Friends, enjoy this provocative take on the relationships of the parking lot and the pew from PARSE friend Adam Graber. – Paul
Of the 150 or so acres making up Willow Creek Community Church’s main campus, a full 8 acres are devoted to buildings. Parking lots cover more than 28. That ratio demonstrates just how important cars are to most churches today.
Though Willow Creek is now a multi-site church, it still calls South Barrington, Illinois, home. Population? 4,656, Each weekend, most of the church’s 20,000 attendees drive on to the main campus using three major entrances, swelling the suburban village’s population for a few hours on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. People arrive by car from all over Chicagoland. The fact is undeniable: for megachurches, cars are essential.
The fact is undeniable: for megachurches, cars are essential.
It’s probably more accurate to say that cars created the megachurch. Without them, these churches simply couldn’t exist in the form they do today. There have certainly been large churches in the past—Charles Spurgeon’s church had over 5,000 members when he died, and Spurgeon is said to have preached to an audience of 10,000 on a few occasions. But that was in densely populated 19th-century London, quite unlike Willow Creek’s campus of mostly undeveloped marshland in pastoral South Barrington. Today, the number of sprawling church complexes eclipses the few large, urban churches of past centuries.
The influence of cars isn’t limited to megachurches though. Churches of all sizes have adapted to car culture. And this involves not only buildings, locations, and weekly attendance, but also church practices. Since the car, church life simply hasn’t been the same.
What are you hungry for?
Among the changing church practices related to this change in transit is affinity, a fancy word for common interests we share. It’s a “likemindedness.” These shared interests might be sports or music or art, or they might be doctrines, morals, and lifestyles.
The interplay of cars and affinity isn’t simple. To flesh it out a bit, take a non-religious example: choosing a restaurant for dinner. Now, most drivers don’t think in miles but in minutes. In 20 minutes, you can drive exponentially farther than you can walk. And this freedom gives you a lot more options.
With so many options, we’re forced to ask ourselves “What do I want?” and go from there.
So how do you decide where to eat? It’s a classic first-world problem: “What am I hungry for?” Chinese? Tex-Mex? Burgers? Pasta? Gluten-free? Deep-fried? While much of the world struggles with scarcity, in the United States, narrowing your options is the first-world problem of abundance. With so many options, we’re forced to ask ourselves “What do I want?” and go from there. We can’t not ask it.
Life with cars almost requires it.
The church buffet
These same affinity dynamics unfold when people choose where they go to church. We drivers have a buffet of churches. Presbyterian? Evangelical Free? Contemporary? Traditional? Suburban? Multi-ethnic? Under 500? Over 1,500? Today’s churchgoers can’t not consider their options. And they can’t not ask “What do I want?” Personal preferences take center stage because there aren’t other limitations. When you’re choosing a church, what other choice do you have?
Life with cars . . . almost requires it.
Affinity doesn’t apply only to megachurches or only to shallow, selfish churchgoers though. The fundamentalist church down the road and the lifestyle-affirming church in town both play into it. Even the most doctrine-driven Christians likely choose their churches based on that personal value. They don’t really have an alternative.
To choose a church at all, then, we tend to turn inward and reflect on our own wants and needs. “What do I really want in a church? What am I looking to get from it?” This strategy isn’t necessarily selfish; it’s practical. But besides being practical, the strategy also becomes habitual. And like any habit, it shapes the kind of people we become.
Well-meaning writers shame us for church hopping and church shopping, and they tell us to “stop dating the church.” But accusing church shoppers of simply being selfish oversimplifies the problem. It places all the blame on the individual. Is this really accurate? Is it constructive? What if selfishness is simply a necessary strategy for reaching decisions in an age of abundance?
Well-meaning writers shame us for church hopping and church shopping, and they tell us to “stop dating the church.” But accusing church shoppers of simply being selfish oversimplifies the problem.
The abundance of choices and the absence of limitations is the blessing and the curse of the car. And church shopping may not be a problem of character.
It may just be a problem of cars.
The distance factor
Cars have made distance less of a factor in our lives. For this reason, church goers can choose from a marketplace of churches. But in order to decide, they have to narrow down the options, and when they do, they (naturally) consider their personal preferences first. They’ll try on different churches and see what “fits.”
Pastors, in reaction, are today forced to account for these new dynamics of affinity. Because church shoppers are exploring their options, area pastors often respond by targeting “felt needs.” For pastors, attracting and retaining church goers often means preaching on the topics people are looking for.
In 2004, Willow Creek undertook a 3-year study called REVEAL. With the help of a consumer research expert, the church’s leadership surveyed people in their congregation, asking about their spiritual development as it related to Willow Creek. The research included a “set of very important questions about what people want from their church.” For example, they were asked “to rate their levels of satisfaction with the church in response to statements like ‘helps me understand the Bible in greater depth’ [63%] or ‘helps me feel like I belong.’ [57%]” (Reveal, p 25; [statistics, p 105]).
Among Willow Creek’s numerous goals for the REVEAL survey, they “wanted to know how satisfied people were with their spiritual development, and how satisfied they were with the church’s role in it” (p 90). Thus, among the topics they surveyed were “overall satisfaction with the church and specific attributes” and “participation and satisfaction with church activities, such as weekend services, small groups, youth ministries, and serving” (p 93). Both the consumer-research paradigm and the satisfaction language illustrate just how deeply embedded “affinity” is to megachurch thinking.
But megachurch leaders aren’t the only ones thinking this way. Churches of every size and stripe, from urban to rural, are susceptible to these marketplace dynamics. “Felt needs” become fundamentals. Parishioner preferences influence not only sermon topics, but also preaching style, music style, and even architecture. Is eachsermon the right mix of funny, wise, and convicting? Is the music moving and meaningful and theologically accurate? Is the foyer bright, accessible, and scented with fresh coffee? If not . . . people may pack up and drive away.
Actually, the reality is more complicated than that, though. Willow Creek found that nearly 75% of people said they were “very satisfied” by the “compelling worship services” (p 105). And yet 63% of those who “exhibit all the signs of full devotion” to Willow Creek “sometimes consider leaving” the church (pp 53, 104). So in the end, at least from my reading of this, focusing on consumer satisfaction may not help church leaders “keep” their congregations anyway.
An important question we should be asking is, “Who should be defining the church’s priorities and practices? Should it be the churchgoers, or should it be church leaders? Neither? Both?” The easy assumption to make would be “church goers.” In a market economy, the customer is always right.
Altering ecclesiology?
Not only has car culture nurtured an emphasis on affinity, but it has also altered ecclesiology (our beliefs about the church). How pastors preach, what they preach about, worship experience, and church governance are all affected. Cars have put church “consumers” in the driver’s seat like never before, and church leaders are forced to buckle up for the ride.
Not only has car culture nurtured an emphasis on affinity, but it has also altered our beliefs about the church.
For many pastors and church leaders, an attractional model of church becomes almost a necessity—subject to forces beyond any one pastor’s control. When parishioners can drive anywhere, pastors are forced to think strategically about how to attract and retain them.
Often the result trends toward “entertainment.” Critics accuse megachurches of prioritizing entertainment over a host of other godly virtues, and they accuse pastors of telling the people “whatever their itching ears want to hear” (2 Tim 4:3). But even pastors of the smallest churches are subject to the church shopping culture. If pastors don’t take their congregation’s “felt needs” into account—not only in sermons, but in polity and practice—they may no longer have a congregation to pastor.
Whatever “community church” means today, the term is no longer geographic.
For a time, Willow Creek tried to make its 7,200-seat auditorium more community-oriented by offering seating sections where citizens of a single suburb could sit together. But apparently geography didn’t mean much. Today, the church has opted instead for “Section Communities” based around demographics and shared interests: “families with school-aged children,” “creative arts,” “fighting human trafficking,” “multicultural,” and “marriage enrichment,” among others. Whatever “community church” means today, the term is no longer geographic.
The priority of preference
In the first decades after the automobile, many recognized “the death of distance,” but who could have imagined that cars would so elevate the priorities of personal preferences? Or would reshape church practices and church authority? Who could have foreseen how cars would encourage people to make selfishness a practical habit? Or would compel pastors to tailor their sermons to “felt needs”? Selfishness certainly existed before the car drove into society, but the car helped it to flourish. Cars made selfish habits much easier to indulge, and now for many of us, selfishness is simply necessary. As necessary as church parking lots.
Our everyday lives are made possible by cars. And they are no less essential to the churches we attend. Churches and church practices have adapted to cars in profound ways. Some of these changes may be good; others, not so much.
As church leaders look to the future, a new traffic is emerging. Not of transportation, but of information. Megachurches along the highway are becoming multi-sites on the superhighway, Willow Creek among them. Already in two decades, the Internet has become nearly as essential as cars for modern life. As churches adapt, new challenges are arising. Maybe not in parking lots or affinity, but certainly in how churches gather and even how they tithe. Some of these changes will be good; others, not so much.
Big parking lots and high-bandwidth might be worthwhile for some church activities. But do those conveniences compete with other formative church practices? Recognizing these conflicts isn’t easy—we live in a time when cars cultivate selfishness while Christ calls us to sacrifice. In the face of such conflict, our response will require both creativity and courage—whether that means resolving the conflict or remaining firm in the middle of it.
@AdamGraber is an editor at Tyndale House Publishers. Writing at thesecondeclectic.com, he explores how technology is shaping faith.
