The church in a buyer’s market

This post is dedicated to Bill Kinnon who can’t stomach the idea of franchised churches. I hope that Bill doesn’t read the latest issue of Leadership Journal which has a short article on this idea.

Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon are helpful voices when it comes to thinking about church – franchised and otherwise – in a consumer market:

…our church lives in a buyer’s market. The customer is king. What the customer wants, the customer should get. Pastors with half a notion of the gospel who get caught up in this web of buying and selling in a self-fulfillment economy one day wake up and hate themselves for it. We will lose some of our (potentially) best pastors to an early grave of cynicism and self-hate. What a pastor needs is a means of keeping at it, a perspective that enables the pastor to understand his or her ministry as nothing less than the participation in the story of God. (Resident Aliens)