Some quotes on a challenge faced by the church. I'll let you supply the transitions between them. I would love to hear your reaction to them:

Eugene Peterson in Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity:
American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationary and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn’t the remotest connection with what the church’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries.

A few of us are angry about it. We are angry because we have been deserted…. It is bitterly disappointing to enter a room full of people whom you have every reason to expect share the quest and commitments of pastoral work and find within ten minutes that they most definitely do not. They talk of images and statistics. They drop names. They discuss influence and status. Matters of God and the soul and Scripture are not grist for their mills.

The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper’s concerns–how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.

Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shopkeeping; religious shopkeeping, to be sure, but shopkeeping all the same. The marketing strategies of the fast-food franchise occupy the waking minds of these entrepreneurs; while asleep they dream of the kind of success that will get the attention of journalists.

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God. It is this responsibility that is being abandoned in spades.”

Dan Southerland in Transitioning: ...calls it the “elitist” question and argues that it (marketing to a particular demographic) “…ignores the fact that God ‘…does not want any to perish, but everyone to come to repentance’” (2 Peter 3:9)

Ray Ortlund in A Passion for God: “Pastors and church leaders, in particular, are under enormous pressure to satisfy the immediate demands of the marketplace at the cost of the gospel.”

John MacArthur in Ashamed of the Gospel: "Paul was equally obligated to Jews and Gentiles, educated people and barbarians. He didn’t target the young, upwardly mobile, cultures people and ignore the slaves and dregs of society. He preached the gospel to them all because he was obligated to them all. “There is no partiality with God” (Rom. 2:11); so Paul was no respecter of persons."

Os Guinness in Dining with the Devil: "Today theology is rarely more than marginal in the church growth movement at the popular level. Discussion of the traditional marks of the church is virtually nonexistent. Instead, methodology is at the center and in control. The result is a methodology only occasionally in search of a theology. After all, church growth. . . . is a self-professed 'science,' not a theology."