Pastor, Is Your Church Too Small?

Adam Long recent­ly emailed this to me and some oth­er friends and with his per­mis­sion I post it here for the world to enjoy.

A dis­claimer: I don’t know any­thing about Nel­son Searcy. He’s prob­a­bly a great guy who has very help­ful insights. The com­men­tary below isn’t about him or his ministry–it’s about his mar­ket­ing. In fact, it’s about the way most min­istry train­ing is mar­ket­ed. And it’s pret­ty fun­ny.

I have a long run­ning prob­lem with the con­fla­tion of cap­i­tal­ist mar­ket­ing and church life. Yes, yes, I believe in redeem­ing the cul­ture. No, no, I’m not a Marx­ist. But I think that we may be head­ing down a dan­ger­ous road. And we need to think things through before div­ing in.

So here’s my prob­lem. I think there’s too much sim­i­lar­i­ty between mar­ket­ing for “church growth” ser­vices and male enhance­ment prod­ucts.

Please don’t dis­miss this. I’m not try­ing to be unnec­es­sar­i­ly provoca­tive. I don’t com­plete­ly buy Freud, but so much church growth mate­r­i­al seems to tap a cer­tain form of envy that strikes many males.

Just take a look at the fol­low­ing quotes from the attached piece, “WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT A COACHING COMMUNITY WITH NELSON SEARCY.”

• Assim­i­la­tion has been huge!!!
• I was slump­ing in my per­son­al growth
• This would have saved me sev­er­al years of frus­tra­tion
• You don’t have to be alone, do it alone
• Coach­ing Com­mu­ni­ty gave me more con­fi­dence, com­pe­ten­cy
• Do it! It is worth expo­nen­tial­ly more than the fees!
• Don’t miss this oppor­tu­ni­ty to grow your­self

I’ve heard peo­ple com­pare TBN to the Home Shop­ping Net­work. It’s so easy to make fun of oth­ers as long as their reli­gious style dif­fers from ours. But what hap­pens when “our” groups sound like Enzyte com­er­cials? Seri­ous­ly? What do we do?

The uber-wit­ty Antho­ny Sco­ma replied:

That is hilar­i­ous, but you missed the best line, My being chal­lenged as a leader has raised “the bar” for lead­ers in our church.