Jesus Cropped from the Picture

Jesus Cropped from the Picture

come, but help for life on earth as well. With the Bible as the “owner’s manual,” church leaders aggressively applied marketing principles to draw people to Christian faith. The assumption was that anyone presented with the right message would naturally “buy into” personal faith in Christ. In the mid-1980s, I earned my MBA, taking a number of graduate marketing classes, including one class called “Consumer Decision Behavior.” Consumerism had become a science that was quickly penetrating mainstream American culture, and the Pragmatic church as well. Since then, marketing language has become commonplace in the church, such as “finding a niche for our church.” By 1988, Barna went so far to say, “My contention, based on careful study of data and the activities of American churches, is that the major problem plaguing the church is its failure to embrace a marketing orientation in what has become a market-driven environment.” 82

As the Marketing Concept became acceptable, the new sovereign king was the individual consumer . In a subtle way Jesus was no longer King of his Kingdom. Jesus was cropped from the picture .

Lost Discipleship Pragmatics believed the gospel message needed to be concise and attractive. The new paradigm was that once people made a “purchase decision” (accepting Christ as savior), they could be grounded in the more complicated or unpleasant aspects of discipleship at a later time. It made no sense to introduce potential believers to all the complexities of Christianity when it was as simple as “accepting Christ’s payment of sin on the cross.”

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