Attention, Ladies and Gentlemen:
May. 3rd, 2011 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogThe "Sermon on the Mount" in your manual is being replaced with the "Mount of Olives Mission Statement." Please break up into small groups, where our leaders will copy down your buzzwords for the first draft while our facilitators will take two fish and five loaves of bread and turn them into several hundred baskets of utter bullshit.
Yup, that was my meeting at church tonight. I swear I am not making this up, but in the immortal words of Tom Lehrer, riffed on here just in the past week, we did.... fractions! Making it even more surreal was that the featured presenter was a demographics specialist from UB (and, I hasten to say, a perfectly nice guy) whose voice is a dead ringer for the Bahd of Hahvahd. And if he didn't actually use Tom's line from the video below about "if they REALLY want to sell the product," he came frighteningly close.
We had PowerPoint. We had charts and graphs. We learned all about the demographics of, and around, the rather economically and ethnically inbred community in which our church is located. And then we took the first steps toward using nationwide and local surveys of our town and similar ones, completely derived from the world of mass marketing, using "mosaic lifestyle portraits" that have been used to target ad campaigns out in the secular world for decades.
Naturally, we focused on Our Own Kind- the dozen or so identified demographic groups which had the most people of that description within the four highly homogeneous zip codes counting for 75 percent of our membership. These include, and I make none of these up, "Small-Town Success," "Suburban Optimists," "Comfy Country Living," and "Shotguns and Pickups." (Actually, I did make the last one up; it does exist as a defined demographic, and in fact I once lived in the Sweet Home/"Looney Acres" section of Amherst long associated with it, but demographers consider the term a perjorative now and don't really like to talk about it.)
Just one example from the text, and one chart, to help explain why large parts of my brain are still on the ceiling of the parlor above where the overhead projector was. The first of those demographics, fitting probably dozens of couples and families within our congregation, is described with all kinds of platitudes about what they like, and do, and believe. My personal favorite of them was this description of what these self-described "families of the most prominent citizens in their exurban communities"
like to watch on the telly:
Small-town Success households share a fondness for a variety of media. They like to watch primetime crime dramas and comedies on television, especially "CSI," "Law and Order," and "Two and a Half Men."
You betcha, folks. The primary governing body of our congregation seems poised to go after a group of people who enjoy watching Charlie Sheen.
A lot of other slides then flew by, but this one just caught my eye enough to make "Tom" go back and show it again to the entire group present:
"Pete, am I reading that slide right?" I asked "Tom" (cleverly using his real name). "Is it saying that in our demographic region, the trend is for income growth to only be occurring among people earning more than $100,000 a year and that the income of everybody below that level is expected to decrease?" Yes, he said, that's what it says. And not one professed Christian in that room- well, other than the one smartass writing to you now- expressed a single problem with that.
By this point, though, my brain had mainly checked out. It was all I could do not to start singing aloud the anthem of religious marketing that the voice-sake of "Tom" had done for his own Catholic faith 40-odd years ago-
- and I was beginning my own Protestant adaptation of it. While this is not specific to our congregation, neither is it entirely inaccurate, either. Demographics suck like that sometimes. It's called.... The Methodist Rag.
First you sit down on your ass
Join in our New Member Class
Then it would be really great
If you'd... profess the faith, 'fess the 'faith, 'fess the faith
Believe anything you want- it's
Quite all right with General Conference
We're never pushy, just a little wishy-washy, we're
Doin' the Methodist Rag!
Make a dirge out of a spiritual,
Pass a dish of day-old casserole,
"Judge not, lest ye be thou judged"- til
You're out the door, then everybody will
Put you down if you are doin'
Something new- even weekly Communion
One-three-five-seven
Christ's headbanging up in heaven
So on Sundays, we'll be here
There's nothing for you to fear
Not unless you might not fit in with
Hypocrites, hypocrites, hypocrites
Say the prayers and pass the peace, then
Be an ass the rest of the weeks
Glory hallelujah!- then we'll stick it to ya
Call me a cynicist for speaking the truth, but it's
Doin' the Methodist Rag!
Yup, that was my meeting at church tonight. I swear I am not making this up, but in the immortal words of Tom Lehrer, riffed on here just in the past week, we did.... fractions! Making it even more surreal was that the featured presenter was a demographics specialist from UB (and, I hasten to say, a perfectly nice guy) whose voice is a dead ringer for the Bahd of Hahvahd. And if he didn't actually use Tom's line from the video below about "if they REALLY want to sell the product," he came frighteningly close.
We had PowerPoint. We had charts and graphs. We learned all about the demographics of, and around, the rather economically and ethnically inbred community in which our church is located. And then we took the first steps toward using nationwide and local surveys of our town and similar ones, completely derived from the world of mass marketing, using "mosaic lifestyle portraits" that have been used to target ad campaigns out in the secular world for decades.
Naturally, we focused on Our Own Kind- the dozen or so identified demographic groups which had the most people of that description within the four highly homogeneous zip codes counting for 75 percent of our membership. These include, and I make none of these up, "Small-Town Success," "Suburban Optimists," "Comfy Country Living," and "Shotguns and Pickups." (Actually, I did make the last one up; it does exist as a defined demographic, and in fact I once lived in the Sweet Home/"Looney Acres" section of Amherst long associated with it, but demographers consider the term a perjorative now and don't really like to talk about it.)
Just one example from the text, and one chart, to help explain why large parts of my brain are still on the ceiling of the parlor above where the overhead projector was. The first of those demographics, fitting probably dozens of couples and families within our congregation, is described with all kinds of platitudes about what they like, and do, and believe. My personal favorite of them was this description of what these self-described "families of the most prominent citizens in their exurban communities"
like to watch on the telly:
Small-town Success households share a fondness for a variety of media. They like to watch primetime crime dramas and comedies on television, especially "CSI," "Law and Order," and "Two and a Half Men."
You betcha, folks. The primary governing body of our congregation seems poised to go after a group of people who enjoy watching Charlie Sheen.
A lot of other slides then flew by, but this one just caught my eye enough to make "Tom" go back and show it again to the entire group present:
"Pete, am I reading that slide right?" I asked "Tom" (cleverly using his real name). "Is it saying that in our demographic region, the trend is for income growth to only be occurring among people earning more than $100,000 a year and that the income of everybody below that level is expected to decrease?" Yes, he said, that's what it says. And not one professed Christian in that room- well, other than the one smartass writing to you now- expressed a single problem with that.
By this point, though, my brain had mainly checked out. It was all I could do not to start singing aloud the anthem of religious marketing that the voice-sake of "Tom" had done for his own Catholic faith 40-odd years ago-
- and I was beginning my own Protestant adaptation of it. While this is not specific to our congregation, neither is it entirely inaccurate, either. Demographics suck like that sometimes. It's called.... The Methodist Rag.
First you sit down on your ass
Join in our New Member Class
Then it would be really great
If you'd... profess the faith, 'fess the 'faith, 'fess the faith
Believe anything you want- it's
Quite all right with General Conference
We're never pushy, just a little wishy-washy, we're
Doin' the Methodist Rag!
Make a dirge out of a spiritual,
Pass a dish of day-old casserole,
"Judge not, lest ye be thou judged"- til
You're out the door, then everybody will
Put you down if you are doin'
Something new- even weekly Communion
One-three-five-seven
Christ's headbanging up in heaven
So on Sundays, we'll be here
There's nothing for you to fear
Not unless you might not fit in with
Hypocrites, hypocrites, hypocrites
Say the prayers and pass the peace, then
Be an ass the rest of the weeks
Glory hallelujah!- then we'll stick it to ya
Call me a cynicist for speaking the truth, but it's
Doin' the Methodist Rag!
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no subject
Date: 2011-05-04 01:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-04 02:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-04 03:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-04 03:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-04 10:00 am (UTC)leeches congregations withprovides vital mission-critical support for local churches is missioninsite.com (http://www.missioninsite.com). The whole site is pretty scary and Stepfordlike. That particular image came from their Fullinsite (just $249!) (http://www.missioninsite.com/PDF_Files/Sample-FullInsite-Report.pdf)report on census data for your particular target area. This is everybody within the selected zip code(s), not just our members or potential members, but it's the lack of concern about the trend that I found the most disturbing.no subject
Date: 2011-05-04 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-04 11:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-04 11:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-04 12:46 pm (UTC)Okay, that made me crack the hell up. I needed that.
Although you certainly didn't need the Buzzword Bingo stress and frustration!
no subject
Date: 2011-05-16 02:10 am (UTC)