I’m not one to mix business strategies and the church, as God doesn’t need any help from Wall Street. However, there is one particular marketing case I find very interesting and relevant for the church today. Consider the details in this particularly strange approach from the food industry.
You may remember the Domino’s pizza commercials from a few years ago, the ones where they basically said “we know our pizza isn’t any good.” Admitting their previous mediocrity, Domino’s famously put out those advertisements to apologize for the lousy quality of their pizza, promising that they were going to change things. This involved an all-new pizza recipe, a mini-documentary showing their overhaul process, a website to document the changes, a hashtag campaign (#newpizza), and taste test surveys to show that they could now both compete with and defeat pizza chains known for their higher quality.
As strange as it was to see a company admit that they had been selling a sub-par product for years, it certainly caught plenty of attention. Would that admission drive people away, though? Wouldn’t people be annoyed by a company that knowingly took their money to provide lousy pizza? Apparently not. USA Today reported that the chain reported one of the largest quarterly fast food sales growths ever, increasing by over 14% in a quarter when industry sales were down 3% across the board. [1]
How does the case of Domino’s pizza recipe reboot relate to the church? Consider the basic message of their effort. “We’re a pizza company that makes lousy pizza. What if we just get back to the basics and make a good pizza?” While their rivals all attempt various crazy new pizzas and flavors to make a splash, Domino’s went back to the basics.
As the religious world looks to the wisdom of men for the latest trends in order to spur new growth, what if we just go back to doing better at what we were supposed to be doing all along? Instead of coming up with all kinds of programs targeted at every age level and thinking we’ll be noticed for our catchy slogans and logos, what if we just got back to being the church?
The church of Acts 2 didn’t need ministers for every single demographic, complete with programs to engage every single member. Somehow they thrived without nice, new buildings and “cool” ministers. Why? Because they were just the church, as God designed it. The wisdom of man is never going to be more effective than the simplicity of God’s intended functions for the church. In the early church we see that everyone had a part in the fellowship, service, and giving, and it dictated their daily lives as well. Those were people who didn’t blend in with the world. They stood out in the best way possible, and the results were predictable. They reached thousands with the life-changing Gospel of Christ, and they couldn’t help but grab the attention of the world.
So, how do we do it? If Domino’s uninspiring signature dish was its pizza, what defining marks of the church do we need to reestablish? How about starting with what Jesus called the greatest commandments?
In Matthew 22:35-40, Jesus is quizzed on which commandment He found to be most important, and He picked two. First, love God with all of your heart, soul, and mind. Second, love your neighbor as yourself. That might seem like an oversimplification in a world where we have to address literally dozens of issues, but if we focus on these foundational points of our faith, God will take care of the details. What makes us different and noticeable to the world isn’t going to be some strategy a megachurch leader writes in his latest book. It’s going to be that foundational principle of everything we do: love.
Love God.
So much of our preaching and understanding of Christianity seems to focus on the heaven vs. hell aspect of God’s Word. Do a, b, and c so you go to heaven, and don’t do x, y, and z because you don’t want to go to hell. But from the very beginning God has wanted a relationship with His people. The most basic message of the Bible is His love for us, and from that our only logical response is to love Him in return.
Practically, this solves so many issues.
The youth unfaithfulness epidemic. If you take Jesus’ quote back into its original context of Deuteronomy 6, Moses tells the people of Israel that their love of God needs to permeate their lives and be something they develop in the next generation every single day. If we love God so much that we refuse to let anything be more important than Him in our homes, and we make every choice because we love Him (not because we think we have to), we’ll see a major difference in the next generation.
Doctrinal issues. With some calling for the church to bow to feminism and allow women preachers, others saying the church should embrace homosexual marriage, still others advocating “innovative” worship practices, and a plethora of other doctrinal disagreements regularly being pushed to the forefront of the religious world, an all-consuming love of God would put everything in its proper perspective. In John 14:15 Jesus said that loving Him would lead to obedience. If you want to ignore God’s Word or try to twist it to mean something that it doesn’t say, you can’t claim that you love God and you can’t claim the name of Christ. The idea that churches swing from extremes of being either loving or biblically sound is off the mark. A church that loves God obeys Him.
Worship. One of the things we observed in our 2013 survey of why people left the church is that so many felt the church lacked spirituality, that it was just a bunch of people going through the motions each week. If you’ve ever felt like worship is a chore, that being present on Sunday mornings is just something you do because you’re supposed to, the answer isn’t just for the church to “shake things up.” It begins in our personal lives. If we have a strong, loving connection with God the other 6 days of the week, our worship will become noticeably different.
Love your neighbor.
So much of what the world has against the church today is that we are unloving. Our survey repeatedly confirmed what you always hear from people about Christianity – “they’re just a bunch of hypocrites.” How do we change that? How do we get back to the basics in our relationship? We love our neighbors as ourselves.
To love someone as you love yourself is a heavy thought. We think about what is in our own best interests every day. To consider others with that same interest would change so much of what we do. Since Jesus said that our defining characteristic in the world would be our love (John 13:35), it has to be the greatest emphasis in our efforts to get back to that basic recipe of what the church should be. Four areas in which we can do so:
Friendliness. The world looks at Christians as utterly disagreeable, as the people who hate homosexuals. While that criticism is generally unfair, it would go a long way to change others’ perception of us if they could see us putting the love of Christ into action. Go out of your way to treat people kindly. Single people out for encouragement and kind acts. Show that you’re willing to serve them and that you love them just as you love yourself.
Fellowship. One of the most obvious differences between what we see in Acts 2 and what the church generally looks like today is the level of fellowship. The church is to be a family, and most people are desperate for that kind of connection in life. If we’re seeing each other only on Sundays and Wednesdays (with the occasional congregational event), there’s no obvious love for each other that is going to stand out to the world. There’s nothing different about us than the people who work together or go to school together and never see each other outside of those places. It doesn’t matter how nice your church building is or how many programs you can offer someone if they aren’t going to find a sense of belonging with your group of people.
Evangelism. No one wants to be lost for eternity, and if you wouldn’t want to be, then loving your neighbor as yourself means you won’t want them to be lost, either. Disciple making is one of the basic principles for which the church exists (Matthew 28:18-20), and without it we can’t say we have a love for anyone. A church that is content to gather together and never reach beyond the doors of the building is a church that has lost its love for people, and without a love for people a church is of very little use to God.
No, the church isn’t a pizza chain, but just as Domino’s completely reversed their fortunes by realizing they did one thing and they needed to do it well, so the church can only grow if we get back to the one thing we’re supposed to do: love. Instead of looking in every direction for the next fad church growth idea, what if we just got back to following God’s perfect recipe for church success as closely as possible?
By Jack Wilkie
This article appears in the March 2015 issue of “Think” magazine. To subscribe, click here.
Cited:
[1] – Bruce Horovitz, “New pizza recipe did wonders for Domino’s sales,” USA Today, Web, 7 May 2010, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2010-05-05-dominos05_ST_N.htm.”
