It would be easy to write about the church’s branding problem and make consumer Christians the villain.
They come late. They leave early. They complain about the music, the preaching, the children’s ministry, the temperature, and the coffee. They want the church to meet their needs, but they do not want the church to ask too much of them. When they become unhappy, they disappear and show up at another church a few weeks later.
It is easy to be irritated by that.
It is harder to admit that we helped form it.
We cannot spend decades treating people like a target market and then shame them for behaving like customers. We cannot build ministry around attraction, convenience, excellence, and personal benefit, then blame people when those are the categories they use to judge us.
This is not their problem. It is ours.
Pastors helped build this culture. I say that as a pastor. We learned to measure faithfulness through attendance, giving, buildings, baptisms, volunteer numbers, online views, and momentum. Some of those measurements matter. Numbers can represent actual people, and people matter deeply. But numbers can also become a way of proving that we matter.
We learned to present vision in ways that would create buy-in. We studied how to attract people, keep people, move people through systems, and turn attenders into contributors. We learned to speak of human beings as target groups, demographics, giving units, leaders, and volunteers.
Most pastors I know genuinely love people and want them to encounter Jesus. The foundations were often honorable. But good intentions do not keep a system from forming us in unhealthy ways.
Congregations helped sustain the culture too. We platformed the churches that impressed us. We followed the leaders who inspired us. We gave our time and money to ministries that delivered meaningful experiences. We celebrated growth, visibility, and influence as evidence that God was doing something important.
Leaders produced what people rewarded, and people learned to want what leaders produced.
We built this together.
That matters because repentance cannot begin with accusation. If pastors stand on platforms and scold people for failing to serve, commit, give, or stay, we are ignoring our own part in their formation. If congregants blame pastors for turning churches into businesses while continuing to shop for the church with the best product, we are doing the same thing.
There is enough repentance to go around.
Pastors may need to repent for confusing influence with fruitfulness. We may need to admit that full rooms made us feel successful and empty rooms made us question our calling. We may need to confess that we built systems requiring constant production, then became frustrated when people expected us to keep producing.
Congregants may need to repent for confusing preference with discernment. We may need to admit that we called churches unhealthy when they simply stopped centering us. We may need to confess that we wanted deep community as long as it did not require difficult conversations, inconvenient service, or relationships with people we would not naturally choose.
All of us may need to repent for outsourcing the Christian life.
We hired people to care, teach, visit, disciple, organize, evangelize, and pray. Then we came alongside their systems and called that ministry. Paid ministry is not the enemy. Scripture recognizes particular callings and leadership. But pastors were never meant to perform the life of the body on behalf of everyone else.
This is where humility must replace blame.
The question is not, “Who ruined the church?” The question is, “What have we built together, and what is it making of us?”
I am not standing outside this system throwing rocks at it. I am a pastor within it. I have benefited from it, contributed to it, defended parts of it, and sometimes confused its success with the work of God.
That is why this is a confession before it is a criticism. (This statement is hopeful, by the way).
If the disciples are the brand, then the church's condition belongs to all of us. We will not move forward by finding better people, better pastors, or a better model to copy.
We begin by telling the truth about what we have loved, rewarded, and become.