Barrington, USA - AS dusk settles on this neighborhood of 1920’s bungalows and old farmhouses northwest of Chicago, Randy Frazee strums a banjo on his front porch, waiting for his dinner guests to arrive. No cars line his curb because everyone who is coming lives within walking distance.
Once the 12 guests — ranging in age from about 7 to 70 — and the Frazee family have gathered around three tables set end-to-end, they join hands, and Mr. Frazee, a pastor at the Willow Creek Community Church, says a prayer. A meal of barbecued brisket, cheese potatoes and green beans follows.
Throughout the evening, conversation occasionally touches on favorite scriptures and “walking with the Lord.” The guests tell about their best and worst moments of the week. As dinner wraps up, Mr. Frazee asks one of the couples to talk about “how Christ walks in their life.”
It’s the first night of “The Table,” a new program offered by Willow Creek — a nondenominational megachurch that regularly draws several thousand people to its services at a 155-acre campus nearby, in South Barrington. “The Table,” however, is deliberately kept small as Willow Creek seeks innovative ways to meet the changing needs of churchgoers searching for ways to express their faith.
Willow Creek’s shift in strategy mirrors moves by other houses of worship across a number of denominations to overhaul the programs they offer to build their congregations. These organizations say they are modeling their outreach practices on proven business and marketing strategies — not unlike what Wal-Mart is doing by adding more-fashionable clothes or what Borders is doing with its smaller “express” bookstores — to reach potential new members or to keep existing ones. They are also changing how they deliver those messages, using videocasts on cellphones and other new technologies, including an increasing emphasis on blogs and podcasts.
Bill Hybels, the founding and senior pastor of Willow Creek, has used business-world strategies — notably branding and word-of-mouth marketing — to help the church grow from 125 congregants 30 years ago into the megachurch it is today. While Mr. Hybels says he does not use marketing techniques to spread God’s word, “we do attempt to harness the full potential of modern technology and business strategies to communicate with our members and our community.”
He has also brought in advisers like Mr. Frazee, who use business ideas to spread the message of the church. Mr. Frazee said many of his ideas grew out of a friendship he had with a Texas developer. “I mentored him in spiritual matters and he mentored me in transferable concepts to the church from his world of business,” Mr. Frazee said. “I would say it was one of the many factors that led me down a path to the ‘Table’ concept.”
The new messages — from Willow Creek and other nondenominational churches to mainstream denominations like the Episcopal and the United Methodist churches — tend to focus on connectedness, theology and shared values.
According to academics, including Robert B. Whitesel, who teaches at Indiana Wesleyan University, that change represents a shift from some past marketing efforts, which sought to make church more fun and inviting to baby boomers.
That trend brought coffee bars to many churches and a proliferation of Christian rock bands in church. Services included little Scripture reading or hymn singing, and, in some churches, took the shape of self-help workshops, particularly in nondenominational churches seeking to be more relevant to younger people.
To spread the word of increased intimacy and a more serious focus on spirituality, some religious groups are now spending a lot on marketing.
For the last three years, the United Methodist Church has been running a broadly based national advertising campaign with the tagline: “Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors.” By the time the campaign ends in 2008, it will have spent $20 million; the effort includes print and cable TV advertisements. The church will then begin a new four-year campaign focused on younger people.
The United Church of Christ has spent close to $3.5 million on television ads that gained attention earlier this year when CBS and NBC refused to broadcast them, saying they implied that other churches rejected people based on their lifestyles.
Two commercials focus on how people can feel rejected at church because of their lifestyle or values. One ad shows two men standing outside a church, selecting who can enter and who cannot. The United Church of Christ said the ads were meant to let people know it was open-minded.
The church also put the campaign on a Web site, www.stillspeaking.com, where it also offered information about its beliefs.
This year, the church will spend around $50,000 to advertise on Internet blogs in the weeks before Christmas. By clicking on links on the blogs, viewers will be able to see the ads the networks would not run. The church says that this will be its largest Internet advertising effort to date.
“What makes this kind of advertising so effective is that it reaches an audience that isn’t in the traditional church cycle,” said the Rev. Robert Chase, the Church of Christ’s communications director. “But they are still looking for a spiritual home.”
As a sign of how powerful some of these new marketing efforts can be, a total of more than 6,000 people recently attended several hundred weekend “Tables” in the neighborhoods surrounding Willow Creek’s campus. These “Tables” supplement small groups that the church has already organized around people with similar interests — like mothers, singles or teenagers. But the idea of “The Table” was based on proximity, Mr. Frazee said, so that people began to meet neighbors who weren’t just like themselves.
Corporate marketers have been using similar events for years to create closer connections with their brand. Nike, for example, has worked with gyms on new workout routines to make its brand visible beyond sporting goods stores.
For churches, events like the ones created by Willow Creek are meant to offer members a similar closeness, albeit for a more profound purpose: religious worship and discussion.
“In the early church, people didn’t get on their camels to go to Bethany to worship,” said Mr. Frazee, who created similar programs as pastor of a church in Fort Worth before he joined Willow Creek in 2005. “We have adults who seem to have suffered a spiritual stroke. They go to church, but they have forgotten that wonderful sense of hanging out, that basic expression of fellowship in their neighborhoods.”
Willow Creek, which says it has 6,100 participating members, advertised “The Table” on the home page of its Web site, www.willowcreek.org, and used the site to match members’ high school districts with a “Table” in their neighborhood.
A desire for less-traditional worship helped propel the growth of megachurches like Willow Creek. Its home feels more like a corporate campus — with a Starbucks-like coffee shop and a cafeteria featuring pizza — than a church.
At a recent Saturday evening service, nearly 3,000 people listened to jazz and Christian rock in a 7,095-seat auditorium outfitted with plasma-screen televisions and a modern sound system. A group of actors performed a skit on a set designed to look like the inside of a home before the pastor took to the stage to deliver the main sermon.
While megachurches like Willow Creek are still among the nation’s fastest-growing places of worship, a study released last month by the Institute for the Studies of Religion at Baylor University found that academics and religious leaders say that people seeking religion today want something else from churches. This is encouraging churches to develop new messages and new ways to spread them.
That move is not unlike corporate America’s new effort to reach consumers who have turned their backs on traditional marketing methods and shifted their attention to the Internet from television, newspapers, magazines and other older media.
“The shifts aren’t antithetical to the megachurches, but it does have something to do with the difference between how baby boomers worship and how younger generations want to worship,” says Mr. Whitesel of Indiana Wesleyan, who is also the author of “Inside the Organic Church: Learning From 12 Emerging Congregations” (Abingdon Press, $18).
“The younger generation sees the megachurches as too production-oriented, too precise,” he continued. “They want church to be more authentic. There is a feeling among this generation that there has been a waning emphasis on the spiritual.”
Mr. Whitesel said that this shift was changing the focus of what a religious leader does at a church. “The boomer church has the pastor at the top who is supposed to figure out what the church is,” he said. But in the newer churches he studied, he added, “the pastor has more of a marketing function in understanding what the congregation wants and finding ways to provide that.”
The United Methodist Church is finding similar trends in its early research into how to reach Generation X — people born in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the generation that followed the boomers — as it tries to reverse a decades-long decline in membership.
“They want a more traditional understanding of religion and faith,” said the Rev. Larry Hollon, general secretary of United Methodist Communications, the marketing and outreach arm of the church. “The contemporary worship that we’ve come to see in the past couple of decades appeals to the baby boomer, but younger generations connect with a more traditional style of worship.” he said. “Quite frankly, that’s surprising to us.”
The United Methodist Church is more than 18 months away from unveiling any marketing based on its research. But Mr. Hollon says the church, borrowing ideas from any number of consumer products companies, does know that whatever the message is, it will be delivered primarily through new media — cellphones and the Internet — and live events, because that is where the target audience is found.
Jan Floro has been training Methodist churches in the Houston area since 2000. Her company, Grow Church Now, spends years with churches as they go through what she calls a “heart change” to reach what she calls “radical hospitality.”
During the training, participants are advised to make their churches more welcoming to newcomers in subtle ways that would be familiar to a consultant advising a hotel or other service establishment: put up signs so newcomers know where the bathrooms are, for example, or hold a social hour before or after church to welcome new people.
These ideas, along with multimedia advertising, appear to have had some effect on attendance for the United Methodists. Since the church adopted the approach in 2004, first-time attendance has increased 10 to 19 percent at some churches, Mr. Hollon said. Sustained attendance, defined as people who return after one visit, has risen 4 to 7 percent.
The church knows this because it is asking member congregations to get a training certification to make sure that they are welcoming to newcomers. Part of the process is to keep close tabs on attendance to see if the ads and training are working.
“We are seeing a reduction in the decline of our congregations,” Mr. Hollon said. “I think we are at the point where we have halted the decline and are beginning to see growth.”
That would be a major turnaround for the United Methodist Church, one of the mainstream Protestant denominations that has suffered as younger people have turned away from tradition and sought new places of worship — or seemed to stop worshipping altogether.
The Baylor survey, based on a Gallup Organization poll with 1,721 respondents, revealed what many churches were already sensing: that people from 18 to 30 years old were much more likely to have no religious affiliation than people 65 and older (18.6 percent versus 5.4 percent, the survey found).
Some denominations have set out to reach these so-called unchurched people by offering more than the incentives — like different times for worship or a coffee bar — that worked for baby boomers. Instead, they focus on the faith and values that are part of the denomination’s tradition.
THE United Church of Christ is also using advertising in one location — Vail, Colo. — to test a new way of creating congregations. Traditionally, a pastor would be sent to a new location and would spend three months to a year seeking people to build a congregation. But that can be a big investment, especially for a church that doesn’t necessarily have big name recognition with the people it would like to reach.
So instead of following that traditional route, the United Church of Christ will begin running ads — using many of the same images as the national campaign — to create awareness that a congregation is being formed. The ads will feature locations and dates of meetings where people can gather more information about the church.
“We know Vail is a progressive community and we know there’s some interest,” said J. Bennett Guess, news director of the United Church of Christ. “But instead of investing heavily, we’re going to use advertising to see if we have critical mass.”
Mr. Guess says that this is the first time the church has used advertising to help create a new congregation.
While denominations like the United Church of Christ hope to use advertising to begin rebuilding their membership totals, Willow Creek’s intentions with “The Table” are more about retaining the congregation than increasing its size.
“This can’t be primarily about making Willow bigger,” Mr. Frazee said. Instead, he said, he hopes that these experiences will extend the idea of church beyond the notion of practicing faith in one specific place.
“For a business, creating an experience may provide a means to an end, such as selling a product,” he said. “But for the church, the experience of community and belonging is our end. It is the sense of belonging with God both here and in the kingdom to come.”
In the next phase of what has been branded “Neighborhood Life,” recently formed “Tables” will create Bible study groups. The next step will be to have each “Table” begin local charity projects.
For Ruth Jarrard, a Willow Creek member who joined the Frazee family’s table on that Sunday evening, the event was distinctly different from worshipping at the church’s huge auditorium.
“Sometimes that can be overwhelming,” she said. “This was more about neighborhood and what you can do, because unless you get to know them, you’ll never know when they need your help.”