The Sex Appeal of the Church
Many churches have never looked better than they do today. Their buildings, websites, and worship services have considerable sex appeal. They display elements of cool, success, and celebrity packaged together brilliantly.
I was in a church building recently and was amazed by the beauty and magnitude of it - flat screens TV’s, vaulted ceilings, and a restaurant were just a few of the things I noticed.
One pastor, who paid a group of consultants to overhaul his church's website, told me, “Church websites just can’t compete, but now ours can.” I regularly receive unsolicited emails targeting pastors. Messages that promise make communication clear, concise and “well-branded.”
This same focus is concentrated on Sunday services too. They are a spectacle - a clever mix of laser-light shows, rock concerts, motivational speeches, and theater. The creativity that churches have the ability to muster is incredible, but there is a risk.
In doing all we can to create mass appeal we are showing people something of a façade. It’s like magazines in grocery store checkout lines. They feature pictures of men and women on the cover who are fit, attractive, successful, or famous (usually a combination of all these).
However, these magazines are cloaked in a thin veneer of perfection that, unfortunately, many fail to see. As a result we have been seduced by image, celebrity, and success - and allow ourselves to live in a world of make believe.
The subtle message being sent is to “be perfect.” So we live like we are at Disney World - the “happiest place on earth.” But has it ever occurred to us that Disney is also the least realistic place on earth? The trouble is the more time we spend outside of reality; the more difficult it is to return.
Regardless, many spend their time trying to make church a kind of Disney like experience by trying to be cool, building the brand, and crafting an image. In this, we lose the ability to be authentic, and when this is lost we cease to be the Church.
Perhaps recalling the central symbol of Christianity would help us a great deal – the cross. It is this Roman instrument of torture and death that God used to put love on display by bleeding and dying. This picture invites all who would come to die to themselves so that they might find real life. The cross asks us what's in really stirring in our hearts.
You can’t make honesty “well-branded.” Being real about who we are – in all of our failures and brokenness – is messy and dirty. Yet that is exactly what's real and what is so desperately needed.
Churches need to spend less time on appearance and more time in contemplation of the person of Jesus - who made himself nothing, humbled himself, and became obedient to death - even death on a cross. If we commit to doing that, the Church will look far better than we do today and have more appeal than ever.