Ready, Willing, Unlabeled
Peter Geromel on Dollar Store Churches
A few months ago, I met a gentleman dressed in a motorcycle jacket and denim jeans at a coffee shop. He seemed intellectual, and we chatted about Pope Benedict’s recent statements on Islam. I thought I might have found a potential proselyte for the continuing Anglican parish I serve.
The next time I saw him was on a late night at the local diner. He didn’t remember me. He claimed that the radio towers in town were giving out radiation and told the waitress she would soon be sterile. He phoned in a citizen’s arrest on the radio tower owner.
Later I saw him at the Dollar Store. He claimed he was engaged to a helicopter pilot half his age whose father was an Anglican military chaplain. I was not surprised that he was very interested in my church. I think that if I tell him that black helicopters have been following me ever since my tiny congregation refused to join the World Council of Churches, I will have him hooked.
Another day, I met a banker whose ethnic faith tradition is Assyrian Catholic (Church of the East). He knew little of his grandparents’ faith, and as I knew more about this than most, we hit it off. His interest in my church is based on my esoteric knowledge.
Similarly, I had lunch with a banker who researches St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s influence on economics through that abbot’s method of building Cistercian monasteries. When I explained how Anglicanism is arguably closer to Benedictine and Cistercian spirituality than, say, Dominican, he became interested in my parish. Counter to expectation, he proved to be a Presbyterian and not Roman Catholic.
You see, like a dollar store, my parish and I generally draw either very dependent people or very independently minded people. The dollar store draws folks who are willing to think unconventionally and folks who simply don’t have enough money to go anywhere else. Some of us are in both categories.
It is likewise with churches like mine. Some of the people are thinking unconventionally and are ready to accept what we have to offer. Some need a great deal of pastoral attention (and are willing to admit it) and know they will never receive it at a large mainline church.
I recently surveyed the average distance traveled by the visitors to my parish. I found it to be fourteen miles. Our regular congregants hail from equally far afield. The prototypical young business man with his wife and children enthusiastically traveling just a couple of miles, I have not yet seen.
Part of the reason is that a parish outside the mainline denominations has no name recognition. It is a “hard sell.” Every effort at evangelism begins with an explanation of what you are, what your name means.
Our advertising problem is the same as the dollar store’s. The immediate questions people ask about dollar-store generic merchandise are: “What is this?” “Where does it come from?” “How old is it?” “Is it stale on the inside?” The questions people ask about the parish (those who do) are: “What is it?” “How many people do you have?” “How long has it been around?” “Is it for real once you get inside the church?”
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