Is the business model of church discipleships worst enemy?

I was reading about a new church in the Tampa area in the newspaper and came across this:

“There has been a whole strategy in this that had started with phone calls, bulk mailings, radio advertising, signs, sponsoring teams – a whole plan to put this together,” their pastor said. That approach is necessary for the contemporary church to thrive, said the associate chair of religious studies at the University of South Florida. “This is a relatively new kind of phenomenon,” he said. “What you see is something that most people would think is more akin to a business model.”

I’m not a huge fan of the business model in the church world. I’m not going to say that nothing good comes out of it. I have seen much good come out of it, but I think that it continues to send the message, “this church is all about YOU, to meet YOUR needs, to make YOU happy.” I'm not sure that is the best thing in the long run. It makes it harder to break the message of Jesus to people when he says that it's NOT about you. That the Kingdom/Church life is actually about dying to yourself and your needs and your wants to serve God's bigger purpose. Does this seem like we're sending a mixed message to people? We tell them that we have the best product (our fun church that we promise won't last over an hour and will feed you great stuff) adn then we have to tell them that Jesus says to die to yourself. Does this model make discipleship harder???

This model is what has led people like the woman last week to come up to our Impact Ministries table at the University and ask, "So, what makes your ministry different than all the others? Why should I come to your ministry?" She's basically trying to get me to sell her our ministry like it's a product or something. It is the most frustrating, disturbing thing which stems from this business/marketing model of church. So I told her that I didn't think she should come to our ministry, and I gave her a few suggestions of where she should go.

Is church marketing sending the wrong message? Would we need marketing if our people were fulfilling their role in sharing the faith, investing in others lives, and inviting people to the church community themselves?

***It should also be noted that on their opening Sunday they played the Creed song Higher. For the record let me just say that Creed is one of the most made fun of rock bands in the history of music and this song is from 1999 making it about 6 years out of date. Why is it that the only people that think Creed is cool are church people??? This is something I’ve never understood.