What spurred me to write this post are the very ads you see at the top of this page right now. At the time of writing they read something like this: "Baptist Sermons," "Sermons You Can Preach," "God," and "positive Thoughts."

That's a nice rainbow of interests isn't it? No one actually reads this blog anyway, so it doesn't really matter what Google puts up there, but those ads, I find, are incredibly awkward. Supposedly, those ads are "targeted" towards me? I'm the one writing about God so much, so Google assumes (I guess) that simply showing me an ad called "God" would reel me in. After all, you can't boil down the Christian faith to a more appropriate keyword. If you actually knew me, though, you would know that putting up an add called Baptist Sermons would most definitely not make me clink on the link, except for maybe a good chuckle. In other words, Baptist Sermons might be about God in general but have nothing to do with what I am interested in. The assumption that they do only proves the assumption maker is an alien in my world. By putting those ads up, Google effectively distances themselves from me, and my faith in their ability to target me with ads falls considerably. I have been drawn into full awareness of their technique by their failure.

In a bizarre way, this tactic of casting a wide net to see what sticks is pretty much how the church runs things now. Actually, its not a bizarre connection when you stop to think about it. Over the past two decades the Protestant church has slowly adopted the tactics and social algorithms discovered for and adapted to the marketing field. The church begun using demographic information some twenty+ years ago to more effectively divide ever growing churches into distinct "groups" to better minister to the congregation. Sunday school became split among age and gender: Single College Students, Youth, Seniors, Married Adults, Divorced Adults, etc. The next thing we know, College, Yong-Married, Widower and Youth groups popped into existence and the church body became slowly sub-divided. Along the way, certain aspects of Christianity and human nature got completely ignored, chief among them the fact that Sunday school isn't really supposed to be school-like and church isn't there to sit you down and behave, dammnit, and make you learn these verses. Its not about knowledge. Its about worship, community and fellowship. The amount of fellowship and community someone can have when they're shuffled off to their own peer group is rather limited. The church is compared metaphorically to a family for many reasons, and one of them is because a family isn't a carefully hand-picked little bunch of people. A family is often a hodge podge of (seemingly) randomly chosen people thrown together. Demographics and interest surveys arent used before a parent gives birth. What you get is what you get.

If the Bible keeps comparing Christianity to such things as family, and marriage, etc, why do we keep trying to make our churches more like a modern marketing focus group? Why can't we just stick to being a family and all the mess that implies? Younger people learn a lot from being around adults and children. The more we try to predict where someone should fit in the more we run the risk of looking like those damn Google ads, and the more we run the risk of driving people off. If we really took the time to get to know people who go to church with us we might discover putting them in their "proper" people group is the worst thing possible, even though on the surface they seem to fit there (very much like my Baptist Sermons ads).

But the problem is bigger than how churches divide up Sunday School. Demographics and the science of the human has completely invaded our churches to such a degree its a way of thinking now. If we really have to use this "science" to make our ministries more efficient then our churches are just to darn big. Maybe size is the bringer of all these techniques. Once you get so very big you can't know people personally anyway.