Worship Service or Customer Service?

 "For if he who comes preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached, or if you receive a different spirit which you have not received, or a different gospel which you have not accepted—you may well put up with it!" - 2 Corinthians 11:4

(Excerpts from Religious Trojan Horse by Brannon Howse)

Following Peter Drucker’s model, the people who go to church can now be viewed as customers. in a 1998 Forbes magazine interview, Drucker bridges business and church strategies when he says, “non- customers are as important as customers, if not more important: be- cause they are potential customers.... Yet it is with the noncustomers that changes always start.”305

This suggests that nonchurch attendees are potential customers, so noncustomers are more important than the church’s customers. There are also more noncustomers than customers, and if you can find out why noncustomers aren’t yet customers, you can turn them into customers by doing the right things to attract them.

What market research can help you discover this necessary non- customer information? You go around your town or city and take a survey of neighborhoods, asking unbelievers how they would program a church so they would want to attend (this has really been done). The unsaved, not surprisingly, want a church that looks like the world and makes them feel comfortable. They want a pastor who is a life coach to assist them in having their “best life now.”

This is the same model Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Church has promoted for years. Hybels also signed the Yale document and has hosted Rob Bell, Brian Mclaren, Tony Blair, and rock star Bono at his church or conferences. (His family aids in perpetuating the agenda as well: Bill Hybels’s wife writes for neo-Marxist jim Wallis in Sojourner magazine.) Hybels seems especially comfortable with the Drucker model as he declares:

unchurched people today are the ultimate consumers. We may not like it, but for every sermon we preach, they’re asking, “am i interested in that subject or not?” if they aren’t, it doesn’t matter how effective our delivery is; their minds will check out.306

The unbeliever who attends a church where the gospel is being preached might laugh and discount the message because the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing (1 Corinthians 1:18). The un- believer may hear the gospel and decide that he or she wants to hear more. or he or she may hear, believe, repent, and come to faith. These are the three responses Paul received when he preached the gospel to  skeptics and critics on Mars Hill as recounted in acts 17. That’s the way it is supposed to work.

Yes, the unsaved may hear the gospel and reject it, but the solu- tion is not to water down the gospel to make it more appealing, but to preach the gospel and pray the Holy spirit convicts unbelievers of sin and that they respond by repenting and placing their faith and trust in Jesus Christ. it is not our job to get people saved. it is simply our calling as disciples of Jesus Christ to present the biblical truth of the gospel without compromise.