Church as an Experience

In one of my favorite books, “The Divine Commodity”, Skye Jethani and his team flesh out this idea of externalities and experiences through an interview with economist Jim Gilmore.  As Gilmore guides them through the American Girl Place he explains how it is our “experience culture” at it’s best.  It has the appearance of a museum but everything you see is for sale.  It has all the dolls portrayed in a different historic era, each with it’s own history and story.  You can even take your doll to the beauty salon to get it’s hair done, get a picture taken with her and put on the cover of a magazine, or go have lunch in the store with your doll.  All an experience.  I’ll start the interview here.  

MS: So how does all this “experience providing” apply to the church?    
Gilmore: It doesn’t.  When the church gets into the business of staging experiences, that quickly becomes idolatry.
MS: I’m stunned.  So you don’t encourage churches to use your elements of marketable experiences to create attractive experiences for their attenders?
Gilmore: No.  The organized church should never try to stage a God experience.
KM: When people come to church, don’t they expect an experience of some kind?  Consumers approach the worship service with the same mindset as they do a purchase.    
Gilmore: Increasingly you find people talking about the worship experience rather than the worship service.  That reflects what’s happening in the outside world.  I’m dismayed to see churches abandon the means of grace that God ordains simply to conform to the patters of the world.  
KM: So what happens in church?  Are people getting a service, because they’re helped to do something they couldn’t do on their own, that is, get closer to God?  Or are they getting an experience, the encounter with God through worship?
Gilmore: The word “getting” is, I think the problem with contemporary Christianity.  God is the audience of worship. What you get is, quite frankly, irrelevant as a starting point.
ER:But people, especially unchurched people, don’t perceive it that way.  They’re expecting some return.  
Gilmore: That is the argument.  But the only thing of value the church has to offer is the gospel.  I believe that one result of the emerging Experience Economy will be a longing for authenticity.  To the extent that the church stages worldly experiences, it will lose its effectiveness.  

So powerful.  “The only thing of value the church has to offer is the gospel.”  That’s it!  It is the only thing that matters.  Somehow or another, the modern church has taken integral parts of the gospel and carved out their own law.  Not only that, when I got into ministry, I quickly found out that I had somehow missed the ministry class in event planning and church politics.