The Miami Herald has a story this weekend about a church in Cooper City, FL (near my old stomping grounds of Coral Springs) that spent $35,000 on a campaign to give away $10 Starbucks gift cards for the purpose of attracting new visitors to its Easter weekend services. What do you think of this idea?
I’ll pretend that someone asked my opinion and say that I find it a bit ill-conceived, like most megachurch marketing these days. See, the past twenty-plus years have brought us what’s been termed the “seeker-sensitive” movement in evangelical America. This movement is well-intentioned, in that its focus is to draw unchurched people into the church, get the Gospel into them, and turn them into disciples of Jesus. At the same time, its execution often focuses too heavily on one demographic to the neglect of another (usually age-based), markets and caters to primarily people’s “felt needs” or desires (like free coffee, for instance), or at its worst, neglects those who already believe. Call me crazy, but scripture seems to demonstrate that a church’s “target audience” should be the church (ie: believers). Yes, Jesus told us to make disciples of all nations, but that does not end with evangelism or a “decision for Christ”. That is but the beginning of disciple-making. Now, in a sense, every sermon should be “evangelistic”, in that it should focus on the Gospel — the Good News of Christ’s victory over death and atonement for the sin of all who’ll believe — and how it applies to a particular biblical passage and to our lives. But in that same sense, everyone needs to be evangelized every week: believers and non-believers alike. We all need the Gospel all of the time — some for the first time, others as a “refresher”.
Back to the Starbucks Card church: this just seems like another well-intentioned attempt to make church and the Gospel “relevant” enough to draw younger people in. The thing is, the Gospel is relevant and always will be. We don’t need a “Gospel 2.0″. There is no upgrade available. We already have the latest and greatest version, and have for a while now. We don’t need to primarily target people’s “felt needs”. We need to target their greatest need. They don’t primarily need to know how to make their marriages better, or how to be better parents, or how to best serve the poor, though those are all good and important things. Primarily, though, people need Jesus — all of these other things are outworkings (or “inworkings”) of following him.
Still, don’t get me wrong . . . some may come in for a free latté and end up hearing the Gospel for the first time and meet Jesus then and there. Praise the Lord if he decides to use this venture to save even one. Still, the methodology seems a little silly to me. The Gospel is “foolishness” enough in and of itself . . . do we really need to add our own?
(HT: StarbucksGossip)
tags: church marketing, Starbucks, Southern Baptist Convention, Southern Baptists, Florida Baptist Convention, Florida Baptists, Flamingo Road Church, seeker sensitive, seeker-sensitive
9 comments ↓
how would this differ from say… an “arts forum” in the arts side of town?
I think it is a little cliche to do so, but only in the fact that it’s Starbucks they’re giving out (which I believe I also had at said Arts Forum).
Well, i’ll give you one difference. At the Arts Forum we charged five bucks to get in! (mama didn’t raise no fool.)
I spent more time thinking about this, and the way the church is relevant to culture today, and that’s not the problem. You’re right in the fact that Christianity is totally relevant and enough to stand on it’s own, it’s the Christians who aren’t.
I think that might be a whole other can of worms though.
I just read the article and it says they spent 10k on the gift cards, 25k on direct mail to advertise and they expect to get 1000 visitors out of it.
I think maybe I’ll start a church marketing consultation business and this will be my gig: give 1000 strangers 25 bucks to visit your church, nix the starbucks idea, give me 5k for the “consultation fees” and keep the 5k left over. There. You get your 1000 visitors. They each get 25 bucks. I get five thousand and you save five thousand. it’s win win win win. Everybody’s happy.
I’m a church marketing genius.
Yeah, I thought about our Arts Forum as I was writing this, actually and wondered if I was being hypocritical (as I fully support the GC Arts Guild and all of the events it puts on). After all, we are in the “arts side of town” like you said, and we’d by lying if we said that we didn’t hope it would bring some folks into the church to check out worship on Sunday nights. For the moment, I’m standing by my post because I think there are some key differences between events like that Arts Forum and the Starbucks Card campaign.
First of all, the Arts Forum and like events that we do (film discussions, etc) are not for the express purpose of getting people to come to corporate worship services. Like I said, we love to hear it when we meet visitors who say they found out about our church because of one of those events. Still, the reason we do these events is pretty simple . . . the church is called to glorify God, the arts matter to the surrounding community, so one way that we can glorify God is by showing how the arts can look when the Gospel is applied.
(BTW, I’m not speaking in any sort of “official” capacity for Grace Central here . . . this is just how I see things. I’m sure that if I say something that needs correction or clarification, Greg will be swift to the task. :D)
I agree with you Rae. I’d add that there is nothing wrong with having events or whatever for the purpose of attracting people to the church. I think we’ve been so use to seeing “outreach” done in manipulative and shallow ways that we’ve developed reactions against any event or activity, etc which is meant to attract people. Certainly we are meant to attract people to Christ and even to church! I think the problem is when we don’t allow the gospel (to which we are attempting to attract people) to also dictate the manner in which we attract them. Really, really heinous examples of this false divide between message and method can be seen in the Crusades (insert sarcastic comment about Campus Crusade for Christ here) when the Church would convert people at sword point.
Free Coffee coupons is not conversion at sword point, but we are uncomfortable with it because it seems a bit like bribery and therefore is equally incompatible with the message of the gospel.
Events like the arts forum are more compatible with the gospel, it would seem in that it brings distinctively gospel oriented thinking about life to bear on one sphere of the world God has created, and seeks to bring that sphere increasingly under the Kingship of Christ. That’s redemptive. Also, an arts forum demonstrates to the community we are in (an arts oriented community) that we value what they value and by implication that God values what they value (beauty, creativity, expression, etc). It is helping to give people access to the gospel and to a Christian community by being intentionally incarnational. That also is redemptive.
An argument could be made, I guess that giving away coffee coupons is like the gospel in that it is free and the gospel is free and God affirms coffee because he created coffee beans. But as a stand alone attempt to draw unchurched people, are any of you buying it? I’m not sure I do.
Greg’s just mad because it’s not coffee from Speedway.
That would attract a completely different “demographic”,
Rae- I totally agreed with everything you said, and that rarely happens for me. If I were to get nit-picky though I’d say the gospel is completely relevant today, not christianity. My pastor uses a quote that I love “Religion is for those who are afraid of hell, the gospel is for those that have been there”.
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