Talk to a savvy evangelical pastor these days, and he (yes, he probably will be a “he”) might sound a lot like a marketing executive. Todd Wilson, the “Executive Pastor” at New Life, a dynamic multi-site church in Northern Virginia, told ReligionWriter, reporting for a 2005 Washington Examiner story, that walking into a church should be a “multi-sensory experience, like walking into a Starbucks.”
Indeed, the connection between marketing and missionizing goes way back, as churches and corporations have long been borrowing ideas from one another. As ReligionWriter wrote about last year, in “Product Placement in the Pews? Microtargeting Meets Megachurches,” this mixing of religion and business has some strange, and perhaps troubling, new incarnations.
But most American churches are neither booming megachurches not “revolutionary” multisite ministries. According to 2003 research from the Barna...