Perspectives on authenticity
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
I almost feel this post should be incorporated into my Lost Art of Evangelism series because it fits so well. There are some great evangelistic principles that come from the Public Relations world—and I don’t mean new ways to market, create hype or generate publicity. Rather, if you strip down PR to its most idealistic, essential truths (and get rid of the shrill publicity hounding), it can be about being Christlike with your words in many ways. The life of Christ—his service and storytelling—is, at times, like a master class in PR.Of course, this is not a perfect simile, but I’ve gained a lot of insight from thinking about The Church, Christianity and my own career from this perspective.
I recently ran across an interview about PR with futurist Watts Wacker that resonated with my thoughts related to church congregations, the use of marketing hype and applying descriptors like “authentic,” “relevant,” “organic” etc. to market their worship services to the public. I’ve always felt there is a big danger in doing this—risking credibility, comparison, competition, etc. Wacker identifies this, connecting it with his idea of cultural schizophrenia and how it effects communication and context in today’s world.“Cultural schizophrenia is the gap between the world as it presents itself and the world as you see it. It has become much more difficult to communicate because the result of this has become an abolition of context, and…context is in effect an agreed-upon social norm. But the way you do that is you find these stories that have had traction, and you align yourself with the ones that are in sync with who you are.
What we’re really striving for, and the way you communicate, is through authenticity. And authenticity is taking what worked in the past and putting it in the context of today. It’s never about saying you’re authentic. Your customers get to say you’re authentic; you never get to say it about yourself. You only get to strive to be authentic.”
There it is. It’s not about saying you are authentic (or relevant, or emergent, influential, or missional). It can only be something that you truly are. And only your public (read: congregants and seekers) can say these things about you.
This is what sets some congregations apart from others in the how they are regarded by their public (both insiders and outsiders, believers and unbelievers). There are those that need to say they are something, and those that truly are those things—without having to say it. When it comes to how highly you are regarded from the outside looking in, there is a difference.
Still many churches may codify these aspirations about who they are or wish to become in their mission and vision statements. I understand the need for this, but suggest that these written statements need not be used for this purpose. Instead, I suggest making them more essentially about what your mission is, rather than focusing the attention on the perception you wish to achieve. Authenticity begins here.
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How to dismantle your BF
Monday, May 29, 2006
This is too funny to pass up. If you think you might have a medical condition recently identified as Bono Fatigue (or BF), you’ll want to take advantages of this web site for support.
Although I’ve been a raving U2 fan since the age of 13 (with some time off in the 90s), I don’t think I’ve quite succumbed to this disorder (denial?). Although please warn me if you think otherwise. I might require an intervention.
A shiny Nickel
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Some friends got us in to see Nickel Creek at private Bethel College show this past Saturday night (5/20/06). And yes, we did feel like some of the oldest folks in the joint. That notwithstanding, it was well worth the pittance we spent for the tickets. Huge thanks to Chris & Ro!This show was downright amazing.
(Photo credit: Nickel Creek web site/Adam Brimer)
Aside from NC’s always fantastic original music, the cover tunes stole the show: From the uproarious rendition of Randy Newman’s “Short People” (Sara and Sean Watkins are short indeed), to Radiohead’s “Nice Dream,” to an over the top version of Britanny Spears’ “Toxic” complete with a computer-generated drum solo.
NC just kept it coming with extended jams of their signature tunes—for more than two solid hours. Sara kept shredding her bow and belting out her vox. And watching Chris Thile throw down on mandolin was a moment of ecstasy for this fan of stringed instruments. Gifted is an understatement of the highest order. Oh yes, and there was even tap dancing involved.
They concluded with a six song encore set that included a round of solo tunes for each one of them, with Sara doing Tom Waits’ “Pony,” Sean doing one of his own tunes, and Chris doing a Bach fugue (think Nigel Tufnel sans the foot-played guitar).
I’m now on an earnest hunt to find them on DVD—nothing in video was for sale at the show.
It was a great way to kick off the 2006 summer music season. The bar is set pretty high, but I’m sure my next live music binge at C-stone won’t disappoint.
Rediscovering the lost art of evangelism episode 6
Thursday, May 18, 2006
This is part 6 of a series of posts that interact with Guy Kawasaki's 10 principles of "evangelism." Refer to my February 22, 2006 post for the set up.Principle 6:
"Learn to give a demo. An evangelist who cannot give a great demo is an oxymoron. A person simply cannot be an evangelist if she cannot demo the product. If a person cannot give a demo that quickens the pulse of everyone in the audience, he should stay in sales or in marketing."
I hope that in reading this we all share a huge grasp of the obvious. We are the demo. Too often I find myself “giving” a demo, rather than “being” the demo. There is a not too subtle difference between those two.
Merely giving a demonstration, in the case of evangelizing the Gospel, is more akin to doing and saying the right things to show what a Christian is like, and what a Christian does outwardly. The trouble with giving a demo is that it only goes so deep. As one gets to know us more, who we are on the inside eventually becomes more important that the motions we are going through.
I used to be a writing and grammar tutor in college. My placement in this program was due to my landing in the advanced placement British literature course—part of the class was being a tutor. It was a gig I didn’t mind because the rest of my class was mostly made up of women. Yet, a grammarian and a tutor was definitely not “who I was” on the inside. I would feebly help students edit their writing assignments, and then proceed to make the same mistakes in my own writing later on. One read through this blog will testify that this remains true of me today. (A reader recently brought my attention to an egregious error on one of my pages that must have been there for months.) I was passably successful pretending to be a tutor since I had an arsenal of quick reference books at my disposal (the Cliff Notes of grammar), and was really good at seeing errors in someone else’s work.
Often that is what I have done in personal evangelism. I may be doing evangelism by having all the resources at my disposal and by judging the life of the one I am evangelizing. Therefore, I can give a demo of the Christian life by acting accordingly. But being a follower of Jesus—being the personal demonstration of that reality—is something more.
2 Co 5:17-20 TNIV “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.”
Being the demo is a matter of a true inward transformation—with the “new creation” unconcealed.
2 Co 3:17-18 TNIV “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”
I think this demarcation of doing and being is missed in the way many people view The Church’s role in evangelism. For The Church, giving a demo today often means inordinately striving to create an experience of God or The Gospel, whereas being the demo unveils the transformative image of the Lord upon His Bride in everything she does. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing the former, unless it is absent the latter. What’s more, I would argue that the tactical aspects of evangelism will take care of themselves if we operate out of an unveiled state of “being” continually transformed into His image—living “as though God were making his appeal through us.”
I will never truly be a grammar tutor, although I continue to pose as one from time to time. I am most assuredly a new creation in Christ, and I need to trust and live in this reality more and more often—thereby becoming the best possible demonstration.
I realize this is all horribly abstract, begging the question, “how do we live in such a way?” May I recommend TrueFaced, by Bill Thrall, John Lynch, and Bruce McNicol as a fine exposition of a 2 Co 3:17-18 reality.
Learning to dance
Friday, May 12, 2006
I picked up this C.S. Lewis quote cited in a couple Blog entries I read recently by Doug Pagitt. He has a different take on it, which you can look at here. I actually agree with him about what his issues are with the quote. However, in the context of what many evangelical mega-aspiring churches are doing with their Sunday services, I also find this quote to be an extremely current and appropriate critique. (Funny how you can sometimes accept the truth of two seemingly competing perspectives on the same thing.)In this post I’m focusing more on Lewis’ perspective on the drive to create novelty and entertainment within the church services, rather than Pagitt’s angle on experimental approaches to how the community interacts with God and each other.
Here is the Lewis quote (taken from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer):
“Novelty, simply as such, can have only an entertainment value. And (believers) don't go to church to be entertained. They go to use the service, or, if you prefer, to enact it. Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best--if you like, it works best--when, through long familiarity, we don't have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don't notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been only on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshipping. A still worse thing may happen. Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant [worship leader]. It lays one’s devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, ‘I wish they’d remember that the charge to Peter was ‘Feed my sheep,’ not ‘Try experiments on my rats,’ or even, ‘Teach my performing dog new tricks.’”
I’ve posted about the “feeding my sheep” fixation of some believers—a red herring for many who are shopping for a church (asking "where can I get fed solid food," etc.). For the record, I do think this quote goes overboard in terms of making the service far too staid. Of course, Lewis looks at it from a mid 20th century, Anglican perspective. But what I think we need to take from him today is the notion that a worship service is not some open invitation for creative evangelism techniques—at least not at the expense of other important elements.
Again last week I saw the phrase, “…we strive to craft worship experiences…” in a church’s communication materials referring to their worship services.
As a lay minister I couldn’t disagree more. Crafting a novel experience is exactly what Lewis is writing about. The worship service should not be a spectacle, but that is where many evangelical churches have arrived. And spectators are what many of them now have sitting in the pews.
The medium is the message. And baby boomers, who grew up under the cool blue glow of cathode ray tubes, now direct the lion share of evangelical Christian resources in the American church. They have largely succeeded in merging the appeal of TV and nightclub entertainment with the Sunday service event, but at what cost? If Marshall McLuhan is to be believed, it has been largely at the expense of the message. It is The Gospel within an entertainment context, rather than the context of the community.
Sadly, this event-driven, produced experience is the evangelistic alternative many have chosen instead of the much harder work of nurturing a faith community that equips believers to be The Church 24-7—out here in the real world. So consider this post a tiny little manifesto.
Instead of watching TV, I’m getting my fat, lazy butt up off the couch (or pew).
Let’s go cut a rug with our Beloved.
Appledobe
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Then, check out Cringley’s column this past week for a possible peek at Apple’s applications strategy. Together with last week’s prognostication, a potential seismic shift is building underneath the PC software world.
The big picture strategy for Apple that emerges is threefold: 1) Make the OS irrelevant to Windows users who leverage Intel and Mac OS X (see the prior post). 2) Neutralize MS Office with Open XML standards-supported OS X office apps from Apple. 3) Dominate all other major creative pro software for Windows and Mac OS X by buying Adobe.If those three elements come to fruition, sit back and watch Apple’s market cap zoom past Microsoft within 18 months. Will it happen? Ask Michael Dell—it just happened to him. I invite your thoughts.
The best of all possible worlds
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Check out Robert X. Cringley’s column from two weeks ago. In it he contends that Apple is preparing to move beyond Boot Camp at some point to a Mac OS X that can run Window’s apps without requiring Windows. He even goes so far as saying that he has it on good authority that Apple already has this running in the lab (and probably has for months, if not years). He also claims he has some pretty deep insight into the infamous 1997 Apple-Microsoft stock investment and patent case deal that may hold the key to how this would be possible via access to the Windows API included in the deal (now that Macs are on the Intel platform, of course). I’d have to say that reading this made me a little giddy. Why? Consider that Windows Vista will hit the market hard in early 2007 (or likely later) with a much reduced set of features from it’s original scope (more like Windows XP SP3). Also consider that most malware affects the OS and the browser rather than other apps. If you can run an OS with next to no security risks (like the Mac OS) and then run your native Windows apps with no performance hits and without running and maintaining the Windows OS, then wouldn’t that be the best of all possible worlds?
If this does happen, look for Apple to market this to Windows users this way: Why upgrade to Vista when you can run all your Windows apps without Windows at all--in an OS that’s more secure and years ahead of it? I can’t wait.
Holy podcasts, Batman!
Saturday, May 06, 2006
I just added Erwin McManus of Mosaic in LA to the podcast page. I've been catching that 'cast ever since I read The Barbarian Way a few months ago. Also, I want to promise you that Doug Glynn of Mesa, AZ will be back podcasting in the future. I may even host that one myself, we’ll see. Stay tuned, and send me anyone else to consider for my page.Some kind of wonderful
Friday, May 05, 2006
Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) was my favorite movie for about 3 years—capping my high school experience. It was, in my opinion at the time, the finest film of the modern era (high praise from a sheltered preacher’s kid who couldn’t even go to movies until high school). One of the things I identified with was being outside the popular circles. Not quite the lowest in the adolescent caste system, but definitely confined to the creative, artistic, dramatic clique. An Eric Stoltz type rather than a Craig Sheffer.I mention that to say this: Just when my career life is in the midst of a major change curve, I hear from one of the few people in my high school past that I always wanted to reconnect with. I get an Email out of the blue last week from this old friend—perhaps via my work address mined from a Google search, which finds me all too easily (along with a pro snowboarder from out West who seems to lead a much more exciting life than I do). Cool. Plus, she is in contact with another one of those few friends I lost all track of.
So, we will be setting up a lunch soon. This will be wonderful, I think. I feel just like Eric Stoltz again, only fat, bearded and balding, which isn’t very wonderful at all.
Dowsing the flame
Thursday, May 04, 2006
I learned a lesson recently. It didn’t take much, but I thought I’d blog about it to remind myself. No flaming. When reading web articles, posts, etc. I’m going to do everything I can to pause, reflect and then, if I do decide to comment, avoid flaming the author or other commenters. I did write a flaming comment post about an interview I read a few weeks ago. It was no big deal—nothing really offensive or personal. Just too harsh. It didn’t take long for me to start to feel really bad about it. Honestly I should know better—I work in public relations, where the first rule is the make friends with your public audience. Plus, I’ve always striven for a Jesus type approach to my communications work—tell the truth, love my enemies, forgive, etc. At least I am comforted knowing that the Holy Spirit holds sway with my conscience.
So if you ever catch me doing that to someone else’s article or post, call me on it.
What happened to April?
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
I have been remiss in posting. Most of this has been due to about two weeks of 12 hour days. I have some some posts drafted. Just need to get them out there. For those that think I've met some cruel fate, the news about my death has been greatly exaggerated. Look for more posts in May. Happy May day one day late.