How the Church Became a Vendor
A short history of the LLC church.
The church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.
— attributed to William Temple
No committee ever voted to run the church like a firm. Placeholder essay — draft text for layout purposes. The historical claims here need proper sourcing before publication. The habits arrived the way habits do: one reasonable-sounding borrowing at a time, until the vocabulary of the sales floor — reach, growth, funnel, campus, brand — stopped sounding strange in a vestry meeting.
Three borrowings
The revival tent taught us the event. Mass evangelism demonstrated that a gifted communicator and a big room could produce decisions at scale. Whatever its fruit, it quietly relocated conversion from the kitchen table to the stage — and taught the church to think in terms of production.
The corporation taught us the metric. What the firm measures, the firm becomes. When attendance became the number that mattered, the front door became the product, and evangelism became — inevitably — marketing. Note what the metric leaves out: nothing about attendance measures whether a single member spoke of Christ to a single friend.
The market taught us the customer. Attractional church works. People do come. But a body optimized for customer acquisition forms its members as customers too — and customers do not witness. They recommend, at most. Politely. When asked.
What the firm measures, the firm becomes.
The abdication bargain
Here is the uncomfortable symmetry: the institution did not seize the work of witness so much as we handed it over, gratefully. The LLC church offered a bargain — bring them to us, and we’ll take it from here — and a laity that already felt embarrassed and underqualified accepted before the sentence was finished. Ruth Kimball’s “The Myth of the Professional Evangelist,” next in this collection, takes up the demand side of this bargain.
Why history helps
Because what was acquired can be examined, and what was examined can be set down. The pre-modern church — poorer, slower, illegal half the time — carried the gospel across the known world without a single program, using an unscalable technology the modern church has largely idled: the believing household. See “What the New Testament Actually Models,” the fifth essay in this part. The rest of this collection is about turning that technology back on.