and to revert the "bad press", "the hounding of church people", for a while.
But there are many sceptics, who wonder whether the campaign’s plea to "get involved" in the church is actually in the church’s real interests. Experience shows that, at least over against the more indifferent church members, there is no greater obstacle to communication than the church itself.
The Protestant church put this to the test in Hessen and Nassau, when it _ another project in this context _ circulated their parish journal "Echt" without any visible reference to the editors. As soon as the cover featured the recognisable logo of the church _ market research showed that _ most people who had read the journal beforehand, didn’t even open it anymore.
The fact that the churches are their own greatest handicap has a profound inner reason. By focusing on the indifferent members out there, the churches fail to see that a substantial, maybe even major part of church staff and the priesthood have long joined the ranks of the indifferent. The message no longer finds an echo on the inside. And that is why suspicion is growing on the outside.
It is interesting to observe that the very voices that point to this accent are hardly or not at all taken seriously. Although there is enough evidence _ even in completed studies. But nobody _ apart from church historian Matthias Kroeger _ has pointed out that one root of the problem lies in the declining internal acceptance of what the leadership defines as binding for the contents and practice of church preaching. So, reaching out to the indifferent is rather a strategic necessity than inner conviction. The way the churches handle study results confirms this assessment. They confirm to the leadership that they only score poorly in selling what is otherwise a good product.
People who think like that, don’t want to invite discussion on "the product". Thus the fact that studies rather focus on how the message is conveyed and not on its contents, is not down to carelessness, but is the method behind the scheme. However, this is, in fact, a decision in favour of the perseverance of conservative theological elites. The recruitment plans amended under all_pervasive financial pressures, confirm this thesis.
There is a noticeable withdrawal from social and political activities financed solely by the church, which far surpasses the decline in other activities. This primarily affects institutions that originated in the innovative surge of 1968. Despite all this talk about visions, directions and making a new start, the focus will be on quite an old issue, on the question who has the most say in the church. The way things look now, the conservatives can be really happy with the church as an enterprise. Business consultants will see to the rest. Reprint from Publik_Forum, Zeitschrift kritischer Christen/Oberursel, no. 8, 25 April 1997, slightly abridged and translated for publication in this magazine.