The third mistake of the market-driven church is to have made the wrong analogy. David Wells writes, “The analogy du jour is between the way proficient marketers like Pepsi do their business and how the church should do its business.”

Wells notes two main parallels in this analogy. First, they have observed that Christ came into the world of men as a man, entered the culture, and spoke the language of the culture. “His teaching was contextualized. Our church life, our message, should be, too.”

   Our context today, at least in the West, is principally one of commerce and consumption. To speak in the language of consumption, to use its speech and ways, is to speak contextually. It is to speak the language everyone understands. It is to enter the culture and mindset of twenty-first century Westerners. It is to meet them on their own terms, incarnation ally, just as Jesus met the people of his own day. That is the logic.1

Second, the marketers have drawn a parallel between marketing and evangelism. Great effort is put into researching the market. The target audience is identified, and the product is customized to meet its demands.

   The parallels with evangelism are not of course exact, but a great many evangelical churches have signed off on this analogy. . . . Now, churches are likely to be ledby former CEOs, advertisin executives,corporate managers, few of whom have, or want, a theological education. The skills that made them successful n the business world make them successful in the church world. That, at least, is what is assumed.
   The gospel is a product, evangelism is about selling it, and church (pastoral) staff is there to make it happen. . . .
   In both forms of marketing — in the world and in the church — the result is an exchange of goods. In the one, a new sound system, a new BMW, or the latest and most alluring perfume. In the other, eternal life.
   So, what is wrong with this? What is wrong if it clearly works? After all, some churches that have marketed themselves and their product, the gospel, have grown rather astoundingly, though those that have failed rarely get noticed. Can we argue with success?2

Wells says, yes, we can and we should, because the reason it has “worked” is that, in order to make the product attractive to the consumer, it has been stripped of truths that are fundamental and essential, but unattractive to potential buyers.

   Success can be had along marketing lines, but truth is not an intrinsic part of that success. There is the formula. Does that not raise a red flag? Is the gospel not about truth? The Christian message is not about anything else than the “truth of the gospel” (Gal. 2:5), the “truth [as it] is in Jesus” (Eph. 4:21). Gospel truth, biblically speaking, is not a formula, not simply a relationship, not just about spirituality. It is about the triune God acting in this world redemptively, in the course of time, in the fabric of history, and bringing all of this to its climax in Christ. . . .
   That is where this gospel really parts company from the way in which productsand services are marketed in our modernized world. These products and services are no more than products and services. They are simply there for our use. The gospel is not. The gospel calls us not to use it but to submit to the God of the universe through his Son. A methodology for success that circumvents issues of truth is one that will rapidly emancipate itself from biblical Christianity . . .3

The result is a church with a gospel stripped of saving truth. This is necessarily so, because the gospel as a product has been defined by the felt needs of the consumer, rather than the actual needs identified by an omniscient God — and the two perspectives could not be more different.

   We suppress the truth about God, holding it down in “unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18). We are not subject to his moral law and in our fallenness are incapable of being obedient to it (Rom 8:7), so how likely is it, outside the intervention of God, through the Holy Spirit, that we will identify our needs as those arising from our rebellion against God? No, the product we will seek naturally will not be the gospel. It will be a therapy of some kind, a technique for life, perhaps a way of connecting more deeply with our own spiritual selves on our own terms, terms that require no repentance and no redemption. It will not be the gospel. The gospel cannot be a product that the church sells because there are no consumers for it. When we find consumers, we will find that what they are interested in buying, on their own terms, is not the gospel.4

The Great Commission is not analogous to the marketing and sale of any product. “It is the benefits of believing that can be marketed, not the truth from which the benefits derive.” As a product, that truth has no takers. It is only desirable to those whom it has already set free.