You want to start your own church! Start with picturing 40,000 cubicles spread out below you. Each one represents a Protestant denomination. Some cubicles are small and shrinking. A few are large, and growing. There are cubicles and cubicles in every direction.
Every Protestant church represented by a cubicle wants one thing: more donors. All but the largest Mega-churches have rising costs and shrinking congregations.
Many see what’s happening in their own church. “We’re losing members. The ones we have are older. Many are moving to Florida. Others are dying. Some are leaving us for the huge Mega-churches. Every time we lose someone, our minister needs the rest of us to donate more. Frankly, my family can’t afford to keep propping this place up.”
Many Mega-churches are tottering. They need lots of assistant pastors to keep their assigned groups busy and thinking they’re doing something useful. Every assistant is thinking, “If I don’t get a raise, I may hear a call to my own ministry.” They think about that with every conversation with a rich person.
Even the biggest Mega-church is only a scandal away from running out of money. Once one of the Pastors Bob can’t keep his pants zipped, things can go very wrong very quickly! On top of that, those Personal Lockheed Mission Jets don’t fly on air, and pilot salaries are higher than ever.
All that boils down to opportunities for you to start your own church. So, don’t just picture yourself looking down on 40,000 cubicles. Picture forty thousand and ONE!
How are you going to pay for it? I’ll let you in on a marketing secret. One of the largest unidentified groups of your converts are among second and third generation Italian Catholics. Many of them are afflicted with the swelling pride that, a generation or so ago, took millions of pseudo-intellectual Irish Catholics out of The Church and into some schism.
What happens is this: Catholics in Europe withstood generations of oppression, invasion, famine, and tyranny. Many came to America. Here, their descendants take God’s final test: freedom and prosperity.
Now, it’s the Italians’ turn! Some of them are dropping like flies! You want them in your new church! They are less questioning than Protestants who’ve already had professional Protestants pick their pockets, they still have some desire for structure, and are gladly convinced to give you a lot more money than they ever gave The Church they were Catholics!
Your marketing plan is this simple: Tell the lapsed, or lapsing, Italian Catholics that they are “enlightened, brave, free, and independent thinkers”. They’ll fall for it, the same way pretentious Irish Catholics did a generation or so ago. Who are the easiest of the group to get into your church? Divorced Italian men with new wives! They don’t want to be bothered with an annulment, so they are willing to pay for the illusion you provide that “Americans don’t have to worry about a lot of Catholic mumbo-jumbo.”
Get busy if you wanna be an Evangelical Minister! Capice?
