Churches Borrow Franchise Approach to Expand
June 13, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
Church pastors seeking to expand their congregations overseas are turning to tech-savvy communication approaches and franchise marketing to bridge the distance between their services at home and abroad, reports The Wall Street Journal.
About 1,500 churches in the United States have satellite campuses, the newspaper says, up from 10 in 1990. At least half a dozen mega-churches in the United States have recently opened international branches, and many more plan to follow suit.
“If Starbucks can start four stores a day, why can’t churches?” says John Bishop, the pastor at Living Hope Church in Vancouver, Washington.
Plus: About 100 seminarians from more than two dozen denominations are attending a weeklong conference in Atlanta, hosted by the Fund for Theological Education, designed to deal with the expected shortage of ministers caused by retirement of baby boomers, reports the Associated Press in another article.
(Free registration is required to view the AP article on the New York Times site.)
