In the Christian West, in the pre-modern world, the parish church met the religious needs of people living in the parish. It was necessitated by and sustained by a culture that had been in place, in one form or another, since the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine and his successors.

In the modern world the contract between the church as a priestly community and society at large began to break down, and churches came to rely on the personal conviction or interest of attendees to sustain them. That corrected some of the shortcomings of the culture-sponsored church, but it led, arguably, to a consumer model of church: to keep attendance and income up we had to stimulate need and then meet that need as efficiently as possible.