Jesus Cropped from the Picture

The Pragmatic Method

techniques, implying the extinction of the Church unless the proper expertise is skillfully applied.

A prominent example is Willlow Creek Church’s 2007 market research study, called Reveal . Willow Creek, a prototype of the Pragmatic Method, publically announced that something was wrong in their approach to church. A customer survey reported that those who were most centered on Jesus were the most disappointed with church and most likely to leave. However, those who were new to their faith found church the most satisfying. Willow Creek concluded that their programs were good at attracting new people to faith, but ineffective in preventing boredom for veterans. Willow Creek’s leaders said, “Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back it wasn’t helping people that much.... We made a mistake.... Our dream is that we fundamentally change the way we do church. That we take out a clean sheet of paper and we rethink all of our old assumptions. Replace it with new insights. Insights that are informed by research and rooted in Scripture.” 86 Notice the Pragmatic cultural influences underlying Reveal. They started with the customer (Individualism) and then conducted a survey (Rationalism) to determine how the customer felt (Individualism), relative to the services offered ( Marketing Concept ). They placed a high value on research and analysis (more Rationalism). The nature of their customer survey put highest value on the individual relationship with Christ (Individualism). Not surprisingly, the longer believers

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