Following World War II, the United States found itself in a precarious
situation. Before the War, Americans felt the deep pain of the Great Depression, and an impending fear remained that the country sat on the verge of another financial shock.9 At the same time, no major battles had taken place on the American mainland, so the
economic war machine that produced massive amounts of war supplies and armaments was primed to maintain economic and industrial momentum.10 As American leaders pondered how to readjust the nation to bolster the economy and prevent financial cataclysm, a new economic ideology found growing favor.
In 1936, John Maynard Keynes published the General Theory of Employment,
7Ibid., 237-38.
8John Hammett, “Have We Ever Seen This Before? Multi-Site Precedents,” 9Marks eJournal May/June 2009, 1 [on-line]; accessed 30 June 2010; available from http://www.9marks.org/ejournal/
have-we-ever-seen-multi-site-precedents; Internet.
9Gary R. Edgerton, The Columbia History of American Television (New York: The Columbia University Press, 2007), 80.
10Thomas K. McCraw, American Business since 1920: How It Worked, 2nd ed. (Wheeling, IL:
Harlan Davidson, 2009), 62.
Interest, and Money.11 Within the work, he presented an explanation for why the Great Depression began and why it continued. Keynes offered a novel view of economics for his day. Instead of addressing economic concerns on a microeconomic level, he
addressed problems and solutions from a macro-perspective through macroeconomics.12 Key to his understanding of economic systems is the idea that supply and demand control inflation and depression. John Steele Gordon describes Keynes’ reasoning as follows: “If there is too much supply, depression results; too much demand and inflation breaks out.”13 His solution to this twin problem was simple: achieve a balance between the two.
While it would take time for “Keynesianism” to find acceptance throughout the American economic system, tenets of Keynes thinking found immediate reception.14
By no means was the growth of the postwar era solely attributable to Keynesian economics; nevertheless, growth ensued in the American economy: “In the five years that followed the war [1945-1950], the gross national product climbed from
$213 billion to $284 billion, and the national income from $181 million to $241
11John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (London:
Macmillan and Co., 1936).
12John Steele Gordon, An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 204), 379.
13Ibid.
14In many ways, the Employment Act of 1946 was the governmental ratification of
Keynesianism. Jones explains the Act’s effect: “The Employment Act of 1946 is the most important single piece of economic legislation of the entire postwar period. It created a clear legal obligation on the part of the federal government to use all practicable means “to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power, and it created the basic core of machinery for such economic planning.” Peter d’A.
Jones, The Consumer Society: A History of American Capitalism (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965), 334. See also, Stephen Kemp Bailey, Congress Makes a Law: The Story behind the Employment Act of 1946 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950); and Robert M. Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–
1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).
billion.”15 By the time John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, “full-blown Keynesianism was adopted.”16
Within Keynesianism, one finds the dualistic concept that a simultaneous reduction in interest rates and an increase in governmental spending on infrastructure generate a cascading effect in the growth of an economy. This growth, in turn, then leads to economic stability and health. Combining the Keynesian paradigm, the national confidence elevated by a global war victory, and a desire to make up for time and life lost in the Depression era, Americans welcomed a new way of life and thinking:
consumerism.17 Industries transitioned quickly from making destruction goods to domestic goods, and American families began buying new products with money stashed in savings since the Great Depression.18
Adding to the economic acceleration in the United States was the homecoming of twelve million soldiers. Before their return en mass, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed The Servicemen's Readjustment Act (GI Bill of Rights) into law on June 22, 1944. This legislation would prove immensely beneficial to the troops, to the postwar economy, and to national growth and development for the rest of the century.19 Embedded within this
15Thomas C. Reeves, Twentieth-Century America: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 139.
16Gordon, Empire of Wealth, 379.
17Bruce Shelley and Marshall Shelley, The Consumer Church: Can Evangelicals Win the World without Losing Their Souls? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1992), 27.
18Edgerton, History of American Television, 80.
19Ibid., 79-80; 157.
act were a series of dispensations for veterans. The two most significant dealt with education and housing. Regarding education for veterans, the government provisioned low-cost, government guaranteed loans for anyone who had served in the military for at least ninety days, and exited service with an honorable discharge “regardless of age, sex, race, religion, or family status.”20 Through the educational benefit, “Nearly eight million GIs pursued some form of schooling, at a cost to taxpayers of $14.5 billion. The college populations soared from 1.4 million in 1940 to 3.2 million in 1960.”21
While the price was steep, the investment in the American educational system and, more importantly, the knowledge and skill base of Americans yielded exponential dividends.22 Historian Milton Greenberg explains why:
By the time initial GI Bill eligibility for World War II veterans expired in 1956–about 11 years after final victory–the United States was richer by 450,000 trained engineers, 240,000 accountants, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 22,000 dentists, in more than 1 million other college–educated individuals.
These college graduates raised expectations throughout the country and their skilled labor contributed to a burgeoning and literate technological middle-class.23
As this newly educated crop of white-collar workers graduated, they possessed both the flexibility and mobility to assume new jobs and new lives at new destinations across the country.
20Milton Greenberg, “The GI Bill of Rights: Changing the Social, Economic Landscape of the United States,” 2, Historians on America, 3 April 2008 [on-line]; accessed 23 June 2010; available from www.america.gov/st/educ-english/2008/April/20080423213340eaifas0.8454951.html; Internet. See also, Milton Greenberg, The GI Bill: The Law That Changed America (New York: Lickle Publishing, 1997);
Edward Humes, Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream (Orlando: Harcourt, 2006); and Michael J. Bennett, When Dreams Came True: The GI Bill and the Making of Modern America (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1996).
21Reeves, Twentieth-Century America, 139-40.
22See Gordon, An Empire of Wealth, 363-67, for an appraisal of the GI Bill’s very positive, but unintended consequences.
23Greenberg, “The GI Bill of Rights,” 3.
As veterans returned from overseas, they found many homes in Depression- condition, and years of war induced neglect weighed heavily even on well-conditioned houses. The second benefit of the GI Bill of Right addressed this issue by giving
veterans the opportunity to assume government guaranteed home (VA) loans. According to Greenberg, “By the end of 1947, the Veterans Administration guaranteed well over one million home, business, and farm loans [and] . . . housing starts jumped from 114,00 in 1944 to 1.7 million by 1950.”24 With the seal of government safety atop the loans,
This [guarantee] encouraged developers to build, bankers to lend, and veterans to buy often with no down payment. The resulting explosion in consumer demand stirred the spirit of American manufacturers, entrepreneurs, and local officials who built new roads, schools, churches, and shopping centers.25
As veterans purchased slices of their communities, they began to own (and invest) in property like no generation before. With this stream of new homes came new products to fill them; producers worked to create new goods and recreate old goods both to satisfy consumer appetites and to cause hunger for more.26 Mary Ann Watson
summarizes well the years immediately following the war:
Within a year of the war’s end, twelve million GIs were back home ready to make up for lost time–building and buying and making babies at a dizzying rate. As the country boomed in postwar prosperity, an abundant home life became part of a new nationalism. All the marvels arrived as predicted and changed not only the physical landscape of the country and household, but the social and psychological contours
24Ibid., 4.
25Ibid.
26“Buying homes, particularly new ones, motivated consumers to purchase things to put in them, and thereby helped stoke the crucial consumer durables market. Billions of dollars were transacted in the sale of household appliances and furnishings, as refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, and the light became standard features in postwar American homes.” Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic:
The Politics of Mass Consumption and Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 123. See also, Greenberg, “The GI Bill of Rights,” 4.
as well.27
Within the business sector, these contours were especially acute. Seismic shifts of various types were radically reshaping the context in which Americans worked.
According to Thomas McCraw,
The war gave a profound jolt to American society in general, and therefore to business across all industries. About half-dozen of these changes were momentous:
the movement of masses of women into jobs outside the home; the conditioning of millions of people to a work life in big organizations, be they corporate or military;
the creation of large populations on the West Coast and in the Sunbelt; this moving out of the business cycle; the introduction of mass income taxation in the
withholding tax system; and, perhaps most important of all, the start of a long stretch of economic prosperity. The period from the early 1940s to the early 1970s became a kind of golden age for American business.28
The growth of the economy was not without negative implications. The mindset of government lending, stemming back to a strong embrace of Keynesianism, ushered in a new familiarity with, comfort in, and reliance upon consumer credit. As Lizabeth Cohen explains in her book A Consumers’ Republic,
More than anything else, the explosion of consumer credit and borrowing kept the postwar mass consumption economy afloat. Mortgage debt, fueled by VA and FHA lending, expanded along with homeownership, but so too did other forms of credit and borrowing. The value of total consumer credit grew almost elevenfold between 1945 and 1960, and installment credit–the major component of the total by the postwar era–jumped a stunning nineteenfold. 29
27Mary Ann Watson, Defining Visions: Television and the American Experience in the 20th Century, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 7.
28McCraw, American Business since 1920, 62.
29Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 123. Cohen provides sobering commentary on the expansive nature of credit within the American economy: “Another major contributor to the explosion of consumer credit in the postwar era was the expansion of credit cards from the limited number of retail store and gasoline company charge cards available before the war to their much greater use, and in particular the development of third-party universal credit cards. First to appear was Diners Club in 1949, the success of which inspired American Express, Hilton Hotels, Bank of America, and Chase Manhattan Bank to mount competitors in 1958. Many others would follow, all putting more and more credit at the disposal of consumers. ‘The democratization of credit was proceeding at a gallop,’ is how one historian of finance describes the atmosphere of the era. And a 1959 Department of Labor study, How American Buying Habits Change, confirmed that ordinary workers had radically changed their mode of financing by the 1950s, from
Reflecting the mindset and worldview of the era, church congregations drank deeply of consumerism. All manner of church-related products, including hymnals, choir robes, organs, offering envelopes for systematic giving, attendance recording resources, and other products emerged, all touted to beautify and enhance efficiency and quality of churches.30 James Hudnut-Beumler explains some of the implications of this cultural embrace within his book In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar:
All of these [products] made the local church a consumer where heretofore congregations had been local producers of most of the items they needed. This subtle shift meant two things for the future of congregational enterprise. The first was those churches that did not buy the paraphernalia of the church market often were felt by their pastors and members to be missing the trappings (or even
requirements) of more successful churches. What could be more obviously faithful in Victorian America, after all, than a church striving to keep up with the challenge of its age? The second implication was that congregations became permanent consumers, and thus the cost of being a congregation, reflected in the cost of maintaining a customary local church lifestyle was permanently raised to a new base.31
This consumption was not limited to ministry accoutrements. Following the war, church congregations and membership increased in number, and subsequently new church buildings swelled to meet consumer demand.32 “Church construction rose from ________________________
striving to save to incurring substantial debt. A year earlier, in fact, the National Retail Credit Association had announced that whereas in the heart of the depression in 1935, 35% of the 70,000 personal
bankruptcies were by wage earners, now 85% of an 80,000 total were. Not surprisingly, by 1957, two- thirds of American families carried some kind of debt, about half of all families owning from installment buying. Without a doubt, credit became an admission ticket that granted purchasers as citizens full entry into postwar mass consumption of prosperity–and retailers and third-party lenders additional profits.”
Ibid., 124.
30James Hudnut-Beumler, In Pursuit of The Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 141.
31Ibid., 33-34.
32In the ten years between 1945 and 1955, church membership increase by 30 million, rising from 70 million to around 100 million Americans. Reeves, Twentieth-Century America, 158; Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, vol. 2, The Reformation to the Present Day (New York: Harper Collins, 1985), 380.
$76 million in 1946 to $409 million in 1950, to more that $1 billion by the end of the decade,” according to Thomas Reeves.33
The flood of new products, goods, and buildings (secular and sacred) signaled a shift within post-war America. Faced with a myriad of options, Americans found themselves choosing from not one, but many types of many things. For those of the war generation, choices were something new in many regards, but they soon acquiesced to the world of choices. The ensuing baby boom generation followed suit, as have generations after them; choice is now normative.34
Among the new choices afforded were more related to church. As time progressed, churchgoers wanted and expected more options. The United States was undergoing a conversion: “A culture focused on survival goals” was dissipating, being replaced with “a consumer-driven culture that overflows with choices [offering] worship communities a range of choices.”35 Schaller illuminates one of the results:
It should not be surprising that people who have grown up in a consumer-driven church that is organized to expand the range of available choices expect to be offered attractive choices in the day, time, hour, physical setting, format, music, and level of expected active participation when Christians gather for the corporate worship of God.36
The connection between consumerism and the multi-site church concept is significant and simple. Offering options is one of the core attributes that multi-site churches and their leaders esteem most about their church model. Multi-site churches
33Reeves, Twentieth-Century America, 158.
34Lyle E. Schaller, The Seven-Day-A-Week Church (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992), 74.
35Lyle E. Schaller, Discontinuity and Hope: Radical Change and the Path to the Future (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999), 138.
36Ibid.
give individuals the choice of worship gathering locations, times, styles, and preaching methods in order to reach non-believers and congregationalize new members.
Regardless of a church’s intention for being multi-site, catering to the desires, preferences, and “choice” of consumers is central to the multi-site mechanism. Lyle Schaller makes the multi-site/consumerism connection well in his book Discontinuity and Hope. In narrative fashion, he demonstrates why organizations began choosing to
operate in multiple, rather than a single location.
That’s the First National Bank at the corner of Main and Washington, and directly across from it is First Church, where we’ve been members ever since we moved here 30 years ago. The college is four blocks to the east up on the hill, our hospital is about a half mile to the west, and our doctor has his office in that building over there,” explained a longtime resident in 1965 while showing an old friend around town.
Today’s resident takes a visiting friend on a brief visit to the same part of town and explains, “That’s the First National Bank, but I haven’t been there for years. We do all our banking at a branch in the supermarket where we buy groceries. We’re members of First Church, but we go to their east side campus, which is within walking distance of our house. We have one congregation, one staff, one budget, and one treasury, but three meeting places—a small one on the north side of town, the big one now where we live, and the old building downtown here.
The old college up on the hill is now University. This is their main campus, but they also offer classes at three other locations. We’re members of the HMO that has doctors in five locations, but my primary care is in a branch about a mile from where we live. Her office is next to a branch of the main hospital, so I’ve never been in the main hospital except to visit a couple friends . . . .
As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, institutions expected their constituents to come to them. The location of the buildings that housed institutions also defined the urban landscape. In today’s consumer-driven society, however, hospitals, lawyers, physicians, banks, and colleges now advertise for customers. The competition among various institutions to reach new generations has forced them to be more
“customer-friendly.”
One highly visible example of that is branch banking. In 1971, only 55 supermarkets housed a full-service branch of the bank. Fourteen years later, that number had increased to only 210, but by 1997, 4,400 supermarkets included a full- service branch bank.37
37Schaller, Discontinuity and Hope, 174-75.
Schaller brings to light several important insights. First, he notes organizations began to transition somewhere in the 1960s and 1970s from expecting customers to come to them to expecting that their organization would go to the customer. Second, Schaller presents a systemic shift in this shift in this reality. It was not one aspect of the
organizational world that was becoming multilocational; the bulk of the structure was changing from one site to many sites. Third, Schaller cites the progressive nature of multi-site organizational expression. While he mentions only branch banking as an example, this case is representative of the larger social overtones.38 As consumerism took hold within the nation, the economic philosophy started slowly and then gradually accelerated. Fourth, and perhaps most noteworthy, the transition from being one site to becoming multiple site organizations hinged on satiating consumers.
Based on Schaller’s rationale, is it possible that the multi-site church concept emerged from the business world? For example, when juxtaposing the multi-site church definition against that of a branch bank or branch store, there seems to be strong
resemblance. Within a “branch store” arrangement, “Usually, one store in a market area is designated the main store, while the others are designated as branches: but where a company operates several . . . stores in a single market, the distinction between ‘main’
38Others make similar connections between the branch banking idea and multi-site or satellite churches. See Dave Ferguson, “The Multi-Site Church: Some of the Strengths of this New Life Form,”
Christianity Today (2003) [on-line]; accessed 16 April 2006; available from www.christianitytoday.com/
global/printer.html?/bcl/areas/vision-strategy/articles/le-2003-002.81.html; Internet. See McIntosh’s satellite model description: “The satellite model is best compared to a bank that has numerous branches located in different cities. Each branch operates with some level of independence but remains corporately linked to the mother bank. Each bank enhances the others by offering services that can be accessed by more people living in different parts of the city. Each branch expands the job market by providing more opportunities for people to work. Each branch provides a measure of accountability to the others as they compare the number of transactions rendered and people served. It is one bank but in many locations. The satellite model is one church but in different locations.” Gary L. McIntosh, Make Room for the Boom . . . or Bust: Six Models for Reaching Three Generations (Grand Rapids: Fleming H. Revel, 1997), 137-38.