Bearing witness to the way churches embrace business principles was last season’s newsroom fashion. Maybe the Times should go shopping for a new wardrobe.

By Lamar Clarkson

Church services are full of refrains. So are commercials. Another institution given to chanting is the New York Times, which can’t stop testifying to the high-powered advertising team that God’s people have formed with Mammon. The paper was at it again in last Sunday’s Business section, handing down the holy truth this time through Fara Warner in her article “Prepare Thee for Some Serious Marketing.”

Like many reporters before her, Warner is bearing witness to the way churches have embraced business principles in order to lure the world’s pickiest potential congregants: American consumers. She visits the Willow Creek megachurch in Barrington, Illinois, to find out how pastors are using “proven business and marketing strategies” to recruit new members and hold on to existing ones. The tactics Warner attributes to church leaders around the country include many new-media buzzwords—blogs, videocasts, podcasts, and even one tantalizing mention of a pastor who’s open to the idea of a more bottom-up, user-directed model—but the ones she reports on firsthand are solidly old-fashioned.

The innovation at Willow Creek that Warner spends the most time with is “the Table,” a program that sets up dinners for church members who live near each other. In her opening scene, Warner describes a peaceful evening one group spent over a meal of brisket, cheese potatoes, and green beans, at a family home where no cars lined the curb because everyone lives close by. Though a neighborly dinner may sound like nothing new for a church group, the pastor who came up with the idea attributes it in part to a Texas developer friend who shared business insights with him. But what exactly earns a quiet meal with the neighbors its place in a corporate-style strategy? Warner tries to fudge it by working a little reporterly transubstantiation: she compares the community fostered outside church, in people’s homes, to Nike’s effort to devise new workout routines at gyms—their way of increasing visibility beyond sporting goods stores. She also draws a head-scratching connection between churches’ revamped outreach programs and Wal-Mart’s decision to sell trendier clothes. The basis for comparison? Just take it on faith.

Abandoning analogy, Warner assures us of Willow Creek’s new-media cred by informing us that the pastors use the Internet. They advertised the Tables on the church’s website and further used the site to match members’ high-school districts with a Table in their neighborhood. In effect, they went online to go next door. One wonders if those podcasts and text messages Warner alludes to (but never describes) are being transmitted to an audience that’s sitting in the same room.

Not only are the marketing strategies not so edgy, but neither are the people they’re aimed at. Warner reports that Gen X worshippers are shunning the Boomers’ corporate campus–style megachurches—with their coffee bars and Christian rock bands—in favor of “increased intimacy and a more serious focus on spirituality.” (That explains why Willow Creek, itself a megachurch with cafeteria pizza, has adopted the Table concept). If churches are indeed using technologies like videocasting to appeal to a tradition-hungry crowd, that would be an interesting story, and one Warner might have reported if she could free herself from Times dogma. Usually newspapers are accused of dressing up old stories in new outfits; here, Warner has cloaked a new story in last season’s fashions—the once flashy, now threadbare garb of “shifting marketing strategies” and “transferable business concepts.” Maybe it’s time for Times articles to go shopping for a new wardrobe. I hear Wal-Mart has a plan for that.

Lamar Clarkson is a graduate student at New York University.