ARE WE A PEOPLE AT HALF TIME? - Leadership Network

e breeding grounds for personal renewal
and human connectedness. Yet they stay
alive and purposeful—and true to God’s
will, as they see it—only by growing: by
remaining vigilantly open and aggressively
attractive to the world.
Following Saint Paul’s first letter to the
Corinthians, they seek to be “all things to
all men”—not forgetting the rest of the
sentence, “that some might be saved.” By
taking on roles as various as those of the
Welcome Wagon, the USO, the Rotary, the
quilting bee, the book club, the coffee
shop, and the mixer—and, of course, the
traditional family and school—they have
become much more than the traditional
churches that many Americans grew up in
and have long since lost. Belonging to
Mariners or any other large church conveys
membership in a community, with its
benefits of friends and solace and purpose
and the deep satisfaction of service to others.
When we were talking in his office one
day, Beshore described the Next Church
strategy as succinctly as I was to hear it.
“We give them what they want,” he said,
“and we give them what they didn’t know
they wanted—a life change.”
“WHO IS OUR CUSTOMER”
Bob Buford, a Texas businessman and
author who became one of my guides in
the world of the Next Church, showed me
a handsome framed woodcut on the wall of
his study one day. It read, “What is our
business Who is our customer What
does the customer consider value”
The words come from Peter Drucker,
the high priest of management theory, who
has recognized the pastoral-church phenomenon
as one of the signal events of the
late twentieth century—part of a sweeping
and spontaneous reorganization of social
structures and relationships.
“What is our business” That would be
FDFX. I saw this mysterious acronym on a
T-shirt, and eventually figured out what it
meant. It comes from a chronically
invoked Next Church mission statement:
turning irreligious or unchurched people
into Fully Devoted Followers of Christ.
“Who is our customer” That would be
Baby Boomers, mostly. This is not exactly
niche marketing. The postwar birth cohort,
after all, is the biggest and currently the
most powerful one out there, the flushest
and the most fecund. Boomers are a needy
and a motivated bunch—with lots of experience
in shopping for spiritual comfort.
Churches like Mariners are drawing a
flock of previously unchurched or unhappily
churched people by being relentlessly
creative about developing forms of worship—most
symbolically and definingly,
music—that are contemporary, accessible,
“authentic.” Next Church services are multimedia
affairs. Overhead projectors allow
the preacher to sketch his point the way a
teacher would on a chalkboard, or to illustrate
his message with a cartoon, an apt
quotation, or a video clip. Lyle E. Schaller,
an independent scholar and
the author of dozens of
books on the large-church
movement, suggests that
these are the descendants of
the stained-glass window,
another nonverbal storytelling
device.
A leading pastor in this
movement, Leith Anderson,
of Wooddale Church, in
Eden Prairie, Minnesota,
likes to talk about “reading
the culture” and “translating
the culture.” The culture is
suspicious of old-church
“European” atmospherics,
ritual, and language—suspicious
of old institutions in
general.
Some of these churches
“are dramatizing a truth that
missionaries have known
for decades,” the church
scholar George Hunter
writes in his new book,
Church for the Unchurched.
“To reach non-Christian populations, it is
necessary for a church to become culturally
indigenous to its ‘mission field’”—
whether that is Asia, Africa, Latin
America, or Exurbia. “When the church’s
communication forms are alien to the host
population, they may never perceive that
Christianity’s God is for people like them.”
Anderson, in his recent book, A
Church for the 21st Century, put this in
perspective. “While the New Testament
speaks often about churches, it is surprisingly
silent about many matters that we
associate with church structure and life.
There is no mention of architecture, pulpits,
lengths of typical sermons, or rules
for having a Sunday school. Little is said
about style of music, order of worship, or
times of church gatherings. There were no
Bibles, denominations, camps, pastors’
conferences, or board meeting minutes.
Those who strive to be New Testament
churches must seek to live its principles
and absolutes, not reproduce the details.”
It is music, more than any other issue
or symbol, that divides congregations on
the cusp of growth. The
pipe organ, the old hymnal,
and the robed choir are
emblems of continuity and
cohesion to those who
uphold tradition, of encrustation
and exclusion to
those who don’t. Whether a
church uses contemporary
music or not defines which
kind of people it wants.
When it uses contemporary
music, it’s saying it wants
unchurched people—particularly
those of childbearing
and child-rearing age.
Even the most stubbornly
traditional churches,
if they have any critical
mass at all, are putting children’s
education, child
care, and teen activities up
there with music as essential
ingredients to attract
Boomer families and, in the
years ahead, the following
generation, usually called
Busters (for the post-Boom baby “bust,”
born after 1964).
Its means may be market-driven, culturally
sensitive, and cutting-edge, but this
does not make the Next Church “progressive”
or “liberal” on the fundamentals.
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