The Cost of Consumer Churches
When a congregation is shrinking or a building is falling apart, it’s easy to reach for business language: sustainability, revitalization, restructuring. But that language doesn’t always capture what’s really going on in the soul of a church.
That’s part of why my recent conversation with Andrew Osenga struck such a deep chord. Andrew has been in more churches than most of us will ever see - over a thousand, by his estimate. Thirty years on the road as a musician and worship leader have given him a front-row seat to the story of American Christianity. What he’s seen isn’t just variety; it’s a cultural shift that has reshaped what we expect from church.
Andrew called it “the Amazonification of the church.” He’s watched small and mid-sized congregations quietly disappear. Just like small-town main streets hollowed out by big-box stores, these churches have been replaced by large, efficient, familiar ones that can feel soulless. They’re convenient, well-run, and well-branded. But the cost is high: fewer places where people can be known, contribute meaningfully, or belong in a way that shapes them.
He told a story about a pastor who joked that he had “successfully grown his church from seventy-five to twenty.” The line got a laugh, but behind it was exhaustion and resignation. How do you compete with the church down the street that has a kids’ ministry, a singles ministry, a coffee shop, and a professional band? The truth is, you don’t. But that’s the problem. We’ve built a system that rewards scale and polish, even when it leaves the body thinner and weaker in the long run.
Consumeristic models of ministry have undeniably grown churches but they haven’t reached more people for Christ. Statistically, fewer Americans attend worship services today than they did twenty-five years ago. Maybe we’ve traded participation for attendance, formation for excitement.
What I loved most about this conversation, though, wasn’t the critique. It was the hope underneath it. Andrew talked about small churches where people still notice if you’re gone, where you might get handed the code to the front door because someone trusts you. He reminded me that conflict breeds intimacy. In those close-knit communities, you can’t just disappear when things get tense. You have to work it out. And in that messy process of forgiveness and ownership, the church becomes a family again.
When I asked him about endings, Andrew said something I can’t stop thinking about: we lack the vocabulary for it. We have plenty of business terms for growth — “relaunch,” “rebrand,” “revitalize” — but almost no pastoral language for closure. Consumerism has narrowed even our spiritual vocabulary. We can talk about victory, but not lament. We can sing about triumph, but not loss.
That gap matters. Because when a congregation faces its own finitude, what it needs isn’t another growth strategy. It needs a way to talk about grief, faithfulness, and the hope of resurrection.
Maybe that’s the invitation for all of us in this season: to recover a richer language that can hold both celebration and sorrow, both birth and death. To resist the lie that bigger is always better. To remember that endings, too, can be holy ground.
