David Wells lists four mistakes made by the church marketers: they have achieved the “wrong result,” made the “wrong calculation” and “wrong analogy,” and targeted the “wrong customer.”
Of the “wrong result,” he writes,
George Barna was one of the primary architects of this new approach to “doing” church. He was in on the ground floor three decades ago. As the church’s most assiduous poller, he undoubtedly expected by this time to be the bearer of good news once his marketing strategies were widely adopted, as they have been. It has not turned out that way. It has fallen to him to be the most important chronicler of his own failure.*
Wells describes how Barna is now “leaving behind this long trail of failure as if it had never happened, . . . [striking] out in a new direction with the same old panache, bravado, and undented self-assurance.” Now, according to his book Revolution (2005), it doesn’t matter that the church as an institution has failed, because, Wells says, “serious spiritual revolutionaries can simply cut themselves loose from every local church. Just walk away! And find biblical Christianity elsewhere.”
What is resulting from Barna’s approach is barely recognizable as Christianity today. And that is what makes the desire of some of the leading American marketing pastors to export their experiment to the rest of the world almost incomprehensible. It certainly is an expression of unbounded chutzpah.*
Biblical Christianity without the local church? It seems that their Bible is missing parts — like the New Testament.
*David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 47.
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