Author: William C. Symonds
Publication: Business Week
Date: May 23, 2005
URL: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_21/b3934001_mz001.htm
How evangelical churches are borrowing from
the business playbook
There's no shortage of churches in Houston,
deep in the heart of the Bible Belt. So it's surprising that the largest one
in the city -- and in the entire country -- is tucked away in a depressed
corner most Houstonians would never dream of visiting. Yet 30,000 people endure
punishing traffic on the narrow roads leading to Lakewood Church every weekend
to hear Pastor Joel Osteen deliver upbeat messages of hope. A youthful-looking
42-year-old with a ready smile, he reassures the thousands who show up at
each of his five weekend services that "God has a great future in store
for you." His services are rousing affairs that often include his wife,
Victoria, leading prayers and his mother, Dodie, discussing passages from
the Bible.
Osteen is so popular that he has nearly quadrupled
attendance since taking over the pulpit from his late father in 1999, winning
over believers from other churches as well as throngs of the "unsaved."
Many are drawn first by his ubiquitous presence on television. Each week 7
million people catch the slickly produced broadcast of his Sunday sermons
on national cable and network channels, for which Lakewood shells out $15
million a year. Adherents often come clutching a copy of Osteen's best-seller,
Your Best Life Now, which has sold 2.5 million copies since its publication
last fall.
To keep them coming back, Lakewood offers
free financial counseling, low-cost bulk food, even a "fidelity group"
for men with "sexual addictions." Demand is brisk for the self-help
sessions. Angie Mosqueda, 34, who was brought up a Catholic, says she and
her husband, Mark, first went to Lakewood in 2000 when they were on the brink
of a divorce. Mark even threw her out of the house after she confessed to
infidelity. But over time, Lakewood counselors "really helped us to forgive
one another and start all over again," she says.
Disney Look
Osteen's flourishing Lakewood enterprise brought in $55 million in contributions
last year, four times the 1999 amount, church officials say. Flush with success,
Osteen is laying out $90 million to transform the massive Compaq Center in
downtown Houston -- former home of the NBA's Houston Rockets -- into a church
that will seat 16,000, complete with a high-tech stage for his TV shows and
Sunday School for 5,000 children. After it opens in July, he predicts weekend
attendance will rocket to 100,000. Says Osteen: "Other churches have
not kept up, and they lose people by not changing with the times."
Pastor Joel is one of a new generation of
evangelical entrepreneurs transforming their branch of Protestantism into
one of the fastest-growing and most influential religious groups in America.
Their runaway success is modeled unabashedly on business. They borrow tools
ranging from niche marketing to MBA hiring to lift their share of U.S. churchgoers.
Like Osteen, many evangelical pastors focus intently on a huge potential market
-- the millions of Americans who have drifted away from mainline Protestant
denominations or simply never joined a church in the first place.
To reach these untapped masses, savvy leaders
are creating Sunday Schools that look like Disney World (DIS ) and church
cafés with the appeal of Starbucks (SBUX ). Although most hold strict
religious views, they scrap staid hymns in favor of multimedia worship and
tailor a panoply of services to meet all kinds of consumer needs, from divorce
counseling to help for parents of autistic kids. Like Osteen, many offer an
upbeat message intertwined with a religious one. To make newcomers feel at
home, some do away with standard religious symbolism -- even basics like crosses
and pews -- and design churches to look more like modern entertainment halls
than traditional places of worship.
Branding Whiz
So successful are some evangelicals that they're opening up branches like
so many new Home Depots (HD ) or Subways. This year, the 16.4 million-member
Southern Baptist Convention plans to "plant" 1,800 new churches
using by-the-book niche-marketing tactics. "We have cowboy churches for
people working on ranches, country music churches, even several motorcycle
churches aimed at bikers," says Martin King, a spokesman for the Southern
Baptists' North American Mission Board.
Branding whizzes that they are, the new church
leaders are spreading their ideas through every available outlet. A line of
"Biblezines" packages the New Testament in glossy magazines aimed
at different market segments -- there's a hip-hop version and one aimed at
teen girls. Christian music appeals to millions of youths, some of whom otherwise
might never give church a second thought, serving up everything from alternative
rock to punk and even "screamo" (they scream religious lyrics).
California megachurch pastor Rick Warren's 2002 book, The Purpose-Driven Life,
has become the fastest-selling nonfiction book of all time, with more than
23 million copies sold, in part through a novel "pyro marketing"
strategy. Then there's the Left Behind phenomenon, a series of action-packed,
apocalyptic page-turners about those left on earth after Christ's second coming,
selling more than 60 million copies since 1995.
Evangelicals' eager embrace of corporate-style
growth strategies is giving them a tremendous advantage in the battle for
religious market share, says Roger Finke, a Pennsylvania State University
sociology professor and co-author of a new book, The Churching of America,
1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. A new Pope has given
Catholicism a burst of global publicity, but its nominal membership growth
in the U.S. stems largely from the influx of Mexican immigrants. Overall,
the Catholic Church's long-term decline in U.S. attendance accelerated after
the recent sex-abuse scandals, there's a severe priest shortage, and parish
churches and schools are closing in the wake of a financial crisis.
Similarly, the so-called mainline Protestants
who dominated 20th century America have become the religious equivalent of
General Motors Corp. (GM ) The large denominations -- including the United
Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church -- have been shrinking for decades
and have lost more than 1 million members in the past 10 years alone. Today,
mainline Protestants account for just 16% of the U.S. population, says University
of Akron political scientist John C. Green.
In contrast, evangelicalism's theological
flexibility gives it the freedom to adapt to contemporary culture. With no
overarching authority like the Vatican, leaders don't need to wrestle with
a bureaucratic hierarchy that dictates acceptable behavior. "If you have
a vision for ministry, you just do it, which makes it far easier to respond
to market demand," says University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sociology
professor Christian Smith.
With such low barriers to entry, the number
of evangelical megachurches -- defined as those that attract at least 2,000
weekly worshippers -- has shot up to 880 from 50 in 1980, figures John N.
Vaughan, founder of research outfit Church Growth Today in Bolivar, Mo. He
calculates that a new megachurch emerges in the U.S. an average of every two
days. Overall, white evangelicals make up more than a quarter of Americans
today, experts estimate. The figures are fuzzy because there's no common definition
of evangelical, which typically refers to Christians who believe the Bible
is the literal work of God. They may include many Southern Baptists, nondenominational
churches, and some Lutherans and Methodists. There are also nearly 25 million
black Protestants who consider themselves evangelicals but largely don't share
the conservative politics of most white ones. Says pollster George Gallup,
who has studied religious trends for decades: "The evangelicals are the
most vibrant branch of Christianity."
The triumph of evangelical Christianity is
profoundly reshaping many aspects of American politics and society. Historically,
much of the U.S. political and business elite has been mainline Protestant.
Today, President George W. Bush and more than a dozen members of Congress,
including House Speaker Dennis Hastert, are evangelicals. More important,
the Republican Right has been fueled by the swelling ranks of evangelicals,
whose leaders tend to be conservative politically despite their progressive
marketing methods. In the 1960s and '70s, prominent evangelicals like Billy
Graham kept a careful separation of pulpit and politics -- even though he
served as a spiritual adviser to President Richard M. Nixon. That began to
change in the early 1980s, when Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority to
express evangelicals' political views. Many of today's evangelicals hope to
expand their clout even further. They're also gaining by taking their views
into Corporate America. Exhibit A: the recent clash at software giant Microsoft.
As they thrive, though, there are growing
tensions, with some mainline Protestants offended by their conservative politics
and brazen marketing. "Jesus was not a capitalist; check out what [He]
says about how hard it is to get into heaven if you're a rich man," says
the Reverend Robert W. Edgar, general secretary of the liberal National Council
of Churches.
Especially controversial are leaders like
Osteen and the flamboyant Creflo A. Dollar, pastor of World Changers Church
International in College Park, Ga., who preach "the prosperity gospel."
They endorse material wealth and tell followers that God wants them to be
prosperous. In his book, Osteen talks about how his wife, Victoria, a striking
blonde who dresses fashionably, wanted to buy a fancy house some years ago,
before the money rolled in. He thought it wasn't possible. "But Victoria
had more faith," he wrote. "She convinced me we could live in an
elegant home...and several years later, it did come to pass." Dollar,
too, defends materialistic success. Dubbed "Pass-the-Dollar" by
critics, he owns two Rolls Royces (RYCEY ) and travels in a Gulfstream 3 jet.
"I practice what I preach, and the Bible says...that God takes pleasure
in the prosperity of his servants," says Dollar, 43, nattily attired
in French cuffs and a pinstriped suit.
Hucksters?
Some evangelical leaders acknowledge that flagrant materialism can raise the
specter of religious hucksterism à la Sinclair Lewis' fictional Elmer
Gantry or Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. "Our goal is not to turn the church
into a business," insists Warren, the founder of Saddleback megachurch
in Lake Forest, Calif. After The Purpose-Driven Life made him millions, he
repaid Saddleback all the salary he had taken over the years and still lives
modestly. Cautions Kurt Frederickson, a director of the Fuller Theological
Seminary in Pasadena, Calif.: "We have to be careful when a pastor moves
into the CEO mode and becomes too market-oriented, or there might be a reaction
against megachurches just as there is against Wal-Mart."
Many evangelicals say they're just trying
to satisfy demands not met by traditional churches. Craig Groeschel, who launched
Life Church in Edmond, Okla., in 1996, started out doing market research with
non-churchgoers in the area -- and got an earful. "They said churches
were full of hypocrites and were boring," he recalls. So he designed
Life Church to counter those preconceptions, with lively, multimedia-filled
services in a setting that's something between a rock concert and a coffee
shop.
Once established, some ambitious churches
are making a big business out of spreading their expertise. Willow Creek Community
Church in South Barrington, Ill., formed a consulting arm called Willow Creek
Assn. It earned $17 million last year, partly by selling marketing and management
advice to 10,500 member churches from 90 denominations. Jim Mellado, the hard-charging
Harvard MBA who runs it, last year brought an astonishing 110,000 church and
lay leaders to conferences on topics such as effective leadership. "Our
entrepreneurial impulse comes from the Biblical mandate to get the message
out," says Willow Creek founder Bill Hybels, who hired Stanford MBA Greg
Hawkins, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant, to handle the church's day-to-day
management. Willow Creek's methods have even been lauded in a Harvard Business
School case study.
Hybel's consumer-driven approach is evident
at Willow Creek, where he shunned stained glass, Bibles, or even a cross for
the 7,200-seat, $72 million sanctuary he recently built. The reason? Market
research suggested that such traditional symbols would scare away non-churchgoers.
He also gives practical advice. On a recent Wednesday evening, one of his
four "teaching" pastors gave a service that started with 20 minutes
of music, followed by a lengthy sermon about the Christian approach to personal
finances. He told the 5,000 listeners about resisting advertising aimed at
getting people to buy things they don't need and suggested they follow up
at home by e-mailing questions. Like Osteen, Hybel packages self-help programs
with a positive message intended to make people feel good about themselves.
"When I walk out of a service, I feel completely relieved of any stress
I walked in with," says Phil Earnest, 38, a sales manager who in 2003
switched to Willow Creek from the Methodist Church he found too stodgy.
So adept at the sell are some evangelicals
that it can be difficult to distinguish between their religious aims and the
secular style they mimic. Last December, Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano,
Tex., staged a spectacular Christmas festival, including a 500-person choir,
that attracted 70,000 people even though the cheapest ticket was $20. Throughout
the year, some 16,000 people take part in its sports program, which uses eight
playing fields and six gyms on its $100 million, 140-acre campus. The teams,
coached by church members, bring in converts, many of them children, says
Executive Pastor Mike Buster.
Gushers of Cash
Kids are often a prime target audience for megachurches. The main campus of
Groeschel's Life Church in Edmond, Okla., includes a "Toon Town"
of 3D buildings, a 16-foot high slide, and an animatronic police chief who
recites rules. All the razzmatazz has helped Life Church quadruple its Sunday
school attendance to more than 2,500 a week. "The kids are bringing their
parents to church," says children's pastor Scott Werner.
Such marketing and services help to create
brand loyalty any CEO would envy. Willow Creek ranks in the top 5% of 250
major brands, right up with Nike (NIKE ) and John Deere (DE ), says Eric Arnson.
He helped develop a consumer-brand practice that McKinsey then bought and
recently did a pro bono study for Willow Creek using that methodology.
Other megachurches are franchising their good
name. Life Church now has five campuses in Oklahoma and will expand into Phoenix
this fall. Pastor Groeschel jumped the 1,000 miles to Arizona after market
research pinpointed Phoenix as an area with a large population but few effective
churches. Atlanta's Dollar, who is African American, has pushed into five
countries, including Nigeria and South Africa.
All this growth, plus the tithing many evangelicals
encourage, is generating gushers of cash. A traditional U.S. church typically
has fewer than 200 members and an annual budget of around $100,000. The average
megachurch pulls in $4.8 million, according to a 1999 study by the Hartford
Seminary, one of the few surveys on the topic. The money is also fueling a
megachurch building boom. First Baptist Church of Woodstock, near Atlanta,
for example, has just finished a $62 million, 7,000-seat sanctuary.
Megachurch business ventures sometimes grow
beyond the bounds of the church itself. In the mid-1990s, Kirbyjon Caldwell,
a Wharton MBA who sold bonds for First Boston before he enrolled in seminary,
formed an economic development corporation that revived a depressed neighborhood
near Houston's 14,000-member Windsor Village United Methodist Church, which
he heads. A former Kmart now houses a mix of church and private businesses
employing 270 people, including a Christian school and a bank. New plans call
for a massive center with senior housing, retailing, and a public school.
For all their seemingly unstoppable success,
evangelicals must contend with powerful forces in U.S. society. The ranks
of Americans who express no religious preference have quadrupled since 1991,
to 14%, according to a recent poll. Despite the megachurch surge, overall
church attendance has remained fairly flat. And if anything, popular culture
has become more vulgar in recent years. Still, experts like pollster Gallup
see clear signs of a rising fascination with spirituality in the U.S. The
September 11 attacks are one reason. So is the aging of the culturally influential
Baby Boom, since spirituality tends to increase with age, he says. If so,
no one is better poised than evangelicals to capitalize on the trend.
By William C. Symonds, with Brian Grow in
Atlanta and John Cady in New York
