Wal-Mart Church

If you watch the stock market reports, there’s something you should pay attention to. The big number, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is a composite of the top companies on the stock exchange. So while that number has been in free-fall (it was about 14,000 a year ago, just above 8000 now), a company on that list has not only not collapsed, but has gained, showing a 10% growth in profits: Wal-Mart.

Now, it’s fashionable to hate Wal-Mart, to cry about mom-and-pop stores on Main Street run out of business (no one asked who mom-and-pop ran out of business), to fuss about what the workers are paid or how good their insurance is (would they have any job or any insurance from mom-and-pop?). There is a disturbing side to hating Wal-Mart. It is, at base, a form of class-warfare, class- and even race-hatred hiding behind some kind of enlightened plan for the proletariat.

Wal-Mart has a business model that has been my model for church growth. I don’t mean selling stuff at low prices (although I suppose that if you compared my salary to any other United Methodist pastor, I am definitely underselling them. The Rock is the only church with 300 people that no one wants!) Wal-Mart’s core commitment is to families making less than $30,000 a year.

You laugh and think, how many people is that? Even if it’s not a huge number of people, it’s a population no one else works with, markets to (except Rent-A-Center and Check Exchange places—now those are evil industries all you cool people need to jump on, not Wal-Mart). So Wal-Mart has an edge over other companies who think that they need to market their business to the folks with money, disposable income, so to speak. It’s working, obviously. I know people who gripe about Wal-Mart and all they can do is be ashamed when I catch them there.

Back in the day, I was tired of working for the Man. A bud and I decided we were going to go into business together, mostly because we thought if we had our own business we could write off some bad-boy Dodge trucks (I was riding a bike at the time; I was desperate). We never did go for it (I sometimes regret it; I would have like to have tried), but we became intrigued by some business ideas we studied. There are a number of restaurant/food franchises available that cater to very small towns (we were in Mississippi, so that was only making sense), towns that did not and would not have a McDonald’s or any other restaurants. You could buy a series of franchises and be set up in a bunch of towns and make it work. Things like Broaster Chicken that you see in country stores, and stores here on the Northside where people walk.

So for a few years I have had it in my head that apparently anyone can put up a warehouse in the burbs, plug in some amps and video screens and fail miserably. They’re even failing miserably when they pack the place, but that’s another story. But what kind of fool plants a church downtown? Um, that would be Rosario. What kind of lunatic pushes a church to let go of the many people coming from far away (who because of distance and lack of commitment come only on Sunday) and instead focuses on a neighborhood of poor people, the very neighborhood churches left behind to move to the warehouses in the burbs?

But it’s not lunacy. Wal-Mart is making a killing. Maybe we’ll be able to, as well.

Finally, tho, the issue of hating Wal-Mart rears its head in many ways. Do we hate Wal-Mart for imagined oppression of its workers, or because if Wal-Mart succeeds, the poor will be able to break out of our last hold on them: the display we make of them. The fundamental feature of poverty is being on display. They don’t look like us, talk like us, smell like us… but many more of them now can break out of the display we would make of them—because of Wal-Mart.

A Wal-Mart church ought to be no surprise. Wal-Mart has said, “Comprehension of the market is upon me, and the inevitable conclusion is that we must bring low prices to the poor.” I wonder if the Church can get this? I mean, can the United Methodist Church understand this? That there are more than enough poor and hungry and disabled and uneducated (stop me if this is sounding too much like the Acts of the Apostles or the early Methodists) to fill more churches than we can build?

The place where we diverge from Wal-Mart is in profit. We’re not going to make much money. In fact, it may cost us some money. That is, we might have to act like Christians. We will no longer be able to say that a church has to be a self-funded entity. We will say that if there is anyone hungry the rest of us will fast until there is enough to eat. We will pay for and send out apostles where the people are and set up not just missions or stopping points for our motorcades of generosity that swoop in and leave, but we will set up churches, where the Word is preached and spirit and stomach is filled with the goodness of the Lord. This is hard because we are tight-fisted. It’s one thing that in our school system we don’t support the poor kids; it is another entirely, one certainly for judgment, when the church will not provide worship for the poor. It is hard, but our Bishop has said we must be willing to afford the poor.