WHY DON’T CHURCHES GROW?
“CAQ” is jargon for “customer acquisition” among folks like Professor Galloway who analyze businesses for success. They look for the cost of acquisition of loyal customers and compare it to the eventual profit. Most people don’t apply this to religious groups because, well, it’s rude and we don’t really want to know.
Reinhold Niebuhr has already pointed out that religious groups — whether congregations or denominations — are not defined by their beliefs but by their socioeconomic class. The real affinity is whether you’re like most other people in the pews, which mostly comes down to income and its relationship to education and location. If the demographics of a group begin to change due to the fortunes of the economy or pressure to move, the churches shrink. This dynamic is clear in terms of seminaries, even the big university divinity schools. One of my darker thoughts is that I was accepted to Meadville/Lombard because there were only 5 others in my class and they needed my warm body.
I propose that the seeming concern about whether white Christians are being replaced might be just baldly economic. The end of the Enlightenment values and strategies has been knocked aside by the end of the fossil fuel -based part of the industrial revolution. This has given rise to the “social hallucination” that everything is ending, though it is only making a transition. One must admit the some people’s lives ARE ending, some in quite real ways, camping on sidewalks with nothing to eat or dying of Covid unvaccinated.
The idea of CAQ is to own a product that will attract enough customers to generate enough profit to maintain the organization. In the case of a church or denomination, that product is a theory of life, a paradigm of safety and productivity. When the old order that was the base of affinity for the group is missing or shaken, everyone leaves.
Where is the new gathering point? What is the message the people need now? The Enlightenment-based or “modernity”-based paradigms won’t work. (There has never been a philosophy that aged more quickly than modernity unless it was “post” and then “post post” modernity.) Neither will simple counterculture reversals of the known norms persist long. In the past when these shifts happened, no one sat in a library and designed a new world. The new paradigm welled up from inside the people. Electric cars. Windmills. Solar power. Today climate change knocks even those brilliant ideas aside.
So Enlightenment thought based on excluding all emotion and embodiment gave way to whatever the next thing really was, much influenced by the Industrial Revolution which was as much a weapon against the indigenous people (guns and railroads) as the microbes were, and as contagious. Quickly followed by “religious” rationalizations of the ways of making profit (mining, industrialized ag, urbanization) so as to form and reassure their members. Now that those very same forces are withering and dying, the churches are unsustainable, though they are interpreted as failing the people rather than that the people just don’t need them anymore.
It’s not the belief-systems that are the problem with religion, but rather what happens when they gather sufficient customers into enough of an affinity group to become a business, offering a product that makes a bigger profit than the cost of attracting members. When I joined the Unitarians, they were beginning to shrink and emphasized growth through professional ministers. But when I was circuit-riding, the purpose to the people was doing some of the work of maintenance. They liked being a small group, but were short of time in busy lives.
In Missoula there was a member who had been a city lawyer but was changing his lifestyle by learning to repair small motors. One of the major rewards to him was that the new work was unambiguous: there was a discoverable cause for every problem, a remedy, and a limit on the time it took. He said to me frankly, “A sermon from you every other Sunday is not worth a pledge. I can get message as good on TV.” (This was before YouTube.) He came on Sunday morning to belong to a group.
No matter how charismatic a minister might be, he or she is not a group. In any case I don’t belong to that group now and try not to belong to any group which is a mistake. But no group has formed yet that has presented a global unified and vivid version of this new world we are discovering right in the midst of the old one. I buy and read books, write what I distill from them, and — quite intensely — take in the vivid images.
It was once said that potential UU’s, those open to Enlightenment rational ideas, are present at a rate of only one or two in a thousand. That means that population density is necessary to form a congregation that will support a minister and a building — even a fellowship. Except for the Catholics the Valier churches are living off the past when people were more of-a-kind and had both more time and money, but even they must share priests with other congregations.
Tomorrow’s “religious” groups may be more like house churches, a gathering of friends. Or they may remain as they are now — on line, particleized. How does one figure out the “CAQ” then? Can they develop political influence? Is there any real relationship to a business CAQ, which I don’t really understand but is evidently an audit strategy for determining Quality, defined as persistence and profit, for the sake of investors.
Surely such a strategy is too cold-blooded for measuring the affinity of people who form friendships based in part on sharing socioeconomics and partly on world view and goals. We have shut out emotion from theology and made religion a matter of individual belief, thus destroying the basis of being together. As we drop our generational energy, we leave out another reason to be together — tradition and shared ethnicity. But why should religion be a matter of institutions and meetings? Why isn’t it simply a dimension of daily life, where we are, what we do, how we govern ourselves?
This is what kicked off this line of thought.
