“Whatever Works”

Abstract

Despite predictions that organized religion would decline with modernization and economic development, some forms of Christianity are thriving, particularly evangelically-oriented churches in the Southern hemisphere. However, their doctrine and strategies are not without controversy. Megachurches, Protestant churches with congregations exceeding 2000 members often embrace marketing and preach a version of ‘prosperity gospel’ where material success is taken to be proof of spiritual blessing. North American in origin, this form of religious organization has expanded throughout South East Asia. In this paper, we use a case study of a megachurch in Singapore – City Harvest Church – to explore how their involvement in marketing and the marketplace is constructed. Using a discourse analytic methodology, our findings show how the church purposefully uses the normative dichotomy between the sacred and secular to frame the meaning of their involvement in the marketplace, targeting particular types of enterprising and professionally-oriented individuals to embody their mission. Further we show how this construction reflects the pragmatism, entrepreneurial and business orientation of Singapore. Our research suggests potential for further study of the way the relationship between religion, markets and marketing are constructed, using methods that incorporate an understanding of context.

Keywords

megachurches Singapore religion critical marketing discourse analysis

Introduction

“We will build a church in the marketplace, for the marketplace, to penetrate the marketplace” (City Harvest Church, Singapore)

Religion is a social phenomenon filled with paradoxes, contradictions and ambiguities (Hunt 2002) and theories abound that attempt to explain its definition, characteristics, social roles, growth and decline. In the first half of the twentieth century, theorists such as Weber (1907), predicted religion’s decline (the ‘secularization thesis’, Hunt 2002) with the ascendance of scientific rationality, modernization and economic development. However, the advance of Christianity in rapidly developing countries in the Southern hemisphere defies this prediction (James 2015; Jenkins 2002). Countries in South East Asia, for example, are experiencing economic growth and the spread of globalized marketing ideologies (Eckhardt, Dholakia, and Varman 2012) as well as substantial increases in evangelical Christianity. One form of religious organization – the megachurch – has been particularly successful. While North American in origin, the megachurch has flourished in different countries in this region, attracting members whose aspirations are upwardly mobile (Chong and Hui 2013).

In this paper, we present a case study of a megachurch in Singapore to show how the construction of its involvement in markets and marketing reflects its unique cultural context. Macromarketers have long been interested in the intersection between religion and markets (Dixon 2001; Kale 2004; Klein 1987; Klein and Lazniak 2009; Mittelstaedt 2002) but there is little work examining these dynamics in Southeast Asian contexts where substantial growth in evangelical Christianity along with rapid economic development has occurred. As a context, Singapore exhibits contradictions in its selective uptake of neoliberal principles, combining both pragmatism and growth ideologies of the market with tight state control over every sphere. We use a discourse analytic approach to explore how one of the largest megachurches in this nation-state – City Harvest Church – conceptualizes the relationship between religion, markets and marketing in ways that are distinctly Singaporean. While marketization of religion may be a global trend, our case highlights it needs to be explored in diverse cultural settings using methods that incorporate contextual understanding into the analysis of data.

Our paper is structured as follows: first we discuss existing literature on marketing and religion, relating this to marketization and neoliberalism. We then describe the cultural context and practices of this megachurch in Singapore, highlighting their use of marketing, involvement in markets and the meanings attributed to these practices. In our conclusion we highlight the potential significance of this case and context for understanding the relationship between religion and marketing.

Religion, Marketing And Neoliberalism

Within Christianity, the relationship between religion and the market has long been controversial and contested. Traditionally, the market or marketplace has been seen as a symbol of hedonism and worldliness out-of-place in church, exemplified in the Gospel story of Jesus throwing the money-lenders out of the temple (Matthew 21:12-13). This reflects a broader normative dichotomy in Western societies between the sacred and the secular or profane that persists despite its historical inaccuracy (Carmona and Ezzamel 2006; McIntire 2006). For example, Durkheim defined the profane as ‘the principle which has the capacity to contaminate the sacred’ (cited in Morrison 1995, p. 191). Sacred things should therefore be segregated from profane things, and this separation provides the basis for other dichotomies such as good and evil, clean and dirty, holy and defiled. Sacred beliefs and practices are central to religion (“things set apart and forbidden”), the sharing of which unites a community.

However, religion is also part of culture and reflects its broader social environment (Geertz 1973), a point well-illustrated by the history of European Christianity. In the Medieval and Renaissance period, Christianity was an integral part of daily life, the basis for law, government, education, politics and economic governance of populations. But in the 17th and 18th centuries, humanist values that celebrated scientific reason, progress and modernity, became more dominant, alongside industrial and economic development. The authority of organized Christianity was destabilized with the rise of free markets and modern liberal democratic models of the nation state (Carrette and King 2005) underpinned by the idea that we have the power to shape the world without reliance on God (Inglehart 1997).

On this basis, some theorists argued that traditional religious belief systems and norms would eventually be replaced by secularism, derived from the Latin word ‘saeculum’ meaning ‘the present world’. Theorists such as Weber (1907) and later Berger (1967) predicted that faith and religious authority would fade in influence with increasing modernization and the dominance of a rational worldview which became known as ‘secularization theory’ (Hunt 2002). Signs of secularization included the separation of church and state, the disappearance of religious symbols in public celebration, and the decline in religious content in the arts, philosophy and literature (Chaves 1994; Lambert 1999). Decline in religion was also assumed to occur in a linear fashion (Hammond 1985) where society moved to progressively secular conditions, in tandem with modernization, with the sacred increasingly receding.

The actual state of organized religion is, of course, more complex and exhibits a ‘stubborn refusal to disappear’ (Chaves 1994, p. 749). Critics point to the rise of religious fundamentalism and the popularity of Eastern religions in the West, the continuing popularity of megachurches in the US, and their rapid growth in developing countries in the South, as evidence the ‘secularization’ thesis is empirically false (Berger, Davie, and Fokas 2008). To be classified a ‘mega-church’ a Protestant Church needs to have at least 2000 members but many have more than 20,000 achieving these numbers in short periods of time (Thumma and Travis 2007). While megachurches have spread far beyond America, their American origins are still evident both in their reliance on marketing strategies and techniques to compete in the ‘spiritual marketplace’ (Ahdar 2006; cf. Iannaccone, Finke, and Stark 1997; Roof 1999; Stark and Fink 2000; Twitchell 2004; Zinkin 2004) as well as their theology. While many claim to be non-demoninational, they are influenced by Pentecostal practice and beliefs (Bonsu and Belk 2010) and a more specific variation known as the ‘prosperity gospel’. In the U.S, evangelists such as Kenneth Copeland established the word-faith movement to preach a gospel of materiality that is based on the present, here and now (MacArthur, Jr. 1992). This kind of gospel appeals to the marginalized and aspirational – material success, whether for the individual or the church, are taken to be manifestations of ‘God’s blessings’. Therefore achieving growth (in church size and in individual believers’ lives) becomes a legitimate godly pursuit. Drawing on popular culture and a consumerist logic they seek “to attract an audience more familiar with rock and roll, shopping malls, and self-help culture than with traditional church liturgies, hymns, or symbols” (Ellingson 2010, p. 247). This equation of material success and consumption with spiritual blessing, continues to attract criticism and controversy. Books such as The Divine Supermarket (Ruthven 1989), Selling God (Moore 1994), Shopping for Faith (Cimino and Lattin 1998), Jesus in Disneyland (Lyon 2000), and Consuming Religion (V. J. Miller 2003) among others, have each provided extended accounts and critiques of this influence.

Of course, organized religion is not the only arena where the influence of the market model and marketing are apparent. A substantial body of work in the social sciences including critical marketing (e.g. Hackley 2009) has traced how the market has become the primary social institution, and underpinned ‘reform’ of previously non-market sectors such as health care, education, the delivery of public services and not-for-profit, aided by discursive diffusion of marketing and management (Gauthier, Martikainen, and Woodhead 2013). This trend of ‘marketization’ (Eikenberry and Drapal Kluver 2004; Wensley 2010) produces and reproduces not only consumerism (a focus on the consumer and promotion of consumption) but managerialism or managing all organizations by commercial principles. These developments reflect a broader political rationality characterizing contemporary society and its institutions known as neoliberalism (du Gay 1996; Hackley 2009).

Currently, neoliberalism has different but related meanings: firstly, it can refer to a set of economic tenets favouring individual liberty, deregulation of markets and internationalization of trade to promote capital accumulation; and secondly, drawing on Foucault, it denotes a form of political rationality or governmentality (Liow 2012; Ong 2007). In this second sense, neoliberalism is a way of conceptualizing and practicing government (Burchell 1993; Rose 1993) with implications for individual identity. Government here refers not to ‘the State’ as institution but to the process of influencing the ‘conduct’ of the governed (Burchell 1993). As a form of governmentality, neoliberalism involves extending the market model to those areas of economic and social life previously regarded as outside market relations, promoting their adoption of market-driven calculations and results orientation (Jaworski and Kohli 1993; Moorman 1987).

Importantly, this remodelling of social relations around the primary institution of the market changes the conditions of personhood (Dunn 2004; Makovicky 2014) because it provides for, and encourages, certain courses of action, behaviour and ways of being consistent with the market. In other words, people are encouraged to behave and to think about themselves in particular ways. Scholars of political economy have discussed how ‘enterprise discourse’ – the trend whereby the non-economic is increasingly defined in economic terms – constructs an ideal type of identity for its subjects – the ‘enterprise self ‘(Rose 1993). According to du Gay (1996), this is an identity in which individuals exhibit autonomy, self-regulation, self-reliance, personal responsibility and self-improvement. Individuals are expected to shape their own lives through the choices they make and above all, the individual is conceptualised as a consumer exercising personal freedom (Rose 1989).

This spread of marketing and neoliberalism has had profound consequences, legitimising, producing and reproducing both consumerism and managerialism, shaping organisations and contemporary society. However, while a hegemonic discourse and compelling ‘grand narrative’ (e.g. Harvey 2005, 2006a, 2006b), studies of the lived experience of this trend in particular contexts show its influence has been geographically uneven and its concrete forms varied and uncertain (Annist 2014; Burchell 1993; Makovicky, 2014; Varman and Vikas 2007). The experience of rapidly industrializing countries in East and South-East Asia (Mesina 2012; Ong 2006) also serve to highlight neoliberalism’s inherent contradictions. On a national and regional level, selective aspects of economic neoliberalism have spread throughout East and South East Asia, facilitated by state-led economic development and flourishing in often illiberal social and political environments. Asian countries’ experience with neoliberalism illustrates that this trend interacts with other rationalities in diverse cultural settings producing unpredictable patterns, at times selectively targeting some groups and not others, within the same context (Ong, 2007). Ong (2006, pp. 3-4) asserts that even in countries where neoliberalism ‘is not the general characteristic of technologies of governing’, there may be ‘sites of transformation’ where ‘market driven calculations are being introduced in the management of populations and the administration of special spaces’.

In this research we draw on Ong’s (2007) thesis to explore the intersection of religion, markets and marketing in a particular cultural context where neoliberalism has had an uneven influence. Singapore was chosen because it exhibits contradictions in its selective adoption of neoliberal principles. Far from a classically neoliberal state, it combines extensive government control and intervention in markets, and socially ‘illiberal’ restrictions on civil liberties, with a pro-capital agenda, oriented towards economic and business growth as the primary mechanism for ensuring national survival (Liow 2012). Because of this combination, the dynamics and contradictions of a Christian organization’s relationship with the market will perhaps be more visible in the practices and strategies pursued by a megachurch operating in this tiny island state. Specifically we use a case of a megachurch in Singapore, City Harvest Church, to illustrate how this church constructs the meaning of its involvement in business in ways that reflect its unique cultural context, strategically deploying the normative dichotomy between sacred and secular to its own ends. We selected a megachurch as case site because this form of Christianity, North American by origin, has proved popular in Asia and typically engages in marketing discourse and practices in order to sustain and grow their size (Anderson 2011). Singapore megachurches may thus not simply be imitating or rebranding ‘Western’ practices but developing particular versions that reflect their unique settings. We seek to demonstrate how megachurch growth is pursued while navigating the contradictions and tensions that characterise its specific context.

City Harvest Church is a suitable case because although a leading megachurch and entrepreneurial success story, it has also been beset by controversy about its involvement in business, culminating in allegations of misuse of church funds in 2012. This has generated public discussion and commentary as well as communication campaigns by the church in order to frame the meaning of their involvement in secular activities.

Before we present the case study, we provide more detail about its cultural context.

Singapore: Authoritarian, Pragmatic and the Antioch of Asia

Singapore is a highly developed but tiny nation-state in Southeast Asia, with a population of just over 5 million, wedged between Malaysia and Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country. Since gaining independence from Britain in 1965, it has become one of the world’s most successful developmental states (Wang 2008) but its history as a trading area predates its British colonial origins (Miksic 1985; Trocki 2006). Located strategically near one of the world’s busiest maritime routes, Straits of Malacca, which connects the Pacific Ocean to the east and the Indian Ocean to the west, Singapore was Temasek in the late thirteen century made up of a trading settlement whose people were Malays, Orang Laut (Malay for sea people) and the Chinese (E. Lee 2008). Singapore then became part of the Malay empires of Malacca and Johore. From 1874 with European expansion into Southeast Asia, Singapore became the capital of British Malaya and a main trading port. Singapore was considered part of Malaya (now Malaysia) until it gained its own independence in 1965 after a period of decolonisation. Its first and longest serving prime minister, the late Lee Kuan Yew who passed away in March 2015, remarked on the ‘anguish’ (K. Y. Lee 1998, p. 16) of the separation claiming the root causes were resistance to the Malay hegemony and irreconcilable differences on racial groups. Singapore found independence ‘thrust upon it’ (K. Y. Lee 1998, p. 22) and with no natural resources, it was considered by many an artificial nation that would not survive.

Interestingly, these challenges were used by its founding prime minister to govern Singapore under the People’s Action Party (PAP) with policies that focused on economic growth as the basis for national survival. Early on, Singapore realised it needed to develop significant industries and an international outlook as it could not rely on its relatively small domestic economic base. Aided by heavy reliance on foreign capital investment, an efficient logistics system, and world class infrastructure including the globally awarded renowned Changi Airport, the Singapore of the current day has been commended by Henry Kissinger (former US State Secretary) as a “high-tech leader of Southeast Asia, the commercial entrepot, the scientific center” (cited in K. Y. Lee 2000, p. xi). Singapore has earned a reputation as one of the least corrupt (http://www.transparency.org/country#SGP, accessed 20 August 2015), safest (The Economist Intelligence Unit, The Safe Cities Index, 2015) and ‘easiest places to do business’ with the World Bank labelling it as the most ‘business friendly economy in the world’ . Under Cambridge-educated Lee’s single leadership modern Singapore grew ‘from third world to first’ (K. Y. Lee 2000) and its annual GDP per capita now exceeds the UK and the US (World Bank 2015).

Singapore is labelled a ‘neo-liberal developmental state’ (Liow 2012) because it combines extensive state interventions with selective aspects of market logic. This differs from Western neoliberalism denoting a state that openly embraces market forces and deregulation (Wee 2012). Often criticised by the West for his strictly authoritarian stance on curtailing civil liberties such as public protests, media control, suing political opponents for defamation, and intolerance for dissent, Lee maintained such discipline was crucial for political stability which in turn was essential for economic progress. In an interview with the International Herald Tribune in 2007, Lee said:

Supposing we had oil and gas, do you think I could get the people to do this? No. If I had oil and gas, I’d have a different people, with different motivations and expectations. It’s because we don’t have oil and gas and they know that we don’t have, and they know that this progress comes from their efforts. So please do it and do it well. We are ideology-free. What would make the place work, let’s do it (cited in Mydans and Arnold 2007).

Despite Lee’s claims to be ideology-free, scholars have argued Singapore’s pragmatic ‘doing what works’ does constitute an ideology that is all the more effective because its ‘association with capitalism is obscured…. [masking] its own ideological condition’ (Tan 2010, p. 347). Through its many state-owned enterprises (SEOs), the government has proactively and selectively adopted neoliberal principles to attract global capital (Tan 2012) and “enhance opportunities for capital accumulation” (Rodan 2001, p. 160). This pragmatic pursuit of economic growth (Tan 2012) helped establish the state’s hegemony, institutionalised by the ruling party in all its administrative and policy-making functions (Chua 1997) enabling political stability and continuity of government.

Political stability is also predicated on maintaining religious and racial ‘harmony’. Officially a secular country, the government’s role is to ensure religious pluralism prevails with the state always ‘neutral and objective’ (Chong and Goh 2015, p. 414). Over 85% of Singaporeans profess some religious faith (Tay 2008) and both race and religion are managed through various acts and policies to maintain harmony (Chong and Goh 2015): almost the entire Malay population are Muslims while Indian Singaporeans are Hindus. Buddhists and Taoists make up the largest portion (44% of the Singaporean population), while Christianity is the most diverse in relation to race standing at 18.3% in 2010 having grown from 14.6% in 2000 (Department of Statistics, Ministry of Trade & Industry, Republic of Singapore, 2010).

Christianity in post-colonial Singapore, a nation-state once prophesied as the “Antioch of Asia” by the American evangelist Billy Graham (DeBernardi 2008, p. 120), has been shaped by American Christianity (Goh 2009). In recent years, Singapore has been discussed as a hub for exporting a lucrative megachurch-based business model globally, not just in the Southeast Asia region (Philomin 2014). The Christian population is largely middle-class with those attending Anglican and Methodist churches part of the ‘established middle class’ (Chong 2015) compared to the ‘emergent’ and upwardly mobile aspirational middle class attending megachurches, more likely to have been born to working class, non-Christian, non-tertiary educated and non-English speaking parents. Chong (2015) argues this ‘new Christian middle class’ benefited most from the rapid economic growth Singapore experienced during the 1980s and 1990s overseen by the highly pragmatic and yet authoritarian state. Growth of megachurches in Singapore coincide with this period.

City Harvest Church: Kristos Kai Kosmos (Christ in Culture)

We use the case study of a megachurch in Singapore, City Harvest Church (CHC hereafter) to explore how their involvement in the market is constructed in ways that reflect its particular cultural context. CHC is one of Singapore’s largest megachurches claiming a congregation size of over 17,000 attendees in 2014 (http://www.chc.org.sg/progressreport/2014-Annual-Report.pdf, accessed 20 August 2015). Its reported growth has been phenomenal at 15% yearly for a decade, peaking at 27% in 2000, slowing to a relative 5% in 2006. In comparison, growth rates are 3% for the Methodist Church, 4% for the Presbyterian Church and 1.6% for the Anglicans (S. H. Lee and Long 2010a). Its founder and senior pastor, Kong Hee, is an influential figure in the Christian community in Singapore and belongs to transnational networks of the world’s largest megachurches such as Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea with over 800,000 attendees. Kong set up CHC in 1989 at the age of 25 with twenty young people, building and moving the church until it established its own church building in 2001 in the Western part of Singapore. Costing SIN$48 million, the titanium clad church building (modeled after the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao Spain) has one of the world’s largest water fountains with sound and lighting structures designed by the same consultants as the Sydney Opera House.

CHC is considered one of the most dynamic, innovative, extravagant and growth-focused mega-churches “that may not have a rival in the history of Christendom” (D. E. Miller and Yamamori 2007, p. 8). Its extremely modern approach to church production (Kong Hee was a computer science graduate from the National University of Singapore, http://www.chc.org.sg/_eng/founder/publications_profile.php , accessed 14 August 2012) has been compared to the process of McDonaldization where scientific rationality, technology combined with consumer ethic has contributed to the success of the church (Tong 2008). It has 50 affiliate churches all over the Asia-Pacific (Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Taiwan, Brunei, Japan, Australia and USA) as well as a School of Theology that has trained over 6663 students from the period of 1994 – 2014. (http://www.chc.org.sg/progressreport/2014-Annual-Report.pdf, accessed 20 August 2015)

CHC is non-denominational, although the influence of Pentecostalism is evident in the emphasis on the worship experience, belief in miracles, reference to the Holy Spirit and the practice of glossolalia (gift of tongues). Kong preaches the so-called US style prosperity gospel where wealth and material attainment is viewed as a testament of one’s faith and God’s blessings and tithing is strongly encouraged. The church currently operates out of Suntec Singapore International Convention and Exhibition Centre which is a recently acquired venue which cost SIN$310 million (Tan 2010). Popular music and state of the art sound and entertainment technologies is an integral part of the ultra-modern image and service experience for which the church brand is known.

The church made headlines in 2012 when the senior pastor and five other senior leaders were charged over the misappropriation of church funds (Soh 2012). The trial is beyond the scope of this paper, however, the controversy concerned the missionary Crossover Project featuring the senior pastor’s wife and worship leader, Sun Ho. Using the bible verse from Mark 4:35 (“Let us cross over to the other side”) as a prophetic legitimation, Sun ‘crossed over’ to become a pop singer in 2002 (Shin 2012a). Her Mandarin albums became popular in Asian markets including Taiwan, China, Malaysia and Hong Kong with several live concerts held in the region during the period of 2003 – 2004. Expansion into Hollywood led to music singles such as China Wine with Wyclef Jean which generated media attention and criticisms over the raunchy costume and dance moves by a pastor’s wife. The controversy surrounding this crossover project centers on claims that church funds collected from donations for a building, were used to fund the singing pastor’s pop music career. In response, the Church argued that Sun Ho’s music career had a missionary and evangelistic purpose.

Methodology

In this research we combine a social constructionist epistemology (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Gergen 1999), with a discourse analytic methodology. From this perspective, reality is assumed as socially constructed, rather than pre-existing and objective, separate from social actors, and we focus on the role of discourse in constructing the meaning of social reality (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2000). For example, an account or explanation of an event is a form of social action or practice (Potter 1996). A discourse analytic approach would not assume the account necessarily corresponded with an objective reality, nor would it seek to establish the ‘truth’ of the account. Rather it would analyse it as a version of social reality that showed the dominance of certain discourses, ideas, taken-for-granted norms and relationships between actors and performed a function in a particular context (van Dijk 1997). ‘Discourse’ here refers to ‘a set of meanings, metaphors, representations, images, stories, statements and so on that together produce a particular version of events’ (Burr 2003, p. 66), the traces of which are found in texts (Parker 1992). A text is a ‘delimited tissues of meaning which may be written, spoken or reproduced in any form that can be given an interpretative gloss’ (Parker 1989, p. 57) including visual representations and material artefacts. Because the focus of discourse analysis is on language use rather than language users (Potter and Wetherell 1987), the units of analysis are texts or parts of texts rather than participants.

The discourses and habits of a religious community are traceable through the material dimension of Christianity (McDannell 1995) including the texts it produces, disseminates and consumes. Purposeful sampling was used in this research; an information-rich case was selected for concentrated study (Patton 2002). Consequently, generating in-depth understanding rather than empirical generalisation is the purpose of the inquiry. We collected two sets of data for this study from 2005 - 2015: 1) church publications (sermons, church articles, books) and 2) newspaper discourse (van Dijk 1998) about the church from local and foreign sources (The Straits Times, Today, and international media such as Reuters, Yahoo, Bloomberg, The Christian Post). These articles were organised by period and indexed into four catalogues (City News, Church texts, Singapore news and International news). City News (http://www.citynews.sg) is the church’s media department; it writes and publishes the church’s weekly newsletter as well as articles on church events, happenings, stories of its members, lifestyle news and community related contents.

The data set consists of over two hundred church newsletters, fifty newspaper articles and twenty sermons collected by the researchers using web searches of relevant keywords such as City Harvest Church, Kong Hee (senior pastor), Sun Ho (senior pastor’s wife), and Singapore megachurch. Both authors undertook data analysis separately focusing on how the megachurch constructed its involvement in the marketplace, and the extent to which this construction was reflected in the general media. The results were then compared. This initial stage of textual analysis involved identifying key patterns in the use of words, phrases, arguments or justifications, imagery, allusions (references to broader culture or specific texts such as the bible), and constructions of individuals or groups, in other words, how they were represented. This process included analysis of content as well as the form of texts or how the text was ‘put together’. On this basis we identified some recurring features that were explored in more detail in a second, more targeted stage of analysis and which correspond to the three themes presented in our findings section: the particular meaning constructed by the church for the term ‘cultural mandate’; the imagined audience for the church’s communications; and the trajectory and international scope of the Church’s mission.

In this second stage, we drew upon different discourse analytic methods including visual semiotics, narrative and rhetorical analysis. Tools of visual semiotics (Baldry and Thibault 2010; Kress and van Leeuwen 2001; Schirato and Webb 2004; Van Leeuwen 2008) were used to analyse images, photos and website design focusing on how they contributed to the construction of a particular worldview and the place of social actors within it; using rhetorical analysis we analysed the structure of arguments and explanations and the discursive resources on which they drew (Gill and Whedbee 1997; Phillips and Jørgensen 2002; Van Eemeren et al. 1997); while we drew on narrative analysis to identify the events, characters, plots, temporal relations and themes (Lieblich, Rivka, and Zilber 1998; Reissman 2008) evident in the texts produced by the Church and about the Church. Taken together, these techniques also help to identify how the texts are constructed with a particular viewer or reader in mind (Althusser 1971; Williamson 1978): texts not only construct a particular version of social reality, and the place of the church within it, but also the type of person targeted by its activities.

Consistent with a critical discourse approach, contextual understanding was incorporated into the textual analysis. This link between text and context is crucial as meaning is contextually dependent and our aim was to show how the construction of the church’s involvement in the market reflected its cultural context. For example, to make sense of the repeated term ‘cultural mandate’ we needed to consider the immediate circumstances of its use (in the text itself) as well as what ‘discursive work’ this term was doing in justifying the actions of the Church, in the face of ongoing external criticism and in relation to the cultural context of Singapore. Different methods were used in order to understand how the role of the church was constructed through different discursive mechanisms. For example, the stories told by the church seemed particularly central in the way they explained and justified their marketplace involvement. Once we had identified a pattern in the narratives used by the church we reflected on the functions this pattern was performing in the context of the case. Repeated stories of entrepreneurial, business and professional success, aided by involvement in the Church, suggested a causal relationship between them.

Discourse analysis is inevitably an interpretive process involving interaction between particular researchers, their understanding of context and the textual data they select. Consequently alternative readings of the data are possible. In the following section, we present and discuss three main patterns that were evident from our inductive analysis of the data using selected quotations from texts to illustrate the logic of our interpretation.

Findings and Discussion

The Cultural Mandate

“God plunges us fully into society to influence the marketplace of business, education, government, arts and media. We must engage culture to be salt and light” (Kong 2007a)

The Church explains its involvement in markets by repeated reference to the term ‘the cultural mandate’. According to this argument, Christianity should seek to be ‘culturally relevant’, in other words, consciously inhabit the secular world in order to proselytise. CHC overtly contrasts this approach from Christianity that separates itself from secular culture in order to protect and uphold religious values and beliefs (being ‘in the world but not of the world’). According to Church communications, this more traditional orientation is ineffective in spreading the Christian message. Instead, a modern and contemporary Christianity needs to be accessible to people in their daily lives through business, markets, media and consumption. In this way, the church’s involvement in business is framed in instrumental and pragmatic terms as an effective means to a valued end.

The concept of ‘worldliness’ is also purposefully redefined by CHC. Being ‘of the world’ has negative connotations within Christianity yet CHC argues it can help the church ‘to penetrate the marketplace’. For example, in the following excerpt from the church newsletter reporting on its Easter celebrations in 2009, the concept of ‘holy worldiness’ is explained and justified:

The CHC drama ministry took a bold step forward by presenting a contemporary version of the Easter story, which appealed to the audience’s modern sensibilities. The narrative combined the social network elements of Facebook with the Lamb’s Book of Life (as stated in the Book of Revelations). LifeBook also included modern touches such as a cast that was fully clad in modern-day attire. “Jesus” was wearing a handsome white suit instead of the usual white robe.

Kong further emphasizes that we should avoid preaching separation and practice isolation. Rather, we should have “holy worldliness”: uphold holy disciplines, yet be connected to the world by being relevant and current. Because of this, CHC embarked on the Church without Walls ministry to extend help and identify with the pains, struggles and problems of the people outside the four walls of the church. The Cultural Mandate was also preached and acted upon to reach out to the five pillars of the Marketplace; Business, Education, Governments, Arts and Entertainment and the Mass Media.

Indeed CHC is where dreams are realized and successes are celebrated.

(Accessed 8 August 2012), [available from http://www.citynews.sg/2009/09/city-harvest-church-20-great-years-of-fulfilled-dreams-and-celebrated-successes/].

In addition to incorporating contemporary cultural signifiers, such as Facebook, spatial imagery and metaphors are particularly dominant in this excerpt (“we need to connect with people in their space” CityNews, 20 November 2008). The ‘church without walls’ construct suggests Christianity should deliberately seek to expand into secular culture, not be confined to a particular type of building or place. Extending this imagery, different cultural domains are imagined as constituting five pillars – the church can thus extend its reach and be supported by existing secular structures including those of the market. The use of the term ‘pillars’ evokes early Christianity, a period after the death of Jesus Christ when Christianity was still a minor sect and in which the figure of Paul looms large (Freeman 2009). This is consistent with CHC’s frequent references to Paul in justifying their version of the ‘cultural mandate’, in particular, his proselytising in Athens. For example, a CHC report on the opening night of the Asia Conference in 2008 was titled ‘Paul in Athens – How to Engage the Marketplace’. A detailed account of a sermon by Senior Pastor Kong, describes how Paul (“the exemplary marketplace missionary”) entered the pagan culture of Athens to spread Christianity, using metaphors of space:

“Paul started his mission at the church (the “First Space”), where there were Jews (who wanted nothing to do with the Athenians) and God-fearing Greeks, who didn’t want to be Athenians anymore. The First Space is the comfort zone, where Christians come to get recharged.

The most impact is made in the Second Space, the marketplace, comprising business, education, government, arts and entertainment, and the mass media.

And then, there is a Third Space. In Acts 17:18-19, Paul was brought before the Areopagus, a council made up of wise Greeks who were the top movers and shakers of the city.

“The Third Space is not a realm you can go in at will. You have to be invited in,” said Kong. “You have to earn the right to be heard. That’s why having upward mobility is important.” Movers and shakers will not listen to people who are not ‘up there’.”

(Accessed 3 June 2015), [available from http://www.citynews.sg/2008/11/paul-in-athens-how-to-engage-the-marketplace/].

Not surprisingly then, CHC exhorts its members “to excel in the marketplace, and so bring Christ into culture” (S. H. Lee and Long 2010b). An earlier sermon by Kong (2007b) recast biblical figures in these terms, discovering their spiritual purpose in secular work and thus achieving earthly success. For example, Adam is portrayed as “[s]tarting out as an entry-level gardener” in the Garden of Eden who then “morphed into being the CEO of the world world! He was transformed in his mental, emotional and spiritual capacity as he engaged the secular. He found his purpose in life as he applied himself wholeheartedly in his vocation”. Similarly, Esther used her celebrity status as a “model” and “beauty queen” who married into royalty to save the Jewish people. After several of these examples, Pastor Kong presents his own story told in the same format – humble beginnings, always a little different than classmates, but eventually called upon, with his future wife Sun, to invent a more innovative, enterprising and effective approach to spreading Christianity by thinking “outside the box” and becoming “ambassadors of Christ” in the secular world:

‘Sun has always felt drawn to the world of arts and entertainment. Maybe because of the Indonesian-Chinese blood in me, I have always been drawn to business and the corporate world. In the last few years, as we engaged our society more as salt and light, we began to discover our purpose: which is not to be a stereotypical religious couple confined within the four walls of a local church, but to take the kingdom of God into the marketplace of society. Sun got into her singing career and I became a businessman.” (Kong 2007b).

The cultural mandate is thus justified not only through explicit arguments and rhetoric but also through narratives, particularly personal stories of Pastor Kong Hee and his wife Sun Ho. Narratives exhibit explanations rather than offering cause-and-effect logic (Gergen 1999) and in this context, the story of Sun Ho and her singing career is integrated with the story of the Crossover Project.

Official church accounts of this project represent it as an extension of CHC’s cultural mandate, to build a ‘church without walls’ by using popular music to proselytise (Shin 2012a). A story about the origins and development of the Crossover Project using a third-party narrative voice unfolds in real time (‘history unfolding’) inviting the reader to identify with the main protagonist (Sun Ho) and experience the dilemmas and crises with which she was confronted. She is portrayed as becoming involved in popular music almost accidentally, and only after she and her husband Kong Hee, received not one but several signs from God that this was the right calling. Details of the success she experienced, both in terms of her musical career and the growth of conversions, are interspersed with mentions of her humanitarian efforts:

“THE BIG LEAP

Twenty-five months after the Crossover Project was launched, Sun had performed more than 100 concerts to about half a million people, and out of that, almost 140,000 gave their hearts to Christ. The Crossover Project sought to achieve two purposes: reach out to the unchurched – those who would never step into a church, those who grew up on a musical diet of Beyonce, Gwen Stefani, Pink and Lady Gaga. Secondly, it aimed to encourage Christians who are already in the entertainment industry to step out with their faith.

But it was no walk in the park. With this calling also came many challenges. In every country Sun and her team travelled to, they faced demonic attacks, near-death encounters and media backlash against Sun’s contradictory image as the pop star wife of a pastor. (Shin 2012a)

The narrative reaches a climax when Sun Ho discovers she is pregnant. This represents a “crossroad – should they continue with the Crossover Project now that she is a mother?” Despite being a pop star, criticised for appearing in one music video pitched at the American market as a “gyrating geisha in micro hot pants” (S. H. Lee 2012), motherhood enables the reader to be reassured that Sun Ho has traditional values. Only after consultation with Phil Pringle, one of CHC’s advisors, do they decide to continue for another five years in order to expand into China. Even the charges brought against Hong Kee and others of allegedly using donations to the church building fund to finance the launch of Sun Ho’s career in the U.S. are constructed as fulfilment of religious prophesy:

“Finally, it was a word given by Phil Pringle to Sun privately in May 2005 that gave them clarity to their path. “He said, ‘Five more years, because God is going to open a big door for CHC in China to be a blessing to the people.” That word gave us the courage, faith and confirmation to resume the Crossover Project,” said Kong. (True enough, it was in May2010 – five years later – that Sun broke her US contract and flew home when the investigations into CHC began).” (Shin 2012a)

Through the Cultural Mandate and constant reinforcement of the ‘church without walls’ philosophy, the church justifies its and its members’ involvement in secular activities and in the name of advancing God’s kingdom. Both worldly and secular pursuits are thus godly while returns on both pursuits are a testament of one’s faith and God’s blessings.

Marketplace Entrepreneurs And Missionaries

“The Scripture says do business till He comes. I have always held an interest for business, maybe it is the Chinese-Indonesian blood in me” (Kong Hee)

Personal biographies of Senior Pastor Kong Hee and his wife Sun Ho perform other important functions in the church’s marketing communications. They are constructed as religious and secular entrepreneurs, succeeding in both realms. They embody a normative storyline of individuals with humble beginnings who, through their own enterprise, initiative, innovation and spiritual purpose, achieve spectacular success. This construction was reflected in the Singaporean media in 2010:

“The founder: Senior Pastor Kong Hee, 45, bills himself on his website as a businessman and international conference speaker who has addressed more than one million people. He owns fashion retailer Skin Couture and corporate training outfit International Harvest. He is a super church-builder, with 47 affiliated congregations in Asia, and is on the board of Church Growth International, founded by his mentor, Dr Cho Yonggi, builder of the world’s biggest megachurch in South Korea.

Success story: Pioneered City Harvest Church in 1989 with 20 young people. It started as Ekklesia Ministry – the youth department of Bethany Christian Centre, an Assemblies of God church where he was ordained. His church has since grown to average 33,000 in weekly attendance.” (S. H. Lee and Long 2010b).

Here the inclusion of figures and statistics substantiates and illustrates the claims of growth, accentuated by contrasting those from the beginning of the church to the present day. This focus on growth and the achievement of measurable results, presented in quantitative form, reflects marketing managerialism and is a recurrent feature of the Church’s communications. For example, in its annual reports, it includes aggregate statistics on church operations as well as detailed data analytics for different demographic groups. Its Progress Report for 2011-2012 is dominated by the visual representation of patterns in results using easy-to-read graphs and stylized figures representing different genders, ages, ethnicities and occupations that reflect the statistical analysis. Outcomes are reported for baptisms, conversions (decisions), weddings as well as the additional bible-study and personal development courses. International operations are covered by results for affiliate churches and attendance at conferences and services hosted in other countries by CHC. Finally analysis is given of digital reach, giving results of webcasts, website visits, and connections via social media, broken down by geographical region displayed on a world map. The extensive use of quantitative measures of results is supplemented by less frequent, short case studies in text-boxes with photos, containing qualitative evidence of the impact the Church has had on individuals’ lives.

This type of case story is used elsewhere in the Church’s marketing communications which are dominated by narratives that link Church membership with business, work and employment-related success. For example, in a City news item called “True Stories to Inspire: Cindy Ng” (19 March 2009) this woman recounts how the church helped her fulfil her dream of becoming a make-up artist. In this testimony she attributes her success to the encouragement she received from Pastor’s Kong Hee’s preaching about using “our talents to engage the marketplace” and pursing a dreamt-of career. Because of the reassurance and role modelling provided by the Church she felt able to take risks and take advantage of opportunities as she grew in confidence. This led to professional success. The Church is constructed as offering a sense of community and social solidarity that underwrites the risks individuals take in embarking on new ventures. In another church update, ten stories of members are presented to illustrate how following the cultural mandate has led to success in government, education and business. These accounts also suggest church membership produces greater success in the form of business growth, enhanced creativity, and more effective fulfilment of their secular vocation (City News, “Salt of the Earth, Light of the City”, March 25 2011).

“Another Chinese businessman, George (not his real name) conducts weekly prayer meetings at his company’s headquarters in China and organizes talks during which the Word of God is preached and souls are saved. Interestingly, every time such talks are held, the company would register the highest sales for the week.” (Shin 2012b).

Church membership is thus directly tied to immediate material and business benefits, inferring this belief system is an effective mechanism for upwards mobility.

This association between professional and business success was reflected in mainstream media coverage in Singapore in features of successful entrepreneurs associated with the church including those involved in social enterprises, such as Kenny Low, founder of the O School, a performing arts centre (Arshad 2007). Even coverage of the financial scandal which dominated 2010 frequently mentioned important and well-known business people, entrepreneurs and celebrities voicing their support for the Church (Quek and Ang 2010).

The Church targets these types of individuals, and those that aspire to be like them, in their communication, products and services. Rather than directly appealing to consumers, the Church is oriented towards those intermediaries who produce the goods and services consumed in the marketplace. These are the ‘marketplace missionaries’ of the Church – those leaders in business, education, government, the arts, entertainment and the media, who through their secular work, are encouraged to embody the cultural mandate. This does not mean producing religiously-oriented goods and services but instead building successful businesses and careers that then provide a platform for proselytising and supporting the church.

“By the grace of God, the annual turnover of Corporate-i has been increasing each year since it started. And because the company does well, Quek is able to finance the work of God. “Using the resources and expertise we have, we are able to serve the church,” he adds.” (Shin 2012b).

This logic is reinforced by seminars and training offered through the Church in association with its external advisors, Dr. A. R. Bernard of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn and Dr. Phil Pringle, Senior Minister of Christian City Church in Sydney Australia. Pictures of both men, in front of whiteboards, pointing at handwritten diagrams and educating an unseen audience, feature in the church accounts of these sessions which resemble management education and conferences. For example, in an account posted on 10 June 2010 titled “Impacting the Marketplace”, reporting on a session given by Dr Pringle as part of the Asia Conference, he is pictured in a dynamic pose, one hand gesturing to handwritten words on a whiteboard: leadership, success, integrity, vision, goals, strategy, team, with the viewer of the picture in the position of (unseen) audience or conference attendee. Urging those present to see the bible as a book full of rich and powerful men “kings, leaders and businesspeople” he makes an explicit promise: “The Bible is a rich man’s book!” he affirmed. “If you follow what is written in this book, it will lead you to success, not poverty” (City News, “Impacting the Marketplace” 10 June 2010) after which he outlines how to form a powerful vision and strategy and share that with your “team”. The Church thus promises to provide step-by-step methods for achieving greater business success by following simple “sane and sound business practices” infused with religious purpose that can elicit more effective employee engagement.

Overall then, the marketplace missionaries envisaged by the Church are not average consumers, but rather those individuals engaged in producing the goods and services bought and sold in the marketplace. The Church targets the entrepreneurs, the successful businesspeople, the artists and entertainers, the dedicated professionals and those aspiring to be like them, who through their secular activities are in a position to reach a broader, potentially global, audience.

Going Global at All Costs

CHC is explicit in their desire to expand globally. Consistent with the outward looking economic pragmatism of the Singaporean state, the church declared in 2014 it wanted to “preach the gospel to the ends of the earth” [using] whatever methods were most effective, including targeting the North American market (Zaimov 2014). The international scope of their strategy is consistent with a missionary orientation. Historically, the word ‘mission’ is linked to the Jesuits in the 1590s to mean ‘to send abroad’ and by the early 1600s had come to mean ‘a body of persons sent out by a religious community to convert the heathen’ (The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles 1973, p. 1336). Echoes of this earlier meaning are apparent in the striking visual imagery that greets the visitor to the official website of the crossover project. The homepage is dominated by a picture of two hands, (a left and a right hand), palms facing up, on which are painted a colourful map of the world (http://www.chc.org.sg/crossover/english). The position and display of the hands signify openness but also show the imagined geographical scope of the crossover project. Interestingly, the Singaporean origins of CHC are not highlighted here. The world map only shows broad topographical contours, not national boundaries; North and South America cover one hand, Europe, Africa and Asia cover the other with Australia mostly obscured. Singapore as nation state appears indistinguishable from other countries forming the Singapore Malay archipelago.

International expansion without limits is suggested both by the imagery and the succession of tabs on the left-hand side explaining the nature of the mission, its operations and impact in different parts of the world (Asia, the U.S., and China). ‘Church without walls’ is a vision of an imagined global Christian community and the crossover project is represented as mobile mission, truly international, no longer anchored in its country of origin, a ‘global brand’. The tab titles also suggest the path this expansion took, profiling Sun Ho as the primary vehicle through which it was accomplished. Here the sequence of milestones in expansion is important in trying to convey it was only by launching a career in the U.S. that Sun Ho and the crossover project was able to have an impact in China through her Mandarin-language popular music. The patterns of influence are not unidirectional or simple but intersect and reverse direction: Pentecostal megachurch as North-American export is adapted and transformed in a Singaporean context, then ‘sent abroad’ through Asia and to North America in the form of Mandarin/English language popular music star Sun Ho which then enables her entrance to the Chinese market and by association, the crossover project.

Mobility is thus central to the way the crossover project is constructed by City Harvest Church – mobility to cross between religion and the market but also to move internationally as part of its missionary rationale. Despite this global outlook, City Harvest Church is still physically located in Singapore, a fact highlighted in 2012 by the charges brought against several of its pastors under Singaporean law by the government for misuse of church-building funds. CHC may have outgrown its Singaporean origins but is still regulated by them. In the U.S. press, prominent supporters of CHC such as Pastor A.R. Bernard portrayed the issue as one of religious freedom, an important and familiar principle in the culture of the United States:

“The bigger picture, he said, is that Singapore’s religious freedoms are not identical to those in the U.S. Accepted practices here, such as churches and charities using their own films and ‘crossover artists’ who perform religious and secular music for evangelism, are ‘strange’ in Singapore, he said.

So when the Singapore church leaders chose to use Ms. Ho’s music for evangelism – she performed especially well in Chinese markets – and took steps to promote her, those actions were misinterpreted, Mr. Bernard said.” (Wetzstein 2015)

Bernard represents the crossover project as aligned with North American culture, part of a more expansive and important international movement to transform society, a moment when history is being made. He thus attempts to frame the scandal as a conflict arising from government regulation of religion in Singapore. However, the court case did not concern the mixing of religion and business per se, but allegations that donations to a building fund collected by a registered charity had been used for other purposes. In fact the State prosecution was careful not to avoid debating the “theological legitimacy” (Lim and Singh 2013) of the crossover project. The complexities of the court case are beyond the scope of this paper but the legal action brought against CHC by the Singapore government seems to reflect its ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to corruption rather than regulation of religion illustrating that ‘whatever works’ does not mean ‘anything goes’.

Conclusions

Church missions have traditionally been globally oriented, using evangelism and church planting to spread the Gospel. More recently, megachurches such as Hillsong Church in Australia and Lakewood Church in USA have gone global in expanding their church brands through merchandising, marketing and networks. In this paper we have shown how this broader trend takes a particular form in the case of City Harvest Church in ways that reflect its cultural context. Here the Church not only blurs the normative division between the sacred and secular, they purposefully reference and transgress it in their version of the ‘cultural mandate’ doctrine. Shared understandings of the boundary between religion and the market are thus used as a discursive resource to legitimize their market orientation. Moreover, their image of a ‘boundaryless’ church, constructed using the language of space and the church vision – ‘church without walls’ – is expansive and outward-looking. Their international focus, and promotion of a business-oriented Christianity that provides support and assistance to those wishing to excel in the marketplace reflects the economic pragmatism of Singapore.

Our findings suggest a need for more nuance in tracing the influence of marketization on religion including an attention to its variations with cultural context. The spread of the discourse and practices of marketing and management and their use by non-commercial organizations (Gauthier, Martikainen, and Woodhead 2013) has promoted the market as an organizing principle for social relations and the elevation of the consumer as sovereign of primary identity. The individual is conceptualized as exercising personal freedom and pursuing self-improvement, exhibiting autonomy, self-reliance and personal responsibility, a construction encapsulated by the term ‘the enterprise self’ (du Gay 1996; Rose 1989, 1993). However while a dominant global trend, the influence of marketization and neoliberalism needs to be treated as an empirical matter, not least because its effects vary as it encounters diverse local contexts.

In our case study, the imagined audience in the Church’s texts were the producers of goods and services in the market, not general consumers. A particular type of identity was constructed for those targeted by the Church’s communications – ‘marketplace missionaries’ - the entrepreneurs and professionals in all sectors of the economy, and those who aspired to those positions, who would then reach consumers. These missionaries were not providing religious goods and services but, through their ordinary business activities, acting as living proof of the efficacy of the ‘cultural mandate’. The promotion of church member as an ‘enterprising self’, a successful or aspiring entrepreneur or business person, is a reminder that consumption is one aspect of marketization but not its whole story. And again, the emphasis on entrepreneurial values and a pragmatic approach to using business to spread Christianity reflects the Singaporean context.

Finally, our case study contributes to understanding the bi-directional relationships between religion and markets (Mittelstaedt 2002). While much critically oriented research has focused on the effects of markets and marketing on religion, here we see a different pattern: a church seeking to colonize the marketplace through secular operations of business, entertainment, popular culture, etc. Rather than the secular contaminating the sacred, the sacred seeks to penetrate the secular to show worldly success is not inimical to Christianity and can even be helped by it. This is a pragmatic, instrumental version of Christianity that promises immediate benefits to followers in their business, professional and work lives.

We acknowledge that this research is not without its limitations. Any research project inevitably involves choices about the focus of study. This research was limited to an in-depth case study of a religious organisation based on monotheistic protestant Christianity and our findings are intended to be illustrative rather than generalizable. The megachurch model emerged in a landscape of American Christianity where marketing and consumption discourses are dominant. Its diffusion into other cultural contexts such as Australia, South-East Asia and Africa, offers further opportunities to explore how this model, with its incorporation of the market and marketing, pursuit of growth and preaching of the so-called ‘prosperity gospel’, is not simply reproduced but transformed, taking on particular localized inflections.

The relationship between popular culture and religion has been characterized by both courting and criticism (Schultze 2001). We suggest understanding the relationship between religion, markets and marketing (Mittelstaedt 2002) will be enhanced by tracing how that relationship is constructed. This would require research to focus more on the marketing communications of religious organizations and movements, where attempts are made to persuade imagined target audiences and which prompt discussion and debate in public forums in turn, all of which constitute potential data for critical analysis. Discursive approaches seem ideally suited to this agenda as they provide multiple methods for identifying both the relationships that are constructed and how they are constructed. This presents opportunities for macromarketing research as the legitimacy of religious organizations’ involvement in the marketplace seems likely to continue to be the subject of discursive struggle.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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