On the news today a segment was devoted to the business model differences between GM and Toyota. The observation was made that the options on a GM car can run upwards of multiple thousands-kind of upholstery, color, sound, transmission and on and on. On a Toyota you get options that number 15!!!
This reminds me of the attractional model of the church. People are being offered so many models and options that evangelicalism can’t run enough conferences to keep everybody up to date. By the time we have “segmented the market” and created churches for “just those people” the tastes have changed and we have to come up with a new year’s model. Multi-generational families can hardly worship in one church anymore. There is music and programming for each and the varieties don’t overlap that easily. By the time most young people get out of the home church into college, they haven’t even been in church worship in a sustained enough way to even develop an appreciation for the larger family of worship. They have always been dismissed during significant portions of the worship experience for their own programming. (And I am not sure parents would want their kids even to hear a lot of what is being talked about from the pulpit, ie., Ed Young’s sexcapades).
I wonder if we are optioning ourselves to exhaustion and to death. And the huge number of man hours this takes from volunteers adds up to a theme of change so constant that the workforce has to turn over on a pretty regular basis. See Willow Creek’s model and their Reveal study. Willow’s response was that people are leaving because Christians do not self-feed. So they have, of course, set up a whole new program with self-feeding as the goal. Of course, as Christine Wicker comments in her book The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, these people who are self-feeders are just the people who are leaving. They are finding out that their churches don’t mean to feed them. They mean to use them to keep people coming who aren’t interested in self-feeding. Enough is enough. They know intuitively that the spiritually motivated person (and I am not saying mature person) doesn’t need 80% of what is being offered to them.
Maybe it is time to do a “de-option” on the church.
