By Micah Jackson
Before I entered the seminary, I worked in business. I don’t think I’m at all unusual in that way. Many of the clerics I encounter previously earned their bread in the for-profit business world. Some of them were very successful by any measure. It’s also true that a great many of the people sitting in Episcopal pews each Sunday are businesspeople of one kind or another. So perhaps it’s not so surprising to find that many think of a typical Episcopal parish as if it were a small business. After all, any business with an annual budget of 300-500K (not unreasonable for a medium size parish) or more, with hundreds or thousands of loyal customers and committed paid and volunteer staff, would have to be considered worth the attention of a competent manager who keeps up with the latest trends in the business literature.
But despite the many similarities between a typical Episcopal parish and a typical small business, the advice given to the latter may not automatically fit the former, at least so it seems to me. For one thing,parishes are not designed to maximize economic value for their
shareholders, as one classical definition of a business puts it, and they are not free to start manufacturing another product when market forces shift. Variations in the product are good and necessary, of course, but we are all in the Gospel business, and that’s just all there is to say about that.
So it can be tricky to evaluate the effect that a particular trendy business idea might have on the Church. Doing so faithfully requires, at least, tremendous creativity and a good hold on the values of that church body. One such trendy business idea is “The Long Tail” a reconsideration of Pareto’s Principle, which most of us know as “The 80/20 Rule.” In business this would suggest that the top 20% of a business’ customers generate 80% of the sales. In the church world, we might see the principle predicting that the top 20% of pledges bring in 80% of the budget, or that 80% of the sermons come from only 20% of the Bible. In an individual case, of course, the actual ratio may be different, but overall, Pareto’s Principle has stood the test of analysis.
Chris Anderson, in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, notices an interesting thing about the way that technology (especially the Internet) affects the 80/20 rule. (Click here to see an interactive demo of The Long Tail, skip down to the asterisk to avoid the even slightly technical language to follow) He sees that as it becomes possible to reach customers farther into the niche markets (at the extreme end of the power curve) eventually there comes a point when the area under the curve (revenue) past the inflection point is greater than that before it. In other words, it is more profitable to serve these niche customers.* Consider Amazon.com. Despite the huge number of hit books they sell, the lion’s share of their sales (and therefore revenue) are books that are best described as unusual or obscure (the industry term is “backlist.”) It’s the same with Netflix, or eBay. Websites that cater to small markets, like egg noodle sculpture enthusiasts, also leverage the Long Tail.
There’s an argument to be made that websites like this one are benefiting from The Long Tail, as it would be difficult or impossible to distribute this content in magazine form, especially if we had to resort to traditional advertising support to do it. I know for sure that my feast-daily podcasts about the saints at St. Jerome’s Chapel draw a far, far larger audience than they ever could have if people had to come to my church to hear those sermons. Nevertheless, I don’t think that the Episcopal Church should start thinking of running parishes that way.
A traditional brick and mortar business (like a parish) simply can’t reach the number of customers necessary to benefit from The Long Tail. And if it could, it would be a tremendous burden, both from the parish end (where it would result in an endless schedule of low-attendance specialized services) and from the National Church end (where lots more tiny missions would be necessary, with the increased stress on clerical resources that comes with it). But thanks to the ease of reaching people via the Internet, the National Church and the Anglican Communion are not brick and mortar entities only, and neither is an individual parish. We can reach out to and minister with people from all over the world, greatly magnifying the Gospel’s impact in the world. Maybe that will benefit our parish, or another one, but we’re all really just divisions of the same company, right?
Jesus told the disciples to go out into the deep water, where there are lots of fish, just not all gathered together. When they hauled in their nets, they were full to breaking. The Internet is the deep water of contemporary society, and paying attention to the Long Tail could make or
break evangelism in the 21st century. Besides, Jesus never said “And if I am lifted up from the earth, I will gather the most profitable 20% to myself.”
The Rev. Micah Jackson, a priest of the Diocese of Chicago, is a doctoral student in Homiletics at the Graduate Theological Union. His personal blog is St. Jerome’s Library.