COMMENTARY: Market research urged as a tool for ministry

c. 1998 Religion News Service HARTFORD, Conn. _ Want to know a sure-fire way to make a church grow? Locate it near a McDonald’s. That’s not because fast-food fans are necessarily churchgoers. What it means is McDonald’s will have done all the marketing research to choose a neighborhood”where there are lots of people coming, lots […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

HARTFORD, Conn. _ Want to know a sure-fire way to make a church grow? Locate it near a McDonald’s.

That’s not because fast-food fans are necessarily churchgoers. What it means is McDonald’s will have done all the marketing research to choose a neighborhood”where there are lots of people coming, lots of young people,”said the Rev. Kenneth L. Ornell.


And that’s the kind of neighborhood where a well-managed church could flourish, the Episcopal priest said.

Even stagnant parishes in cities and rural areas could learn something from how McDonald’s and other secular companies reach out to boost sales, said Ornell, one of a growing number of clergy proclaiming the good news of market research to reinvigorate dying congregations and bring back members who have drifted away. There are a lot of those in Ornell’s own Episcopal Church, a graying denomination that has lost more than 1 million members in a generation.”For the first time in history (membership) has slipped below 1 percent of the U.S. population,”said James Solheim, the church’s national communications officer in New York.

All of the so-called”mainline”denominations _ including the United Church of Christ, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) _ find themselves in the same pickle of falling memberships.

Enter market research.”You don’t have salvation by facts but they help if you are doing strategy for mission,”said the Rev. Richard F. Tombaugh, who has been in charge of development for the 78,000-member Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut.

Tombaugh has tapped Ornell as one of a dozen diocesan consultants who are spreading the word in the parishes that they can do more than watch their congregations grow old and die.

Tombaugh, 65, who retired at the end of January, is leaving as his legacy a system intended to help the 184 Episcopal parishes in the state to measure the potential church market around them.

He contracted with a private research company to provide the diocese and parishes with demographic data, such as the population makeup of their area, what people care about, their religious preferences, their lifestyles and even whether their”faith receptivity”_ how people respond to evangelism _ is high or low.


The parish pays $150 for its package, and the diocese pays for the consultant who interprets the data for the parish leaders and helps them devise growth strategies.

Parishes, for example, might consider how to meet concerns for day care or the moral education of children in young families, provide activities for the elderly, or meet the recreational needs of youth.”Meet a need and fill it”has become a cliche among advocates of church growth, but congregations often need hard data to move them beyond inertia.

The research company, Percept of Costa Mesa, Calif., was started 10 years ago by a couple of entrepreneurial churchmen who watched with dismay the shrinkage of mainline Protestantism. They thought churches needed to base their missionary endeavors on more than seat-of-the-pants maneuvering.”There is the growing realization that the role of the church in American culture is changing dramatically and at a much faster rate than the people in the church can embrace,”said Mike Rigele, a Presbyterian minister who was one of the co-founders of Percept.

Rapid change”is the quintessential challenge facing the church as we go into the new millennium,”said Rigele, adding that his company has limited itself to working with churches so as to provide materials in a language that pastors can understand.”We’ve tried to take the emphasis off the numbers and make it a tool for people to engage in mission development,” he said.

The company has nearly 100 clients, up from 67 last year, he said. They include regional judicatories of some of the major churches: Episcopal, United Methodist, ELCA, and Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) as well as the North Carolina Southern Baptist state convention, Rigele said.

Since the U.S. Census does not ask questions about religion Percept draws on other sources to reflect the religious makeup of communities.


The demographic materials Percept produces include maps with transparent overlays and colored circles showing such characteristics as population densities and lifestyles.

Tombaugh describes the material as”user friendly,”much different than the books of data he had tried using a decade ago that made”people’s eyes glaze over.” The priest said his eyes were opened to the potential of using such data by the experience of a church in Indianapolis. The church had been offering all kinds of family-oriented programs to attract new members without much success, Tombaugh said. Then an analysis of the population showed church leaders they would be better off appealing to the heavy concentration of single people in the area. They shifted course and boosted the church roles.

Professor Carl S. Dudley, co-director of the Hartford Seminary’s Center for Social and Religious Research, said he is impressed with the material Percept puts out.”The general approach is excellent and Percept has far and away the best presentation of research materials,”Dudley said. “The notion of studying population and helping the congregation recognize the changing nature of their neighborhoods is essential. But the key to using this stuff is to have people wanting it and wanting to make it go.” One of the problems in convincing old congregations to take a fresh look around them is that they tend to focus on the past, Dudley said.”Take a walk around with an old parishioner. You get a lot of good stories but they are out of date,”he said.

DEA END RENNER

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