On Entrepreneurship
As a continuation of my thoughts in an earlier piece that I wrote called “The Church is Not a Business,” I wanted to reflect on the concept of entrepreneurship. This is part of running a business under the capitalist, free market model of economics.
As I pointed out before, the church is not a business, and the lessons of business are limited in their application to the church, because the church is a provider of a resource that is not scarce. The church is the instrument by which God gives salvation to the world. And because grace isn’t scarce, it isn’t a commodity. While what the church offers is invaluable, it is paradoxically unlimited in its supply. The classic example of this concept in the academic study of economics is air. Unlike diamonds or corn or grandfather clocks, air is not scarce. It is superabundant. On the moon, air is scarce, and would therefore have to be distributed somehow, according to some economic principle and property law. It would thus be an economic commodity. There would be a market for it to be bought and sold, and its price is the result of a negotiation between buyer and seller, between consumer and producer - all according to the intersection of a supply and demand curve. But on earth, we simply inhale and exhale, because there is more than enough to meet all of the demand. Bottled air won’t sell (unless it is compressed for fighting fires, filling tires, or SCUBA diving. In that case, you’re not paying for the air but for the delivery system). It’s already free.
The Gospel is also free. It cannot be commodified. The delivery system is, in a sense, a commodity. Pastors have to be paid and formed. Buildings and altars have to be maintained. Bread and wine and electricity have to be purchased, along with insurance and other worldly costs. But the Gospel itself cannot be commodified, even as a way to raise money for the costs of delivering it. This false doctrine and aberrant practice was the impetus behind the sale of indulgences that sparked the Reformation. It is the equivalent of prostitution: a commodification of love, turning that which is sacred into a commodity for purchase, for rent, or for hire. The pastor is metaphorically the ox who is not to be muzzled, but at the same time, the shepherd (Latin: pastor) is not serving in the stead and by the command of his own Good Shepherd if he is a “hired hand.”
So understanding business principles is a good thing, especially for the lay leadership of the church. Accountants, lawyers, plumbers, mechanics, business owners, etc. are all valuable vocations to have in a local congregation. But that said, we must resist the temptation to Romanize by applying business principles to the Gospel itself, to change the way we deliver the Gospel (Word and Sacrament) based on supply and demand. The church’s sacred worship is not a business decision about branding and marketing. It is not subject to market forces. For it is the ministry of the miraculous and divine Word and Sacraments.
But we see this very kind of commodification in the vocabulary of the pioneers of Church Growth: “seeker sensitive.” This is what led to the worship wars in the first place. Preaching and the liturgy were changed so as to meet the perceived demands of the consumers - in particular, the unbelievers (sometimes euphemistically called “the unchurched”). Of course, the Old Adam prefers junk food, entertainment, and fluff. The Old Adam doesn’t want to hear the Law. The Old Adam wants rock and roll and dancing girls. The Old Adam is uncomfortable in the divine presence, flees from that which is holy, is quickly bored by Word and Sacrament, and profanes the sanctuary by inviting the common into holy space and time. And this was a kind of entrepreneurship: a rask-taking change in supply to meet demand, seeking greater return on investment, and in a quantifiable way by which “success” can be tangibly demonstrated.
The modern Church Growth Movement has become a little less hostile to the liturgy, but one will be hard pressed to find any of them that don’t practice some kind of entertainment evangelism, some kind of pop-music worship and TED-talk “messages” that have replaced the sermon. Many of these churches which focus on size, either ripped out the altar, font, and pulpit, or never had any to begin with. Those who have not removed the traditional architecture often clutter up the sacred chancel with drums and guitars and wires and other stage paraphernalia - as well as flashing screens. And those who do “wear robes” (as they say) for what they call a “traditional” service still bring in a sense of casualness - if not an outright lack of knowing how to conduct a proper liturgy or preach an actual sermon. They seem uncomfortable with reverence and holiness, like an awkward boy nervously asking a girl out to the junior prom. They are clearly fish out of water. And in fairness, this is also the case with many of our pastors who don’t advocate for Church Growth style entrepreneurship.
This “entrepreneurial” disfigurement of the church’s worship is falling into the same trap as did the medieval church, which applied business principles, including entrepreneurship, not only for the sake of the physical building, but also to theology and worship. In pre-Reformation days, there were mercenary Masses used to raise money: robotic services with no hymnody and no sermon rattled off irreverently in the interest of time (which is, after all, money). In our day, the Masses have been abolished in favor of an imitation of the worship of the radical Reformation that our confessions explicitly reject. It is to turn the church’s worship into a spectacle, not unlike the old grifts of supposedly moving statues, macabre relics, crying icons, and bleeding hosts. Now the spectacle takes the form of ginned up excitement, manipulative music, screens, and QR codes so that people can make their donations with their phones from the chairs - which may even have cupholders.
This encroachment of entrepreneurship from the realm of buildings and salaries to overtake the sacred space of worship itself is a reversion to an approach to the faith that the early Evangelicals (Lutherans) attacked head on.
But it’s even worse.
For as entrepreneuship goes, they’re not even doing it right. I’ve seen it again and again. Our modern Church Growth advocates freely admit and concede that the younger generations, including Gen-Z, are taking a hard turn toward a rigorous conservative traditionalism - including traditional liturgy. They yearn for something deep and profound in their faith, not gimmicks, not shows, and not manipulation. They desire transcendence and timelessness instead of ever-changing and shallow pop-tunes and fluffy life-coaching and pep-talks. They’re also not drawn to physically and intellectually soft pastors. There is no dispute that young people are leaving big-church non-liturgical, non-denominational so-called Evangelicalism. And where are they going? They are going to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. They are passing right over Lutheranism.
They are drawn by the very sacraments that their churches ceased confessing when the Lutheran Reformation was rejected in favor of the Radical Reformation. The ministry of Word and Sacrament became truncated to a ministry of Word only. Baptismal regeneration was replaced by a mere water ritual. The miraculous and supernatural Holy Eucharist was replaced by a casual snack of crackers and grape juice that is purely symbolic. And, of course, the worship practices of the Radical Reformation reflect this Real Absence. For why would a pastor approach the altar with reverent formality for a mere symbol? In fact, genuflecting and elevating could be considered idolatry, as if Jesus were actually present. If nothing holy is happening at the altar (which in Radical Reformation churches, like modern nondenominationalism, is a figurative term for the front of the church), then nothing in the church is holy. There is, in fact, no altar to reverence and no sanctuary that intuitively calls us to behave more reverently. There is no bowing and no sign of the cross, no sense that this space is any different than the local Walmart or movie theater. Worship, being all Word and no Sacrament, becomes mere information - without transcendence or mystery (Latin: sacramentum). And that also translates to how one sees seminary training: mere information that can be learned gnostically as data points online rather than fleshly formation that requires incarnational presence.
And it should surprise no-one that one is less likely to find the Lord’s Supper offered weekly in churches that are “seeker sensitive,” or to use the more modern parlance, “entrepreneurial.”
And to be clear, I don’t advocate that people should adopt the liturgy because it plays in Peoria, so to speak. I don’t think we should be changing the church’s worship to accommodate this group or that. One of the beautiful things about the liturgy is its timelessness. It doesn’t belong to any particular generation. Everyone can participate - even those with mental handicaps and memory loss. The liturgy is not bound by what kind of pop music you might listen to at home. Three-year olds and ninety-three year olds can harmonize their voices together around the divine throne, “with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.” We should, as St. Paul advises pastors, “preach the Word… in season and out of season,” and in the words of the hymn: “to men who like or like it not.”
This is not to say that there is no room for entrepreneurial thinking at all among churchmen. In what I believe a proper use of the entrepreneurial instinct, the Rev. Bryan Stecker started a long-format podcast called On the Line to showcase Lutheran theology, a counterpart to the Roman Catholic apologetics podcasts like Pints With Aquinas or Word on Fire, which themselves compete in “the marketplace of ideas” with the popular conservative Gnostic Jordan Peterson, making use of the format pioneered by Joe Rogan. This kind of apologetics by taking advantage of technology was being done by confessional Lutherans well before the Church Growth Movement. Of course, the early Lutherans took full advantage of the Gutenberg press. The LCMS has long taken advantage of new platforms: radio, TV, and the Internet (the latter being demonstrated in the shift from Issues, Etc. being a synodically-controlled program offered through radio, to being transformed into a more nimble and independent Internet-based program after Satan and his allies seized on Holy Week in 2008 to attempt to silence these faithful Lutheran voices and punish the men behind the program with being fired.
This kind of apologetic entrepreneurial thinking is, in fact, helpful and godly.
But I don’t advocate subjecting our worship to entrepreneurial thinking about supply and demand, holding the Divine Service captive to the winds of change. Once again, what is offered in the liturgy is not a commodity. But for those who do treat worship as an entrepreneurial enterprise, one would think they would be doing “market research” to retool their worship practices to meet this changing paradigm, this shifting demand curve. You would think instead of shrugging and saying defensively, “I’m not against the liturgy, I wear robes,” they might start to take charge and “lean in" as the kids say, to learn about vestments: when cassock and surplice are called for vs. alb and stole. When is a chasuble or cope appropriate? What is the symbolism and history? Who should be vested and how?
You would think their churches would be remodeling now to install altars, fonts, and pulpits, and learning how to use them in the traditional way. You would think they would be investing in a thurible and researching the best kinds of incense to burn in it, how to make safe use of a burning hunk of charcoal in the sanctuary, whose job it is to use it, and what the rubrics are. You would think they would go back to the basics about preaching in a traditional way, a way that is both serious and engaging - but not fluffy. You would think that they would be buying hymnals, hiring organists, and teaching the congregation Gregorian chant and chorales.
You would think they would ditch the “Father God Wejustwanna” prayers in favor of something more traditional, like learning to pray ex corde prayers modeled after our Trinitarian collects. You would think they would rediscover the rich vocabulary of our tradition, such as peppering their sermons (yes, “sermons”) with phrases from our Small Catechism (which both children and adults should recognize and be comfortable hearing) and turns of familiar phrase from our beloved hymns that we all walk together singing, and have done so for centuries. You would expect to see such pastors learning how to sing the Words of Institution according to Luther’s 500-year old composition based on the Gospel chant tone, as they are found on page 197 of the LSB hymnal, learning the rubrics of consecration, instead of delegating his job under the cover of “equipping the saints for the work of ministry” - like the lady praise band singer - to sing a butchered paraphrase of the Verba while the pastor, vested in his simulated baseball jersey, uses a fake chalice as a prop and instructing people to rip open their mini-moo-like prepackaged plastic communion thingies and slurp down whatever the drink is while the non-consecration happens. This is the very kind of you-know-what show that young people are fleeing in droves.
You would think they would be getting up to speed studying the Early Church and Reformation fathers - and recovering the vocabulary of serious, historic Christianity and the Lutheran confessions - as well as the profound, transcendent, and truly awe-inspiring (not “awesome” like a really good pizza) reality packed into that vocabulary, and put into action in the celebration of the very Mass that they promised in their ordination vows that they would not abolish.
But they don’t.
At their best practices conferences, you would think they would be asking the Rev. Dr. Fritz Eckardt to celebrate the Divine Service for them, and get the Rev. Dr. David Petersen to preach. You would think their speakers would be pointing to Gottesdienst videos as a way to be good entrepreneurs with a finger on the pulse of the “liturgical marketplace.”
As the rock and roll pioneer Buddy Holly famously sang, “That’ll be the day.”
So are these guys really entrepreneurs? Do they believe their own rhetoric? I suppose time will tell. Things are changing in a hurry.