Churches and the Dangers of Line Extension

I have always banked on the notion that you cannot grow a strong church with a side-door strategy, and this week I was reminded of that first hand. Side doors are everything else a church does besides preach the gospel and help grow people in their faith. Somehow along the way church leaders have decided that music concerts, recreation, cafeterias, schools, bookstores and even quilting groups were church-worthy pursuits and a proliferation of side-door ministries began to show up in large churches.


What I experienced recently as I visited a great church last week reinforced my theory. What started as an outreach ministry of the church years ago, suddenly began to take a life of its own and became a huge resource and energy drain--so much so that the very thing that drove it into existence, evangelism, is no longer the focus.

I appreciate Thom Rainer's book Simple Church and its efforts to help churches do what they can do best: reach people for Christ, help them grow in their faith and equip them for ministry. When other things, albeit good things, get added into this mix, the main thing seems to weaken with the passing of time. In marketing we call this phenomenon: line extension.

Xerox learned the line extension lesson years ago when it decided that since it was so popular in its copier business, it should go into the computer business. Their logic was simple: We are the best selling copier maker in the world, since a copier is a machine and so is the computer, the people who bough our copiers will also buy our computers. Well, it did not work. People did not want to buy their computers from their copier maker. Several years into the PC venture and several millions of dollars later, Xerox finally got it: people want to buy copiers from us and nothing else. I hope churches are learning that lesson.

Difficult financial times forces us to look very strategically at where our resources go. I hope more churches are taking a hard look at all the expenditures outside of the core business of being the church and focus their effort on the main thing.

Is your church guilty of line extension?