Thoughts on Church Demographics
I’ve been reading Ed Stetzer’s Planting Missional Churches recently, and it’s been instructive to hear Stetzer’s arguments for certain aspects of missiology, when prior to this, all I had heard was the reaction against it. I didn’t realize until fairly recently that there was such a backlash against certain aspects of missiology within certain areas of the church. For example:
“THINGS JESUS NEVER SAID: ‘My target demographic is . . . ‘ ”
- Don Miller
Don’s not the only one saying stuff like this, of course, and I’m not trying to pick on him – this was just the easiest quote to track down, and I run across statements similar to this on a fairly regular basis. The assumption, of course, seems to be that it’s possible for churches to reach anyone if we can just stop targeting specific demographics. Of course, when we’re talking about one-one-one involvement with individuals, this is a perfectly valid point, and I suspect this is what Don’s talking about. Jesus crossed gender, class, and racial lines when he was talking to people (sometimes all at the same time – see John 4 for the example that is most well known), and although he wasn’t inviting people to church, per se, he was plugging them into a community that was centered around Him. That’s a pretty good definition of a church.
However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that using Jesus’s model for talking to individuals is the best way to go about church planting. This isn’t to say that the way that Jesus’s way of reaching people was in any way inadequate, only that it’s possible to misapply the lessons that we can learn from his life into a situation where Jesus’s actions are no longer analogous to what we’re doing. (There seems to be a general consensus among most theologians, for example, that when Jesus gave us the principle of “turn the other cheek,” He intended for this to be applied in the context of one-on-one relationships, and not, for example, to civil law or international relations.)
I’ve frequently heard it said that since we all think about God, there’s no way to escape being a theologian – the only question is if you’re a good theologian or a bad theologian. Even if we make an effort not to think about God at all, this position still carries within itself a set of theological assumptions with regards to whether or not God is worth thinking about, at least. The lesson, perhaps, is that it’s worth examining our assumptions about God.
After reading Stetzer’s thoughts on the benefits of targeting specific demographics, I’m rapidly coming to the same conclusion that a similar point can be made about churches, and the effort that they make (or don’t make) regarding the targeting of specific demographics: the problem is not that some churches are targeting specific demographics, and some are not. The problem is that all churches target a demographic, but some of them do not realize that they are.
Here’s why: an individual has far less flexibility than does an institution when trying to appeal to a cross section of society. Jesus, when talking to individuals, could interact with them in a specific way, taking into account their social position, background, and needs. When visitors walk into a church service, there’s no realistic way that it can be remade to appeal to their specific needs.
When a church makes a decision about anything that your they do, they’re making a decision about who they are positioning themselves to reach. Where is the church building? Odds are, they’re going to get visitors that are located primarily within a 30 minute drive of their building. Are the services only in English? Then that church is unlikely to be targeting any recent immigrants to the United States. What kind of music doe the church have in its service? Odds are, they’re going to be more attractive to people that already like that kind of music. Do the cars at a church have bumper stickers extolling NRA membership and conservative political candidates? If so, that church has likely created an environment where more politically progressive folks aren’t going to want to visit. They may not even be willing to make it past the parking lot.
The human limitation, here is twofold: (a) people doing outreach feel more comfortable inviting their peers to church, and society being what it is, almost anyone’s peers are very likely to be members of a similar demographic that they are. Additionally, (b) people that have been invited to church are far more comfortable visiting a church in which the majority of the attendees look and act like they do.
If we’re taking the church’s behavior in Acts as a model for how we do outreach, though, two things stand out: the church was able to reach diverse groups of people, and these specific demographics were each reached in a way that was took their specific assumptions and life experiences into account: Peter’s sermon to devout Jews in Acts 2 is completely different from Paul’s sermon to the Greeks on Mars Hill – giving each one of them the same presentation wouldn’t have made sense.
Clearly, having the ability to reach differing demographics is a good goal, but it’s also easy to see that for most of us, being able to reach out to every group may be beyond our skill level. A good start, perhaps, is just reaching out to our peers. If the entire church does that, though, there’s a good chance that they’ll be targeting a specific demographic whether they mean to or not.
The lesson, perhaps, is that targeting demographics can be something that results from organic outreach. It may not be all bad, and it’s certainly worth thinking about. There is some balance to this, of course, and it’s easy to see how this sort of thinking can be carried too far. As Stetzer points out, the primary emphasis of church planting – and outreach in general – is driven by deity, not by methodology: in Matthew 16:18, Jesus says that He’s going to build his church. He doesn’t say that we do not need his help and can build it ourselves if we’ve got a good marketing campaign, good coffee and tasty low-fat snacks, and the latest strategic thinking on reaching influential members of the community. He’s going to build it. It should be His church anyway.
Thoughts on Iran
Conventional wisdom, at least to judge by what America’s diplomats are doing and what most of the talking heads are telling us now, seems to implicitly assume several things about the current situation with Iran that may not be entirely accurate:
The Year in (A Book) Review
Like most people, I am not a book critic, but also like most people, this doesn’t generally stop me from expounding on what sort of things I like to read. To actually be a good book critic, it seems to me, requires being (a) generally well-grounded in a reading of the classics, and, additionally, to (b) be the sort of person that reads new books within a reasonable time period of when they come out, as this generally results in an opportunity to write reviews of books that the general population is more likely to actually read. I think we can all agree that there’s a larger market, in any context outside of an English class, for reviews of Harry Potter and the Home Equity Loan, or whatever Rowling’s writing now, than there are for master’s theses that analyze themes in King Lear.
Instead of Watching Political News . . .
C.S. Lewis once observed that, like fashions, the more up-to-date a book is, the sooner it is out of date. If this observation holds true for more than just books, then there’s not much that goes out of date faster than the 24 hour cable news cycle. The analysis of the third Republican debate, if it’s interesting at all, is only interesting until the fourth debate occurs.