Purple Churches
Here's an article that I've written for Envoy Magazine. I think it'll be in next month's issue.
Purple Churches
In the next thirty seconds you’ll make a decision about whether or not to read this entire article. It’s a function of something called the reticular activating system. Your brain is constantly bombarded with stimuli and it’s the reticular activating system’s job to filter out the “white noise” that isn’t worth paying attention to from the information that is vital to your interests. So let me cut to the chase since I’ve got about ten seconds left. You ought to paint your church purple—figuratively speaking.
In his book, Purple Cow, Seth Godin makes an astute observation: if you've seen one brown cow you've seen them all. “My family and I were driving through France a few years ago; we were enchanted by hundreds of storybook cows grazing on picturesque pastures right next to the highway. For dozens of kilometers we gazed out the window marveling. Then within twenty minutes we started ignoring the cows. The new cows were just like the old cows, and what was once amazing was now common. Worse than common. It was boring. Cows, after you've seen them for a while, are boring. They may be perfect cows, attractive cows, cows with great personalities, cows lit by beautiful light, but they're still boring. A purple cow, though. Now that would be interesting.”
Let’s be brutally honest. Don’t take this personally unless it’s true. Many churches are boring brown cows. If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. They look alike, act alike, sing alike, smell alike. Godin says, “Either you’re remarkable or you’re invisible.”
There are approximately 340,000 churches in the U.S. but most of them are invisible because they aren’t remarkable.
Where’s the originality, the creativity, the personality?
Now Meeting @ a Theater near You
The church I serve as lead pastor, National Community Church, is one church with two locations. We meet in the movie theaters @ Union Station (four blocks from the U.S. Capitol) and the movie theaters @ Ballston Common Mall in Arlington, VA. Our macro vision is to meet in movie theaters @ metro stops throughout the DC area.
One of the greatest things about “church in a theater” is that it’s a purple cow. There is a “shock value.” Unchurched people aren’t used to it, and all of our marketing plays off of that fact. Our website is our brand—www.theaterchurch.com. We do series posters that look like movie posters. Our invite cards have the moniker “Now meeting @ a Theater near you” on them. We do an annual series titled God @ the Box Office. We do trailers for almost all of our message series. And we use popcorn buckets for the offering.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that those things are gimmicks. There is a theological method to our madness.
Attention Deficit Disorder
Luke 14:23 says, “Go out into the roads and country lanes and make them come in so that my house will be full.” The KJV uses the word “compel.” It means “to urge irresistibly” or “to demand attention.” And therein lies the challenge. We've got so many things vying for our attention that most Americans suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). In their book, The Attention Economy, Thomas Davenport and John Beck cite lots of statistics, but the bottom line is this: we just don't have enough attention to go around. The church needs to compete for people's attention. Madison Avenue is awfully good at advertising. They do a better job advertising beer than we do marketing the gospel. Does that bother anybody else? I happen to believe that the greatest message deserves the greatest marketing.
Our competition is not other churches! Our competition is any alternate use of time. More specifically, our competition is the Sunday paper, the Sunday talk shows, an extra hour of sleep and whatever else people do on Sunday mornings! That's what we're competing against. And we can bemoan the fact that a majority of Americans don't go to church or we can create an experience that is so compelling that it demands people's attention!
The Middle of the Marketplace
Part of our DNA as a church is meeting in the middle of the marketplace. We have nothing against church buildings. We might build one someday. But we believe God has strategically positioned us in an urban beachhead—the movie theaters @ Union Station. Nearly 75,000 people pass through Union Station everyday! We have our own bus stop and metro stop. We even have a railroad that drops off at our front door. We think we’re where God wants us to be. We also do a monthly event at the largest nightclub in DC. We’re building a coffeehouse on Capitol Hill. And when we launched our second location @ Ballston Common Mall we choose it because malls are marketplaces.
In Acts 17, Paul walks into the Areopagus and shares the gospel. The Areopagus was the marketplace of ideas. Acts 17:21 says they “spent all their time talking about and listening to the latest ideas.” Paul walked into that arena and he competed. He wasn't afraid of head-to-head competition. Why? Because he knew that he knew the truth. Instead of sitting on the sidelines, the church needs to get in the game and compete in the marketplace of ideas.
Someone recently emailed an article titled Cinema: The New Cathedral of Hollywood. The article compared churches and theaters. “What we want from church is actually precisely what we get from film.” It's a “two-hour reprieve from the burden of self-consciousness.” Movies are “an alternate form of transcendence.” Then the author shared what for me was the clincher. She said, “Awe in the presence of a great film is something that very few people are even capable of feeling in church these days.”
When I read what she wrote it riled something so deep in me that it's tough to put into words. I have a competitive streak. I hate losing Candyland to my kids! That statement –“Awe in the presence of a great film is something that very few people are even capable of feeling in church these days”—got my competitive juices flowing. We better not compete with other churches. But we better compete in the marketplace of ideas!
Fredrick Buechner said, “Hollywood consistently beats the church at its own game.” That shouldn't be. We've got to compel people to come in. We’ve got to create experiences that people walk away from feeling I Corinthians 14:25—“God is really among them.”
Postmodern Stained Glass
One of our core values at NCC is pray like it depends on God and work like it depends on you. I spend approximately twenty hours preparing every message I preach. We invest approximately thirty hours shooting, editing, and producing our video illustrations. We invest thousands of dollars designing graphics and invite cards and series posters. Every week we invest lots of mental capital into our “big idea” meeting where we nail down message themes and creative elements. And here is the conclusion I’ve come to: there is nothing easy about creativity. Creativity is good old-fashioned hard work! It’s so much easier to do what you’ve always done, but we believe the church ought to be the most creative place on the planet. We’ve got to reflect the creativity of the Creator! According to entomologists, there are more than 250,000 species of beetles. That borders on creative overkill, but it reveals something about God. God loves variety.
We need lots of different kinds of churches because there are lots of different kinds of people. We believe that our role in the Kingdom is in the Research & Development (R & D) department. We want to experiment with new ways of doing church, news ways of doing spiritual formation, new ways of communicating ancient truth.
Every church needs to be creative in keeping with its culture. We know based on our demographics as a church (80% twenty-something and 80% single) that we’re primarily reaching postmoderns so we’ve got to speak in postmodern languages. The movie screen is postmodern stained glass. It allows us to tell the story in images to a post literate generation.
I read some fascinating research recently about the way we process information. The brain is able to process print on a page at a rate of about a hundred bits per second. But the brain can process at picture at about a billion bits per second. That means that a picture isn’t worth a thousand words! A picture is literally worth ten million words!
That’s why we hired a pastor of media before we hired a youth pastor or associate pastor or worship pastor. One of the fundamental shifts that affects postmodern ministry is the fact that people don’t process information the same way. We try to communicate in 3D/5S ways (three-dimensional/five senses).
We know that most people will visit us online before they visit us in person. That’s why we put so much time and effort into our creative efforts. Before we launched our second location @ Ballston Common Mall we produced our first trailer for our Extreme series. We knew that thousands of people who wouldn’t come to church would watch a trailer. The trailer got nearly 3,000 hits in a three week period. Our hope was that some of those hits would visit one of our physical locations.
This article wouldn’t be complete without a show-n-tell so let me invite you to visit us online @ www.theaterchurch.com to check out our video archive. If you’d like a copy of our latest invite cards, the reel NCC 2003 DVD (nineteen video illustrations) or our 2004 annual ministry report, you can email info@theaterchurch.com.
One last thought.
One of my core convictions and one of our core values as a church is this: irrelevance is irreverence. God is omni-relevant. He speaks six billion languages. He knows the number of hairs on our head. He knows every need before we verbalize it. He knows how to meet each of us exactly where we are—geographically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. No one is more relevant than God so to be like God is to be relevant. When we become irrelevant we become irreverent. Cultural relevance isn’t about cute gimmicks. It’s about incarnating the ancient truth in postmodern ways.
Let’s be reverent.
Let’s be relevant.
You can’t be one without the other.
Purple Churches
In the next thirty seconds you’ll make a decision about whether or not to read this entire article. It’s a function of something called the reticular activating system. Your brain is constantly bombarded with stimuli and it’s the reticular activating system’s job to filter out the “white noise” that isn’t worth paying attention to from the information that is vital to your interests. So let me cut to the chase since I’ve got about ten seconds left. You ought to paint your church purple—figuratively speaking.
In his book, Purple Cow, Seth Godin makes an astute observation: if you've seen one brown cow you've seen them all. “My family and I were driving through France a few years ago; we were enchanted by hundreds of storybook cows grazing on picturesque pastures right next to the highway. For dozens of kilometers we gazed out the window marveling. Then within twenty minutes we started ignoring the cows. The new cows were just like the old cows, and what was once amazing was now common. Worse than common. It was boring. Cows, after you've seen them for a while, are boring. They may be perfect cows, attractive cows, cows with great personalities, cows lit by beautiful light, but they're still boring. A purple cow, though. Now that would be interesting.”
Let’s be brutally honest. Don’t take this personally unless it’s true. Many churches are boring brown cows. If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. They look alike, act alike, sing alike, smell alike. Godin says, “Either you’re remarkable or you’re invisible.”
There are approximately 340,000 churches in the U.S. but most of them are invisible because they aren’t remarkable.
Where’s the originality, the creativity, the personality?
Now Meeting @ a Theater near You
The church I serve as lead pastor, National Community Church, is one church with two locations. We meet in the movie theaters @ Union Station (four blocks from the U.S. Capitol) and the movie theaters @ Ballston Common Mall in Arlington, VA. Our macro vision is to meet in movie theaters @ metro stops throughout the DC area.
One of the greatest things about “church in a theater” is that it’s a purple cow. There is a “shock value.” Unchurched people aren’t used to it, and all of our marketing plays off of that fact. Our website is our brand—www.theaterchurch.com. We do series posters that look like movie posters. Our invite cards have the moniker “Now meeting @ a Theater near you” on them. We do an annual series titled God @ the Box Office. We do trailers for almost all of our message series. And we use popcorn buckets for the offering.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that those things are gimmicks. There is a theological method to our madness.
Attention Deficit Disorder
Luke 14:23 says, “Go out into the roads and country lanes and make them come in so that my house will be full.” The KJV uses the word “compel.” It means “to urge irresistibly” or “to demand attention.” And therein lies the challenge. We've got so many things vying for our attention that most Americans suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). In their book, The Attention Economy, Thomas Davenport and John Beck cite lots of statistics, but the bottom line is this: we just don't have enough attention to go around. The church needs to compete for people's attention. Madison Avenue is awfully good at advertising. They do a better job advertising beer than we do marketing the gospel. Does that bother anybody else? I happen to believe that the greatest message deserves the greatest marketing.
Our competition is not other churches! Our competition is any alternate use of time. More specifically, our competition is the Sunday paper, the Sunday talk shows, an extra hour of sleep and whatever else people do on Sunday mornings! That's what we're competing against. And we can bemoan the fact that a majority of Americans don't go to church or we can create an experience that is so compelling that it demands people's attention!
The Middle of the Marketplace
Part of our DNA as a church is meeting in the middle of the marketplace. We have nothing against church buildings. We might build one someday. But we believe God has strategically positioned us in an urban beachhead—the movie theaters @ Union Station. Nearly 75,000 people pass through Union Station everyday! We have our own bus stop and metro stop. We even have a railroad that drops off at our front door. We think we’re where God wants us to be. We also do a monthly event at the largest nightclub in DC. We’re building a coffeehouse on Capitol Hill. And when we launched our second location @ Ballston Common Mall we choose it because malls are marketplaces.
In Acts 17, Paul walks into the Areopagus and shares the gospel. The Areopagus was the marketplace of ideas. Acts 17:21 says they “spent all their time talking about and listening to the latest ideas.” Paul walked into that arena and he competed. He wasn't afraid of head-to-head competition. Why? Because he knew that he knew the truth. Instead of sitting on the sidelines, the church needs to get in the game and compete in the marketplace of ideas.
Someone recently emailed an article titled Cinema: The New Cathedral of Hollywood. The article compared churches and theaters. “What we want from church is actually precisely what we get from film.” It's a “two-hour reprieve from the burden of self-consciousness.” Movies are “an alternate form of transcendence.” Then the author shared what for me was the clincher. She said, “Awe in the presence of a great film is something that very few people are even capable of feeling in church these days.”
When I read what she wrote it riled something so deep in me that it's tough to put into words. I have a competitive streak. I hate losing Candyland to my kids! That statement –“Awe in the presence of a great film is something that very few people are even capable of feeling in church these days”—got my competitive juices flowing. We better not compete with other churches. But we better compete in the marketplace of ideas!
Fredrick Buechner said, “Hollywood consistently beats the church at its own game.” That shouldn't be. We've got to compel people to come in. We’ve got to create experiences that people walk away from feeling I Corinthians 14:25—“God is really among them.”
Postmodern Stained Glass
One of our core values at NCC is pray like it depends on God and work like it depends on you. I spend approximately twenty hours preparing every message I preach. We invest approximately thirty hours shooting, editing, and producing our video illustrations. We invest thousands of dollars designing graphics and invite cards and series posters. Every week we invest lots of mental capital into our “big idea” meeting where we nail down message themes and creative elements. And here is the conclusion I’ve come to: there is nothing easy about creativity. Creativity is good old-fashioned hard work! It’s so much easier to do what you’ve always done, but we believe the church ought to be the most creative place on the planet. We’ve got to reflect the creativity of the Creator! According to entomologists, there are more than 250,000 species of beetles. That borders on creative overkill, but it reveals something about God. God loves variety.
We need lots of different kinds of churches because there are lots of different kinds of people. We believe that our role in the Kingdom is in the Research & Development (R & D) department. We want to experiment with new ways of doing church, news ways of doing spiritual formation, new ways of communicating ancient truth.
Every church needs to be creative in keeping with its culture. We know based on our demographics as a church (80% twenty-something and 80% single) that we’re primarily reaching postmoderns so we’ve got to speak in postmodern languages. The movie screen is postmodern stained glass. It allows us to tell the story in images to a post literate generation.
I read some fascinating research recently about the way we process information. The brain is able to process print on a page at a rate of about a hundred bits per second. But the brain can process at picture at about a billion bits per second. That means that a picture isn’t worth a thousand words! A picture is literally worth ten million words!
That’s why we hired a pastor of media before we hired a youth pastor or associate pastor or worship pastor. One of the fundamental shifts that affects postmodern ministry is the fact that people don’t process information the same way. We try to communicate in 3D/5S ways (three-dimensional/five senses).
We know that most people will visit us online before they visit us in person. That’s why we put so much time and effort into our creative efforts. Before we launched our second location @ Ballston Common Mall we produced our first trailer for our Extreme series. We knew that thousands of people who wouldn’t come to church would watch a trailer. The trailer got nearly 3,000 hits in a three week period. Our hope was that some of those hits would visit one of our physical locations.
This article wouldn’t be complete without a show-n-tell so let me invite you to visit us online @ www.theaterchurch.com to check out our video archive. If you’d like a copy of our latest invite cards, the reel NCC 2003 DVD (nineteen video illustrations) or our 2004 annual ministry report, you can email info@theaterchurch.com.
One last thought.
One of my core convictions and one of our core values as a church is this: irrelevance is irreverence. God is omni-relevant. He speaks six billion languages. He knows the number of hairs on our head. He knows every need before we verbalize it. He knows how to meet each of us exactly where we are—geographically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. No one is more relevant than God so to be like God is to be relevant. When we become irrelevant we become irreverent. Cultural relevance isn’t about cute gimmicks. It’s about incarnating the ancient truth in postmodern ways.
Let’s be reverent.
Let’s be relevant.
You can’t be one without the other.
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