6 God and Popular Culture movement is a “success” or “failure” largely depends on whether you view it from inside or outside Christendom institutional assumptions. The capi- tal pool for church planting is diminishing rapidly, and between finan- cial crisis and leadership burnout many new churches have proven to be unsustainable. On the other hand, experiments in alternative intentional Christian communities have flourished outside the direct control of par- ent organizations. In other words, the more relevant that Christian com- munities become to “what seekers seek,” the less viable they become as denominational franchises. Why is the new quest for “relevance” failing to renew the institutional church? The answer brings us back to the four lenses of demographic research. Even in its more creative forms, the church still hesitates to go all the way and use all four lenses of research. Established churches persist in their old-fashioned (20th-century) reliance on “pure demographics” and clumsy strategic planning based on broad genera- tional, racial, economic, marital, educational, and other filters. Church planters go further and use lifestyle segmentation to plan more accu- rately for the attitudes, stylistic preferences, media, and personal preferences of diverse publics. However, their innovation tends to focus solely on form and assumes that the content of religious questions and answers remains essentially the same. Some church planters go even further to establish completely different kinds of intentional spiritual communities. They use the next two lenses of psycho- graphic and heartburst research to adapt both the form of spiritual/cultural dialogue and the content of questions and answers in the dialogue. When spiritual leaders use all four lenses of demographic research in their quest for relevance to emerging and diversifying lifestyle segments, they inevitably drift further and further away from their denominational par- ents and traditional roots. For example, the demographic search engine http://www.MissionInsite .com (and its parent company for school boards, http://www.DecisionInsite .com) can now discern lifestyle and psychographic preferences in extraor- dinary detail from as wide a geography as the city of Chicago to as small a geography as a single residential block on Ogden Avenue. As I indicated earlier, my work has been to write commentaries for church planners on all 19 lifestyle groups and all 71 lifestyle segments currently in the United States, specifically for church and denominational clients who are involved in strategic planning (church transformation and planting, outreach, and evangelism). Here is the key: Each lifestyle seg- ment has distinct preferences for certain kinds of ministries. We can now
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