c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) As chief strategist for President Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, Matthew J. Dowd helped eke out a victory despite surveys that depicted an electorate uneasy over Iraq, the economy and where the nation was headed.

Now Dowd says churches can apply the same techniques that worked for Bush. “Whether your product is a candidate, a hamburger or the word of God, the challenge is the same.”

Dowd is a co-author of the new “Applebee’s America: How Successful Political, Business and Religious Leaders Connect With the New American Community.”

Q: What is it about Applebee’s that intrigues you?

A: Applebee’s is not trying to sell food. They are trying to give people a sense of connection and community and a feeling of belonging. Customers are going there because they get a sense of community when they walk in an Applebee’s, and each Applebee’s reflects the local community.

Q: What does that have to do with churches?

A: Successful growing churches have learned that what is very important is giving people a sense of belonging and community and connecting them with other folks at their churches. This is exactly what Applebee’s and other successful businesses like Starbucks are doing around the country.

Q: So what do successful religious institutions have in common with Applebee’s?

A: Successful religious institutions are not built in hierarchical ways. Interestingly, it’s like politics: The most successful ones are built from the bottom up. It’s built by how people respond to small communities. People might have some common interests. They might be motorcycle riders or they might be card players. … It’s more important to have 1,000 groups of 10 people than it is to have 10,000 people.

Q: Are religious institutions inherently different from political or business organizations?

A: Well, there are some differences. … In politics, it’s a choice between one person or another. In business, it’s whether you buy this car or that car. In religion, the successful ones aren’t calling people to say, “Don’t go there, go here.” It’s all about, “Come here and get something that your soul needs or your heart needs.” I don’t think most successful religions are asking people to make that choice.

Q: You write about dividing potential worshippers into 50 lifestyle segments and crafting messages that appeal to them. What do you mean by lifestyle segments?

A: If there’s a group of people who have a common thing _ they like to go hiking together or be outdoors together or that sort of thing _ then a church can say, “OK, these people have that (in common). Maybe there are ways that we can … give them a religious experience with that in mind.”

Q: Some in religious circles bristle at marketing because they feel it reduces faith to a mere commodity. Does that sort of thinking doom certain religious people or institutions to extinction?

A: If a religious institution says, “That’s marketing. I’m not going to do that,” they’re going to cut their nose to spite their face because then they’re not able to talk to people. … They’re not going to be successful in their endeavor of what they really want to do, which is talk to as many people as possible and ultimately save souls.

Q: You focus on megachurches, but there might be some who say, “My church is much smaller.” Do lessons from megachurches apply to churches, synagogues and mosques of all shapes and sizes?

A: I think the lessons to be successful in what you’re doing _ whether it’s a church of 100 people or a church of 10,000 people _ are the same. Lessons you learn and what you need to know, which is how to connect with people, are the same. You connect with people in their hearts. You give them a sense of community. You’re authentic. You have a set of principles and beliefs. They’re the same things that work in a campaign for president or a campaign for city council somewhere.

Q: I’ll ask for a prediction here. If you could look 10 years down the line, how will the landscape of American religion be different?

A: One of the things we know for sure is that institutions set up in a hierarchical fashion are going to be very unsuccessful in keeping people in the pews and keeping parishioners as part of those ministries. … That I think is why the Catholic Church has had difficulty growing and has had parishes that have shut down. … So my prediction is the ones that maintain that (top-down decision making) are going to continue to lose parishioners, and the ones that build a sense of church at the grass-roots and at the community level … are the ones that are going to succeed.

Q: Are you worried about the future of your own Catholic Church?

A: I’m very worried. I’m Catholic, I’ve stayed Catholic, I was raised that way. I’m as Irish Catholic as you get _ one of 11 kids from Detroit. I have actually looked at other churches _ with a lot of the things we go through in life, we say, “OK, is this what I want?”

I’ve gone to other churches that have a much better sense of building community in local involvement in a grass-roots way. And I worry about that. Although I’ll always be Catholic, I think there are a lot of things in the Catholic Church that haven’t responded to that change. Again, not in terms of a (revamped) belief system, but in responding to people where they are.

KRE/PH END MACDONALD

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