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The Medium is the Messiah
18 November 2003A media-savvy church embraces virtual faith. By Chris Lehmann The lights come up as the strains of U2's megahit "Beautiful Day" fade behind the testimony of Mark Batterson, leader of Washington's National Community Church: "God has strategically positioned us in the marketplace, which is right where we want to be." In fact, the market calls for Batterson, known to his congregation as "Pastor Mark," to be in two places at once: on the big screen in Cinema 1 of the Ballston Common Mall's Regal 12 Multiplex in Arlington, Virginia; and in the actual flesh, preparing to stand in front of that screen and deliver his sermon to the more than 300 souls gathered here for the September 21 launch of the church's new franchise. This moment of interfacing personas says a lot about the NCC's ministry. For the past seven years, the church has been meeting, and flourishing, in the leased virtual spaces of the multiplex world, in what are arguably the mainstream culture's most hallowed places of icon worship and — as the NCC itself likes to point out — home to a rich vein of popular theological themes that Batterson is eager to tap.
"Media churches," as the mostly nondenominational congregations might be called, are multiplying across the country, pulling in crowds of previously unchurched young professionals in and around major metropolitan hubs of high-tech enterprise such as the NCC's new Northern Virginia locale. Pastor Mark's vision of "Extreme Faith" — the title of the four part sermon series with which he's launching the Ballston Mall branch of his Washington-based church — is at the vanguard of a broader convergence of evangelical institutions and sensibilities with mainstream popular culture: the bestselling "Left Behind" apocalypse novelizations, the wildly popular, business-friendly "Prayer of Jabez" series, the recent publication of Revolve, a version of the New Testament formatted as a teen girl's magazine. More homely, but no less striking is a booming cohort of neighborhood-scale commerce pitched along evangelical lines: Christian health clubs, coffeehouses and nightclubs. A recent episode of the Fox animated sitcom King of the Hill featured the Hill family's 12-year-old son Bobby falling in with a Christian youth group outfitted with Jesus-themed skateboards, electric guitars, and "Extreme Bibles."
On one level, the recent resurgence in Christian marketing is nothing all that new. Since the time of the apostle Paul, Christianity has been the Western world's sturdiest model of customer recruitment and brand durability. It is, after all, the genius of the faith to stake its fortunes on a model of continual growth spurred by the intensely dramatic and personal experience of conversion and redemption from sin. While Pastor Mark has lifted the "Extreme" terminology of his homilies from the worlds of advertising and daredevil youth sports, he is firmly within the established motifs of Protestant proselytizing. Christian theologians from Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas on through to Paul Tillich and H. Richard Niebuhr have argued that the essence of Christianity lies outside the cultural mainstream, but Pastor Mark draws on a different tradition, one geared toward meeting sinners and searchers within the culture of spectacle. This impulse hails back most directly to the 1920s media ministries of former professional baseball player Billy Sunday, and Pentecostal radio songbird, Aimee Semple McPherson, and arguably further, to the 18th century evangelist George Whitefield, whose voice was so loud — supporters claimed his sermons could be heard for a mile — that it was itself nearly a form of mass media. Pastor Mark, of course, has the advantage of both a microphone and a movie screen. In his Arlington debut, he riffs on the scriptural episode in which Peter sees Jesus walk on water — extreme, indeed, a metaphorical bridge between the homily and the special effects the theater-cum-churchgoers are accustomed to. To draw this point home, Batterson asks them to imagine the scene as if they were viewing it in their dens. He then suggests that many of the New Testament's most memorable set pieces will be available for repeat viewing in the afterlife. "One of the things I can't wait for in Heaven is the video replays," he says. "I want to see the instant replays from every angle."
The same canons of slick self-presentation extends to NCC's promotional literature, which, like its video trailers, have clearly absorbed many volunteer man-hours from NCC's member base of information professionals. The church smartly designs all its promotional literature to mimic the look and feel of Washington's metro system, a sharp visual trope referencing its thematic preoccupations with immediacy and relevance. In a further mimicry of the culture of business, NCC delivers its mission statement to new parishioners in the format of an annual report. It may be business-like, but it's never boring. Pastor Mark likes to depict the core dilemma facing today's believer as the choice between the twinned impulses of fear and ennui. Not surprisingly, he echoes the leading themes of marketing ideology by coming down squarely on the side of fear and risk: "If you look back on your life, some of the greatest moments are the scariest ones, and some of the scariest moments are the greatest.... The alternative to fear is boredom. I'm not going to tell you that following Christ sometimes isn't scary....You can choose to live a boring life, or you can follow Christ." The specter of boredom is an obsession in NCC worship. In another benediction, Pastor Joel offers thanks to the deity for "never being a boring God"; and as Pastor Mark parses the scriptural account of Jesus walking on water, he sets up a moral that's as much about human daring as about miraculous divine purposes. "Peter is the one [disciple] who denies Christ three times," he says in partial defense of one of the New Testament's more troubled figures, "but he's also the only one who got close enough to get caught."1[Pop up here] Once more he draws an analogy from the secular world of marketing to drive home the sense of his sermon's main thesis: "How do you get market share? You take risks." When I meet Pastor Mark at a bakery near NCC's administrative office on Capitol Hill, he's carrying two books that seem to sum up the polarity of his mission: St. Thomas a Kempis' classic work of spiritual discipline, The Imitation of Christ, and Patrick Lencioni's popular business fable, Five Temptations of a CEO. Batterson's heady brew of slogans and gospel hermeneutics can make for a surprisingly effective, if distinctly McLuhanesque, spiritual vernacular, even if, as befits the form, the medium does often seem poised to overtake the message. In his sermons (also available in repurposed online form from the church's Web site as "evotional" e-mails), Batterson makes promiscuous use of pop culture iconography and marketing theory. The mascot of this year's hottest management handbook, Seth Godin's The Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable, is a frequent touchstone, as are TV ads. In a sermon on Jesus driving the moneychangers out of the Temple, Batterson likened the Savior's anger to the Hulk-like outbursts of "Terry Tate, Office Linebacker" in a series of TV spots the former NFL star filmed for Reebok. Earlier this year, Batterson delivered a sermon series keyed to religious allegories in Hollywood releases, such as The Bourne Identity, The Rookie and The Count of Monte Crisco, titled, in high Information Age form, "God@The Box Office." Still another sermon series, completed just before the Ballston launch, drew all its signature themes from The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded.
"For better and worse, Hollywood is the culture we live in," Pastor Mark says when I ask him whether he worries that his stable of references might have too short a half-life. But in a sense, that may be the dilemma awaiting NCC as it continues to grow. While it remains studiously relevant in form — and wins itself a congregation in which young single professionals account for 80 percent of the membership, making it the envy of less media-savvy churches — NCC, like many growth-minded Protestant outfits, is pointedly "apolitical" on many of the hot-button controversies that convulse other denominations, and produce the great Protestant virus of denominational schism. Indeed, even though Batterson was certified out of seminary to preach in an Assemblies of God, he proclaims himself "a theological mutt" and says NCC "is about as eclectic as a church can be." Well, yes and no. In theological terms, NCC hews to the doctrine of biblical literalism, insisting that the Bible is divinely inspired and authored, and that every word in it is God's truth. But even on this conservative platform, Batterson can be hard to pin down. As an incorrigible science geek who keeps a list of top ten popular science books posted on the church's Web site, Pastor Mark also resists applying the literal word of scripture too rigidly to the mechanics of evolution, insisting that the Hebrew word for "day" in the original Genesis account of Creation permits a whole host of meanings. He says that the letters of Paul do provide some important precedents for the participation of women in Christian worship. He doesn't know how the church would handle an organized contingent of gay members, "but I don't see that as something likely to happen."
It's hard to avoid the impression that, as is the case with many an investor, the NCC can overextend its profit forecasts into the realm of irrational exuberance. On my way out of the service, I run into Pastor Joel on the stairs leading back into the mall. He holds a big Krispy Kreme box in which sits the last donut remaining from the morning's pre-service social hour. He urges it on me. As I comply, he looks into my eyes and says, "Awesome." In fact, he says it twice. Chris Lehmann is deputy editor of The Washington Post Book World and author of Revolt of the Masscult This is the first of a three part series on marketing God.
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