The commercial church and externality
Monday, August 18, 2008
I came to this idea last year in the midst of my grad-level organizational communication class. However, I’ve only recently begun to apply it to church communication. The purpose of this post is to walk through this line of thinking more thoroughly.But first, I have to define the first phrase in this post’s title: “the commercial church.” This phrase was coined to identify churches that have embraced an advertising and marketing approach to their mediated, public communication.
It helps to identify this specifically in order to avoid generalizing churches that fall into other descriptive categories because of size or organizational structure (for example, megachurches, mainline churches, etc.). In short, any church could be considered a commercial church if its mediated communication appeals to people as consumers and the message is centered on the church and/or God as a competing life solution for individuals in a crowded marketplace of commercial culture. Certain churches may be more prone to commercial communication methods than others, but this has more to do with the people communicating than it does size or affiliation.
That brings us to the idea of “externality” as it pertains to the mediated, public communication of the church. To properly define this in the church context, the linked clip below provides the classic definition from Nobel laureate Milton Friedman.
“An externality is the effect of a transaction between two individuals on a third party who has not consented to or played any role in the carrying out of that transaction.”
- Milton Friedman.
At first blush, using this line of reasoning to evaluate church communication might seem like a stretch. But it’s appropriate to apply the concept of externality to the church because the very idea of embracing an advertising and marketing approach to evangelism and church growth is borrowed from the business world. Therefore, such communication can be critically evaluated on the same basis. What is the externality of how the church is communicating? What are the externalities of commercial communication when the message is the Gospel and the communicators represent The Church?
It’s all too easy to view all media as neutral conduits for our messages. But as has been posted here before, media are far from neutral conduits. Advertising in particular has a specific ideology that thoroughly contextualizes messages. And externalities are often where the effects of this ideological bias show up.
Externality, in the sense I am using the word, is the effect of this type of communication on those whom don’t respond as customers/converts. Apart from the ones who are won over, who are the ones who are disillusioned, confused, offended, or driven further away? Communicators must assume a certain amount of ownership and responsibility for these outcomes.
To take the business analogy a little further, the church tends to only report new sales, while it avoids dwelling too much on attrition and doesn’t even think to measure campaigns in terms of lost prospects. Externality is all about those lost prospects.
While we know not everyone will choose to believe the message of the Kingdom and become followers of Jesus, this truth is not a blanket exemption from being responsible for the externalities of how we choose to communicate.
Exxon, for example, cannot morally ignore the tragic externality of environmental pollution after an oil spill like the Valdez just because it is achieving record profits for its shareholders.
While the truth of scripture is eternal, how we choose to communicate can be fallible and corruptible (read: counterproductive). If commercial methods of communication serve to further pollute the social environment we inhabit, it is appropriate to consider whether we’ve moved two steps forward and three steps backward in advancing the Kingdom.
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No surprise: Disappointed in Rick Warren’s politics forum
Sunday, August 17, 2008
I had issues with this whole event in terms of the church context and politics. Those (major) issues aside, I was completely disappointed by the questions that Rick Warren asked Sunday. This Washington Post commentary by David Waters really sums that all up for me. Since TSAWWT is going on hiatus, I’ll depart from my usual policy of not doing political posts. Follow the link and read the piece to understand what follows:If David Waters’ set of questions seem to have a certain bias, congratulate yourself for recognizing the obvious. The fact is, both Warren’s and Waters’ questions reek of bias. But Warren’s claim to provide a fair and equal forum on faith issues ignores this reality.
What was asked and how the questions were played off of by the candidates provides a clear example of a profound bias in question selection. If McCain had been asked to write his own “faith-based” questions, they would have been the same ones that were asked. I doubt the same could be said for Obama. And it is question bias that serves as the subtext for the inflated controversy over the “cone of silence.” McCain didn’t need to listen in beforehand. These were the questions he and his staff knew (hoped) were coming because they had done their homework. They shouldn’t be faulted for that.So, what is the bias in Warren’s case? He asked the questions that he thought most evangelicals would want to hear answers to. He didn’t necessarily ask questions that all evangelicals need to hear answers to. There’s a difference.
Do I show my own bias by really wanting to hear both candidates' answers to David Waters’ questions too—important questions of faith that will now go unanswered?
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Diagnosing the cost disease
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
I was tipped off to this article from the Strib that ran in the Saturday paper. It’s worth a critical read. More worth reading are the reader comments because they speak to some the "externalities" of the megachurch and the ministry marketing paradigm—something I’ll define in a future post.As for this post, I was following reporter Jeff Strickler along as he discovered all the effort and angst that goes into “one hour on a Sunday” at Eagle Brook Church in White Bear Lake and other venues (yeah, the one that installed the cupholders in their theater-style seats), when an innocent observation he made reached out and hit me on the head. He had done his homework and landed an interview with Scott Thumma, one of my research sources on megachurch stats. The conversation got into church giving trends and growth trends, and there it was:
“Another myth about megachurches, according to researcher Thumma, is that they spend a lot of time begging for money. In fact, most take a rather relaxed approach. That includes Eagle Brook, despite an annual budget nearing $10 million. Like a big-box mega-store that holds down prices with volume, Eagle Brook's continuous growth means they don't have to lean on members to dig deep; an ever-increasing number of hands slip cash into offering baskets.”
Strickler connected the dots—all the more remarkable because his article does not reflect any sort of critical or biased tone (In fact, I’m sure Eagle Brook would read this piece as good PR). As the excerpt above explains, Megachurches operate on an economy of scale financial model, whether they know it or not. The conclusions drawn by Mark Chaves in his 2006 article (I blogged about this well-researched article in March) are largely confirmed by the above observation. A major growth factor in megachurches during an era of flat growth in the church overall has to do with Baumol’s Cost Disease. (Baumol is pictured.)
Churches must achieve scale in order to provide the “services” people (read: consumers) expect. Since the 1970s, giving levels per family unit haven’t sustained smaller churches—especially as they tended flocks that were increasingly straying toward the capabilities of larger churches. Currently, we find polar opposites emerging, with simple/house/missional churches on one end of the spectrum and so-called ‘gigachurches’ emerging on the other. There still churches of every size imaginable on our spectrum, but your 50 to 500 size congregations are increasingly coming under financial strain regardless of whether they try to compete with the giants or intentionally attempt to stay smaller. Compete or die has become the operative norm, leading some churches to the ministry marketing paradigm, and others into the strange, new world of church mergers and video venues.
Rather than offer deeper reflection on the some of the more telling quotes in the piece, Achievable Ends has done it better here.
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Commodify me, oh Lord, part 11
Friday, May 16, 2008
The audience commodity is dead. Long live the audience commodity.The starting point for my MA project has really been about viewing church congregations as advertising audiences (a thoroughly objectified state). From that perspective, one can begin to understand how the media industry is shifting its resources toward reaching such audiences (in the context of the church culture) in an era where their traditional mediums, such as television, are providing an increasingly less reliable audience commodity value.
I recently downloaded and listened to a lecture by Sut Jhally, media communication professor at The University of Massachusetts (located here). In the presentation, Jhally makes emphatic and compelling arguments that the time people spending watching television is a real and quantifiable expenditure of work time. Our attention—our consciousness—is sold by media companies to advertisers. This is largely consistent with what Dallas Smythe observed in the 70s, and has been largely accepted as a practical reality.It’s totally true, and totally out of date.
Because what Jhally doesn’t address in his 2007 speech is what is happening to the media consciousness industry in the Web 2.0 world. He makes some general comments about the commodification process extending to new media, but doesn’t deal with the way this commodity value (for advertisers) is beginning to be redirected (by audiences) toward participatory media activity. And this is key, because it shifts the whole concept of audience commodity value away from the media industry and advertisers toward the audience.
This idea became clear to me after viewing the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo Conference presentation by Clay Shirky of NYU’s Tisch ITP program. I recommend viewing it for more context on what follows in this post. A full text version is here.
What is happening, according to Shirky, is that this “cognitive surplus” value of television watching is slowly being redirected toward more meaningful activities—participatory Web media being a chief beneficiary.
Fellow NYU colleague, Jay Rosen, offered a few summation points on Shirky’s presentation (the full post can be found here):
“A cognitive surplus means the total amount of unoccupied free time available (think of it as “screen hours”) after the basic needs of society have been met. Television swallowed up most of the surplus American society produced during the period of relative affluence after World War Two.”
“[Shirky] figures it took 100 million hours of people around the world writing, checking, editing, gathering, and talking it over (and fighting!) to make all versions of Wikipedia. ‘And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year.’ Therefore if 99 percent of the TV watching in the US remained as is, and we broke off just one percent for the information commons and other cool stuff we could have 100 Wikipedia-[sized] projects per year.”
“[Shirky] thinks we can reverse the time sink for people once marooned on the receiving end of a one-way system that didn’t care what you thought or brought to it, since it couldn’t afford the costs of interacting with you."
Shirky also drew an intriguing historical analogy: Gin was to the industrial revolution as the sit-com was to the post-WW2 consumer age. (For a full write up on the 1800s Gin Craze, read the wiki here.)And just as gin producers quickly developed an industry to monetize people’s need to cope with dramatic social changes, the media industry quickly developed a capacity to monetize people’s free time via television technology and advertising.
As Jhally pointed out in his 2007 lecture, initially, radio and television programs were created to provide programming that would entice people to purchase radios and televisions. Once people had made those technology investments, the model shifted from primarily relying on static product revenue to relying on advertising revenue tied to audiences that seemed to have continual growth potential.
Today, of course, it is the overall loss of audience commodity value that is pushing the media industry and advertisers toward new venues like the church. Here the modernistic model of weekly, one-way interaction via professional clergy and a mass audience (pun?) creates the attractive captive audience that television and other ad-driven media once provided.
At the same time, the church in the U.S. seems to be gravitating toward two extremes. One the one hand, economic and consumeristic forces are driving the growth of megachurches (see my post from March referencing Mark Chaves’ article and his take on the economics affecting churches). On the other, there is a decidedly participatory approach emerging in the realm of post-congregational Christians. Here Bill Kinnon and others see an exciting parallel with emerging, missional expressions of the church in Shirky’s presentation.
The media industry, along with church growth marketing agencies that have a vested financial interest in advancing an advertising and marketing evangelism paradigm with churches, are increasingly targeting megachurches, their satellites and like-minded church plants because of the quality of the audience commodity and their economies of scale for reaching them. The reasons are simple. This is where the consumers are more concentrated and homogenous. This is where word-of-mouth and opinion leader marketing potential naturally pre-exists. This is where out most powerful cultural narratives can tied to entertainment media and product brands.
There is a path that leads toward further commercialization of time, and another that leads toward the de-commercialization of time. Each expression of the church—each community of Jesus followers—must make a choice as to which path they will take. It’s my mission to make sure this is a conscious, informed choice.
You know my bias.
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Commodify me, oh Lord, part 10
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Can I get a witness?
As has been said here before (by whom, I have no idea): What you win them with, you win them to. In one way my entire project is about this. Yet, it is always good to get confirmation from someone who knows. That's exactly what I believe the excerpt below accomplishes. Shane Hipps recently responded to a question on his Third Way Faith blog that I have to share. Hipps is a former advertising executive who left the ad game to attend seminary and become a Mennonite pastor. His recent book (in my library links) shines the exposing light of 60s and 70s communication sage, Marshall McLuhan on the relationship between spirituality and electronic culture in the digital age. Hipps responds to a question about whether he can apply skills or approaches from his advertising career to his job as a pastor. His response:
"...the primary task of my previous life was to try and highjack your imagination, brand your brain with a Porsche logo, and then feed you opinions you thought were your own. I can't think of a method more opposed to the process of deepening and evolving the spiritual life. So I'm very aware of intentionally not translating or using these methods.
In my experience, the best thing I can do to lead people spiritually is to show them love. At the heart of love is making space, honoring the free will of the other. This requires that I intentionally divest myself of their outcomes, decisions, and conclusions. Sounds counter-intuitive, but then again, most things in the life of faith are. When someone senses that I need them to grow to validate myself, it usually hinders their growth. When they sense that I love them and have no need for them to take my advice, they're more free to do so if they choose. This I've found to be the most fertile soil for spiritual evolution. And it is diametrically opposed to the tasks of advertising and marketing, which are driven entirely by outcomes."
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Commodify me, oh Lord, part 9
Friday, March 28, 2008
Megachurch: New revival or economic disease"Disease" sounds really harsh and judgmental. I must have an axe to grind or something. While there may be some truth in both of those statements, the disease hypothesis is not original to me--and it is not meant to be pejorative. It was something I came across in my research yesterday that I think is worthy of some reflection. As far as I can google, it has only been blogged about one other place (here), so this post should almost double its exposure.
In 2006 Mark Chaves (of Duke University Dept. of Religion) penned a cover story for Christian Century that plumbed the depths of the available quantitative and qualitative research to uncover the driving forces behind the rise of megachurches in America since 1970. His findings deserve serious consideration.For the past decade or more there has been an argument in evangelicalism—one I’ve participated in from my own small corner of limited influence. The argument has been over whether megachurches are successful (by the numbers of people attending them) because of their ability to attract the unchurched through innovative outreach methods involving marketing, a consumer experience orientation and large gatherings with the high production values of entertainment media. Critics have argued that overall church attendance in America is not growing, but has stagnated:
“It sometimes is said that the secret to megachurch success is that megachurches have figured out how to attract the unchurched. But overall church attendance is not increasing. The only study I know of that compares very large churches with smaller churches concludes that there is no difference between the two in the percentage of new members who were not previously involved with a church. So the increasing concentration of people in the very largest churches is not a consequence of megachurches tapping into a previously uninvolved population. Increased concentration is occurring mainly because people are shifting from smaller to larger churches, not because people are shifting from uninvolvement to involvement in big churches.”
So what is the impetus for all this megachurch growth—this concentration of more people into larger congregations—which has been accelerating since the 1970s? Chaves. informed by research, offers an increasingly plausible explanation: It’s the economy, stupid:
“…the increased concentration of people in the very largest churches is caused in part by rising costs that make it more and more difficult to run a church at a customary level of programming and quality.
Churches suffer…from ‘Baumol's cost disease.’ This is a phenomenon identified in the mid-1960s by economists William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen. The basic idea is simple: if there is increasing productivity and efficiency in some sectors of the economy, and if wages increase in those sectors, then wages also will increase in other sectors, or else talent will move to the sectors in which wages are increasing.”
Professional church workers (pastors, staff) require ongoing wage and benefit increases to keep pace with life in the U.S. economy. But churches don’t usually have the ability to become more economically productive.
“…churches face ever-rising real costs with no significant opportunities to reduce those costs by becoming more efficient. The only options in such a situation are to sacrifice quality or increase revenue.”
It’s no coincidence that revenues (via giving) for churches have not kept pace since the 1970s, when the evangelical megachurch trend began.
“…increases in donations are not often compared to the rate at which the costs of running a church have increased. Beginning in about 1970 the rate at which donations increased stopped keeping pace with the rate at which the costs of running a church increased.”
Megachurches offer better economies of scale, and their growth is directly correlated to their ability to provide more people with the (customer) services no longer available from smaller churches due to rising costs for operations and labor. The cold, calculated truth is that megachurch growth is being driven mostly by Christians shopping for better service at a cheaper price—the Wal-Mart phenomenon in more ways that one.Chaves offers a theory that, rather than reassuring me in the thought that megachurches have a kingdom impact (I think some do), convinces me that the commodification of the church is far more entrenched in American Christianity than I dared assume. And as it turns out, the church is being commodified by the consumer before the church returns the favor and commodifies the audience and the message.
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TechnoratiCommodify me, oh Lord, part 8
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Rich media, poor churchContinuing with my last post in the “Commodify me, oh Lord” series, I came across this quote from Noami Klein taken from an online interview for the 2004 PBS Frontline report, The Persuaders. She again mentions Disney’s Celebration community like she did in her No Logo documentary, but then adds this additional point:
“It’s one of the ironies of our branded age, that unbranded space. Public space, or pseudo-public space, is now a luxury item that is only really available to the very rich. Once you move up the class hierarchy, things get a lot more tranquil and quiet, and you sort of pay not to be marketed to. HBO is the same in a way. You pay extra not to be advertised to. Bahamas bans McDonald's. When rich people get together, they want to be protected from the brands that they got rich creating.”
Consider what this implies: Given the means, people will pay a premium to avoid advertising. Aside from being further evidence that people prefer not to be constantly sold to, this is the reason that advertisers are looking for ways to fuse product pitches with entertainment. For my own graduate project, it’s one of the reasons the film industry is creating Christian teaching materials to get their promotional product (movies) messages into churches. It’s hard to avoid an ad when you don’t know it’s there. NYU’s Mark Crispin Miller explains this in a Frontline online interview:
“Advertising is just a commercial form of propaganda. What propaganda has always wanted to do is not simply to suffuse the atmosphere, but to become the atmosphere. It wants to become the air we breathe. It wants us not to be able to find a way outside of the world that it creates for us.”Make no mistake. This is the hot strategy of today’s marketing strategists in terms of the multi-billion dollar evangelical Christian market. It is being played out every time a “faith and values” movie, Christian book or major label worship artist recording is released.
The bottom line is that some pastors and church leaders are now looking to these media to co-create the culture of the church community. There is a complicit effort to incorporate these marking messages into church teaching and worship because they allow pastors to leverage the powerful narratives of popular culture, or provide appealing and popular music for worship leaders. In a consumer culture, entertainment media is the ticket to the “relevancy” show. The audience/congregation pays the cost for these goodies by lending their attention to the subtle, hidden promotional message. See the new movie. Buy the new book. Download the new song.
But are we to the point where people may begin paying not to be marketed to in the church they attend? By paying, I mean going elsewhere, driving farther, giving up other perceived social and spiritual benefits, or quitting church altogether. I don’t think we are all the way there yet—although I personally arrived at this juncture two years ago. What is much more likely at the present is that the pervasive “sell” of today’s church culture has become a primary deterrent to reaching those who would otherwise be compelled by the radical, counter-cultural story of the Kingdom.
While Klein makes the comment below based on her concerns about society and culture in general, let’s apply it directly to the context of the church. Speaking about the type of brand marketing taking place today, Klein comments:
“…they've done our market research for us and proven that we actually really do want more than we're getting from our culture, which would mean that we have our marching orders. There are these desires that are being expressed in ways that they're not actually being met through shopping, and it's a challenge to try to meet them in other ways.”
I submit that helping meet the deeper spiritual needs of people (in contrast to their felt social-consumer needs) cannot be done by creating and presenting a sanitized facsimile of consumer culture, or by employing an advertising and marketing paradigm to communicate and engage them. People will pay not to listen—in more ways than one.
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Commodify me, oh Lord, part 7
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
What Disney knowsMy research has been on a roll recently, obtaining copies of some key documentaries off the web. I now have access to The Ad and the Ego, Behind the Screens and No Logo. I plan to use clips from each of these in my road show presentation.
Most recently I watched Naomi Klein’s No Logo (2003), which focuses on the negative effects of brand globalization on culture and workers across the globe. There was one instance among many that really stood out to me—and it promises to be the primary example in my closing argument for a commercial free faith movement. Since I was able to obtain the No Logo transcript from the MEF, I’ll paste the specific quote from Klein about branding here, and follow it with comments on what her example means from my perspective:
Because Disney has been at this for so much longer than most companies, they have gone further. …in a sense they’ve reached brand nirvana, they have built a Disney town called Celebration, Florida. You can live your whole life inside the brand and that’s what thousands of families have done, they’ve packed up the kids and moved into the Disney brand full-time, they send their kids to the Disney school, and they elect representatives to the Disney council, so it’s a fully privatized life. What’s interesting about the world’s first branded town is that there are no brands there. If you go to Celebration, Florida you will see not a franchise, no McDonalds, you won’t see any billboards, you’ll see lots of green spaces and parks and kids riding around on bicycles. And Disney says that this is because they built Celebration, Florida as a monument to the ideal of the American town, of public space. Public space is a big part of that. Now that may be true but there’s another aspect of it as well and that aspect is that when you have finally reached your absolute brand nirvana where you have built the dream world in three dimensions and you actually have people living there full-time, the first thing you want to is you want to slam the door behind you. And you want to make sure that there aren’t any competing messages that are in any way interrupting with this perfect synergized, cross-promoted marketing moment.While many churches that subscribe to an advertising and marketing paradigm of evangelism may be trying to learn the finer points of branding and marketing from media giants like Disney, Klein’s example of Disney’s Celebration community in Florida has a great deal more to tell us. Although totally unintended on their part, Disney’s strategic approach with Celebration teaches us two critical things about the commercial media saturation that people live with in today’s culture: First, the fact that there are no brands and overt advertising in Celebration indicates that Disney knows people, given a choice, would not choose to be inundated with marketing and advertising. Advertising overload is ugly, noisy and does nothing but detract from the idyllic community Disney wants Celebration to embody. Their emphasis is on pleasant, clutter-free public spaces. Even Disney tones down its own branding as the people living in Celebration have totally immersed themselves in a single brand environment. Second, Disney knows that any competition for people’s attention is counter productive to the environment it wants to create and provide. Disney “slams the door” on outside marketing influences because it can. It makes perfect sense. Why would you want anything interfering with your customer’s brand experience if you could control it? Since Disney can, they do. Subsequently, apart from the Disney brand, Celebration is a mostly brand-free culture.
What is instructive for The Church about Disney’s Celebration community from a commercial-free faith standpoint? It has nothing to do with branding a church or enveloping people in a 360-degree brand experience for one hour on a Sunday. Instead, we need to think of it in terms of a more radical and counter-cultural opportunity. If people, given the choice, would rather be free of the constant cacophony of selling and marketing, where can they go to find an even temporary refuge? Assuming most people won’t or can’t move to Celebration, The Church should be expressed in terms of local communities that are intentional in maintaining a commercial free context for people. This context, if I’m right about cultural trends, could become more compelling to those outside of the faith over time as the volume level of promotional communication in our consumer culture continues to rise to new heights.Disney’s approach also supports the argument that allowing outside brands and marketing dilutes the community experience they are trying to maintain. Transfer that logic to the local church, where we have an established culture of faith. The entrance of commercial media into this context, through disguised movie, music, publishing and product promotion, can only serve to dilute the relational aspects of church culture by orienting more of the communication in the community toward things, as opposed to persons—orienting people more toward consumption of products, as opposed to encounter with God and others. Since we have an opportunity to defend the sanctuary of our community from the siege of commercial media, why shouldn’t we do exactly what Disney has done? That’s what Disney knows.
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The gospel according to George Michael
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Just when you think an idea only exists as a hyperbolic and hypothetical absurdity for the sake of discussion, someone somewhere makes it a reality. That’s the thought that crossed my mind when I saw a very brief news article on CNN.com (picked up from AP) yesterday morning—which was booted up to the top of the news list yesterday due to the provocative headline, no doubt. See the story here on the CBS web with a clip from national TV. This post really won't make any sense without this pre-reading.My critique has nothing to do with the content of the purported sermon series. I could care less about what this pastor is preaching about with regard to sex. Maybe I’d agree. Maybe not. That’s not the point. My concern has everything to do with the advertising and marketing paradigm within The Church and the ideology of the commercial media. You can’t get away from this most tried and true fact of American advertising: sex sells—even if your “product” message is aimed at getting more butts in the pews of your church. But do the ends (pun intended) justify the means? And can we account for the true cost to The Church at large when local church marketing gets global attention?
Let’s consider how this story found its way to CNN.com and my attention.
The almost instant media notoriety is really all about issuing press releases and putting sex and church in the headline. The same is true for their blog and billboard advertising campaign promoting their 30-day sex challenge campaign.
Here’s the news release, blog link and inset picture for a look at their campaign’s billboard and web ad. Actually, there are two press releases on the transworldnews web site. You may also be interested in their the oh-so-hot YouTube trailer here. It’s no surprise at all that Relevant Church generated publicity. The story was picked up by more than 275 major and minor news outlets (globally) by February 20 at my count—TV, Print, Web, you name it. But what is the benefit of this media coverage? If the pastor is truly doing local ministry, why blast a press release (twice) to the international media? What can someone in China or Dubai do with such information?Getting media attention for this is like shooting fish in a barrel—for two reasons: First, anything linking sex with the moral compass the church represents is strange enough to get the attention of reporters interested in drawing readers. It rightly strikes the world outside of the church as odd. Second, most other churches have refrained from stooping this low to promote themselves in the past, making the novelty of the story even more attention-grabbing. In a journalistic environment driven by the marketability of stories and publications to advertisers, this story gets attention—just like Linsday Lohan’s nude pics in the New Yorker.
Here’s the more important question: what does this communicate?
Contrary to what this church pastor may think, this use of marketing and advertising takes a giant leap toward objectifying sexuality and, by association, the Christian faith. Simply put, cheap publicity stunts lead to a cheap regard for our message. In a world torn apart by pain and evil, this is what Relevant Church has to say: "Our religion says you should be having sex everyday and you will be happy. Join us this Sunday and we will tell you how" (not a real quote--just me interpreting their media). It’s the salacious bait-and-switch tactic between the prurient tease derived from broader cultural values and the James 1:2-4 reality of becoming a Jesus follower. Who wants to suffer and sacrifice when you can be having more sex?
James Twitchell (author of Shopping for God and fan of advertising in general) provides this important observation: “...when most people consume advertising, they know that they have to filter it because it's not going to be telling them the truth.”
So why can’t Relevant Church tell the truth?
Because sex sells better.
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Commodify me, oh Lord, part 6
Thursday, February 14, 2008
How the metaphor defines the messageI missed a recent Out of Ur post (Feb. 1) that opened up a debate about franchising churches. The latest trend in video venue churches is to open up franchise locations in other parts of the country. As I have commented on in the past, this is neo denominationalism in an age of non denominational mega-churches.
But the point of this post is not to critique the practice of video venues or mega-church franchises. (While I could do this, the article and the comment discussion at Out of Ur addresses this pretty thoroughly). My intention here is to demonstrate the advertising and marketing paradigm in the church and its prevailing economic metaphor. So let’s look at a specific quote from “franchise” pastor Eddie Johnson in the Out of Ur article:
"Just like that Chick-fil-A owner/operator. I'm here in Nashville to open up our franchise and run it right. I believe in my company and what they are trying to 'sell.'"So what is it about a metaphor like this that should concern us as followers of Jesus? Are these not just words to help more vividly illustrate a concept? Yes, they are. But they also are much more than that. Originators of metaphoric analysis and linguistic theorists, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, suggest that metaphors not only make ideas and concepts more vivid, but that they also structure one’s perceptions and understanding. Consider these excerpts from Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, published in 1980:
“…metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. … We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”
“…metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined. Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person's conceptual system.”
What this means is that our perceptions and understanding of faith, the church, God, fellow humans and evangelism are unavoidably impacted by the words we use to describe them to ourselves and each other.
“Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.”
If we take Lakoff and Johnson’s idea seriously, then we have to look at the prevailing metaphors we use in terms of how they structure and define our relationships with God, other believers and everyone else. My argument, in this instance, is that a metaphor derived from an advertising and marketing paradigm causes us to relate to people as consumers, our church as a product, God as a vendor, pastors as salespeople, our worship as consumption, etc. If we speak in commercial language, then we will relate to others accordingly. The metaphors we use co-create our culture.
I think most believers would agree that there is (or should be) a qualitative difference between a quid pro quo business relationship based on economic gain, and the Kingdom relationships described in so many passages of the New Testament, such as 1 John 3:16-18, based on selfless and sacrificial love. (“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for one another. If any one of you has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in you? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.” TNIV)
In the comments section of the Out of Ur post, pastor Eddie Johnson invites readers to his blog where he attempts to defend his Chick-fil-A franchise “analogy” and then takes it a few steps further (his post was published on a new church blog as well). Here are a few excerpts from his post. Look for the metaphors and consider the relational issues that could result:
"...we as a church need to keep open and aggressive in looking for new, exciting and innovative methods to improve our environments and streamline our processes.
Our organization is also led by a humble, visionary leader who seeks to redefine his industry. Chick-fil-a has Truett Cathy. North Point has Andy Stanley."
Is the Kingdom an industry?
"Excellence and attention to customer service will be our catalyst for getting people to come visit us again and again and again. Eventually they will 'buy in' with us. And hopefully, they will bring a friend the next time they come."
Do people buy a church, or buy a conversion?
"Our mission is simple. It is to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ. We seek to do it by creating helpful, engaging and irresistible environments that help people take that 'next step' towards a small group. If that 'next step' isn’t an easy, obvious and strategic step…then we don’t take it. Meaning, our franchise/church is designed to sell 'chicken' (life change) and the best way we think we can do that is by getting you into a small group."
This last one shows the contrast at its greatest. If the mission is drawing people to a relationship, then a metaphor of selling is its antithesis.
Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to eat a chicken filet sandwich without thinking about this. And that’s not a good thing.
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Commodify me, oh Lord, part 5
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
The metaphor is the messageA late-modern paraphrase of Mark 4:26-29: This is what the kingdom of God is like: A church scatters an advertisement across various media. Night and day, whether the church sleeps or wakes, the ad spreads and grows, though they do not know how. All by itself the ad produces interest—first a web site visit, then a phone call, then the full-fledge visit to a weekend worship experience. As soon as a seeker chooses to buy in to a regular weekend service, the church adds them to the headcount and registers a “conversion,” because the harvest has come.
Take a moment to consider whether the above paraphrase disturbs you (and you may want to compare it to the original translation). If it doesn’t bother you, then you may be very comfortable with the prevailing metaphor of evangelism and church growth. But if you are like me, it makes you feel uncomfortable, to say the least. In Mark’s account, Jesus was using a simile (a type of metaphor) to liken the kingdom of God to a farmer casting seeds and reaping a harvest (to give a really simple description). So what happens to the meaning when you exchange one metaphor with another as I have done?In truth, Jesus used many metaphors in his teaching ministry. They are powerful tools to share meaning. Economic and marketplace metaphors were even used by Jesus—and were very appropriate given the culture. I don't believe, however, that he ever characterized a life of following him in terms of a product.
The issue in today’s postmodern culture is whether certain metaphors serve our message well or ill. I would argue that there’s a major difference between being relevant to the culture (by observing and understanding the ideas and trends that are active in society), and adopting the prevailing cultural metaphor to mediate your message to reach an audience.
If my “paraphrase” of Mark doesn’t disturb you, consider these examples from various articles I’ve come across in doing research:
“Nearly every pastor is a salesman or a marketer of one kind or another because ... we have a philosophy to sell. The best marketers and best salesmen will have more converts, will have more people, will take in more money.... Evangelicals are marketers because they’re really passionate about their product.”
“Marketing and the church, they go hand in hand [because] we're called to bring our message to a community.”
“It is marketing. I don't try to talk my way around that. Every organization today is having to market because there are thousands of messages bombarding the people…. we're all having to compete for a diminishing amount of discretionary time.”“There is a new sense of awareness that marketing can be used effectively with the Christian message. You have a product in terms of the person of Jesus Christ and the relevancy of what he represents and the difference he can make in a human life.”
That last line is chilling. The truth is we don’t have a product in “the person of Jesus Christ.” What we find “in” Jesus is a Kingdom. What we carry is a message about our life “in” Jesus. It’s our choice of metaphors that correlates this message with an objectified product in the marketplace. It is the difference between ‘having’ and ‘being,’
If we want to inhibit the impact of the advertising and marketing paradigm on our message meaning, we must begin by choosing a better metaphor to describe our mission. I think we have an excellent one in a King and a Kingdom.
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Commodify me, oh Lord, part 4
Monday, February 04, 2008
Marketing: zeitgeist of the late-modern* ChurchWhat is clear from my own experience and research into church planting and megachurch models is the widespread adoption of an advertising and marketing paradigm. In short, success for a church is predicated on the attractional capabilities you bring to the crowded marketplace for consumer attention. Church leadership models have been transformed to mirror business structures, and the economic language of marketing has been adopted in the church right along with it. Over the past half century, this amounts to a paradigm shift in church ministry that has profoundly impacted the Church, leading to a rearrangement of congregations where larger churches with economic resources and compelling marketing have tended to get larger, and smaller churches have tended to get smaller or phase out. It has been zero sum.
It is the advertising and marketing paradigm of evangelism that makes the entry of other commercial media into the sacred frame of the church possible—even attractive to pastors and church leaders. Taken together, these contribute to the critical theological issue behind marketing and advertising messages invading the church. Advertising has its own ideology, whether it be used to do outreach, or allowed into the church context in order to underwrite ministry. Sut Jhally, communication and media professor from the University of Mass., provides a brief explanation:
“[Advertising] provides a particular vision of the world—a particular mode of self validation that is integrally connected with what one has rather than what one is—a distinction often referred to as one between ‘having’ and ‘being,’ with the latter now being defined through the former.”- Sut Jhally
An advertising and marketing paradigm of evangelism and theology internalizes an exchange mentality in both the evangelist and the target—one where salvation can be “obtained.” It is made into a transaction. Not one where people are purchasing an object with money but, rather, one where their payment is in the form of their conscious attention. Their regard toward God and their conversion is objectified nonetheless. Christianity is possessed—something one “has” rather than what one “is.” In this way, faith is mediated through the advertising and marketing paradigm.
I’ve often heard the advertising and marketing paradigm vigorously defended by some pastors from the perspective of evangelism and outreach to the lost. Most recently, it turned up in an article from the Christian Science Monitor, “Churches seeking marketing-savvy breed of pastors,” quoting one marketer-turned pastor “with a heart for marketing”:
“It’s the medium of marketing that’s used to get a message across [in today’s culture], whether it’s an election or you’re trying to sell a product. But in this case, we’re just trying to hear the hope of a new life that is eternal.”
But what is at issue is the ideology of marketing and advertising in the culture we live in, and how it acts upon the messages it carries because of that ideology. The “medium of marketing” is not a values-neutral conduit in this culture—it’s much more than a dumb pipe, to borrow a term from the technology world. Again, Jhally succinctly nails this point:
“[Advertising] constantly propels us toward things as a means of satisfaction.”
- Sut Jhally
Here we find that the scripture has much to say that should move us away from an economic metaphor of salvation and the overall advertising and marketing paradigm. Following Jesus is about finding our identities, and life, “in” Him (John 15, and all over the NT). We are described as His children (Matthew 5, and all over the NT). The church is described as His bride (Matthew 25, and several other places in the NT). None of these identities are objects that we can “have.” They are ways of being that can only occur “in” Him.
How can we evangelize people through mediated messages that objectify them and the Kingdom without recognizing that the result will be groups of people conditioned to view their faith and their formation as something they must obtain and consume? If anything, the results from the much discussed Reveal Study (from Willow Creek) confirm as much. Of course, if you want to see this study in full, they would like to sell it to you. The paradigm runs deep, indeed.
*Note: I use the term “late modern” concerning the advertising and marketing paradigm because I feel it more accurately describes contemporary culture with specific regard to consumerism and mediated consciousness. This does not mean that I reject the overall notion of postmodernity in terms of the other elements of the socio-cultural shift that it attempts to define.
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Commodify me, oh Lord, part 3
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Why sanctuary?When it comes to exploring how commercial media is entering the sacred frame of the church, the principle concern is the nature of our conscious attention. As followers of Jesus we should recognize that to what and how we pay attention shapes us (cited below). John 15 captures this life in the body as abiding “in” Jesus. When we gather together, in whatever expression we manifest, as the Church, we are attending to Jesus and to each other as vine and branches. Divided attentions lead to stunted growth, slow death.
…in the image culture, the crisis of the human spirit is the crisis of knowing what things to pay attention to. In the United States alone, there are thousands of well-paid persons whose constant preoccupation is to orchestrate the attention of the populace. In clever and subtle ways, these voices can be heard whispering constantly, "Pay attention to this"; "Look, pay attention here"; "No! This other matter is the one most deserving your attention." In the face of such pressure-for-attention, religious persons are especially challenged, because religion itself is a way of paying attention to matters not fully perceptible, which is to say that religious attention is a specially heightened, focused attention. The ultimate attention, from a religious standpoint, is to the presence of God. Religious people recognize, perhaps instinctively, that what we pay attention to and how we pay attention is what shapes our hearts.
- Michael Warren, author and professor - St. John's University, New York
As The Church, if we cede the attentions of the body to the objectifying consumption of commercial media messages, we lessen the degree to which we can abide in the transformative life of the vine. Our very being is diminished.
Rather than the pointless “fight fire with fire” approach of co-opting commercial media and marketing practices to achieve cultural relevance and attract consumers to our "services," I suggest we call out the spiritually hungry to the life of abiding in Christ alone—in a community that is intentionally kept free from the divided attentions that commercial media invite.
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Join the conspiracy
Saturday, December 08, 2007
This is seriously a great idea (check out the linked page). As the Web site defines it, “Advent Conspiracy is an international movement restoring the scandal of Christmas by worshipping Jesus through compassion, not consumption.”
One of my suspicions is that churches tend to address consumerism as an individual spiritual malady, without owning up the fact that it is a systemic problem in The Church in the U.S. To put it another way, they blame the audience, and think that a good admonition to curb conspicuous consumption now and then will put good Christians on the path to self sacrificial love and spiritual enlightenment. But many fail to recognize that what you convert them with, you also convert them to.
That’s why addressing how churches worship is a key progression in thinking that I’m excited about.
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Commodify me, oh Lord, part 2
Saturday, December 01, 2007
SanctuaryFasten your seatbelts, this is going to be a long one folks. See part one for the set up. Also check out this lecture as a good primer. It's long and requires Real Media--no YouTube version is out yet.
According to the Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2006-2010 issued by global accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, worldwide advertising spending was $385 billion in 2006. The accounting firm’s report projected worldwide advertisement spending to exceed half-a-trillion dollars by 2010.
What does that equate to per person, per advertising message today? Depending on whose research you believe, it’s something like 300 to 3,000 advertising messages per day. At either end of the extreme, that’s a lot.
It boggles the mind to think that for every person on the planet, a total of $64 per year is spent just to advertise to them. But if you get more creative (and realistic) about the ad spend, its likely that at least 1/3 of that spend is targeted at the U.S. Doing the simple math (which is all I am competent to do), that works out to $426 of ad spend per citizen based on 300 million people. If that does increase as PWC predicts, this rises to $550.
In terms of my own experience, I often compare the commercial onslaught of today’s culture with my formative years in the 70s. From this vantage point, the ramp up and expansion of commercial messages is staggering—infiltrating nearly every public space and media form in our culture. People’s homes, schools, recreation, political and social frames have become venues for commercial messages.
The impetus for my project is too look at how these messages of commercialization are entering the sacred frame of our church communities, and evaluate specific commercial media that are targeting the church audience: movies, music, books and consumer products
Far from advocating dropping out of the capitalist system we are a part of, I’m looking toward an emerging opportunity for communities of faith: Embracing the alien culture of the Kingdom of God as communities that offer people sanctuary from commercial media, rather than deepening the syncretism with commercial enterprise, and cooption of entertainment media to achieve cultural relevance in our mission.
Why do I think this is a worthy objective? I’ll let media theorist Dallas Smythe chime in:
The enormous mass of advertisements and other mass media content which bombards the individual in the advanced capitalist state from all the mass media has the systemic effect of a barrage of noise which effectively exhausts the time and energies of the population. This is a powerful deterrent to consideration of the possibilities of alternative systems of social relationships.
Given the weariness of “being sold to” and “selling” that some in American consumer culture may be experiencing, my theory is that there is a growing opportunity for The Church to play a brave new role in America (or return to an old role, perhaps). As a countercultural movement, we can offer real sanctuary from commercialization and commodification in our communities of faith. Restated in the terms of Smythe, The Church can provide a sanctuary for people to rest from the constant, incessant “work” of the commercial audience. Our attraction and relevance to new generations of people may now hinge on this. Sadly, most of the American Church has become so enamored with the power of consumer marketing, that commercial media forms have become unchallenged and essential ingredients in “success.” The trouble is that, by most measures (Barna, Pew, etc.), these approaches haven’t made a dent in terms of adding souls to The Kingdom.
Let me take a moment to delineate where I think the Church lost site of its role regarding commercial media and communication:
There are two basic critical perspectives on media: Content and context. Most often the church has offered its moral critique on media content, while at the same time trying to harness the communicative power of the context.
I’m not concerned with content criticism with this project. It’s not a question of avoiding certain media content to keep pure or separate from a moral standpoint. While I don’t discount the need to consider content on moral grounds, there is a deeper moral question at stake with context.
I’ve had a couple of significant epiphanies in my research over the past few weeks. One of these has to do with the intersection of consumerism with theology and ecclesiology. As some recent books are now exploring (Paul Metzger), both The Church and the Gospel message are being commodified quite readily in American culture through the marketing and branding of churches, evangelism via marketing tactics, and the transformation of our messages into entertainment and self-help forms, etc. What hasn’t been discussed as much is what the effects are—why this is a truly problem. Most people don’t think there is a problem, although some in emergent circles do recognize the issue. This is where communication research and theory can add to the conversation.
In short, both The Church and The Word (both living entities, I would argue) risk being objectified when subject to or coupled with commercial communication approaches. This objectification, or “fetishization” as it is referred to by media theorists such as Sut Jhally, is what creates identity and meaning for consumers. The commodification of sacred messages, which are placed at the mercy of a consumer marketplace when contextualized as commercial media, become elements in a transaction, which are consumed (not in the sense of spiritual nourishment, but as objects to satiate people’s needs and desires—needs and desires that have been engineered by commercial media forms from birth. In that sense, the objects are emptied of their intrinsic meanings and given new meanings by the commercialization and consumption process.
Seen through a spiritual lens, the objectified Word no longer gives and sustains life eternal and sacred, but only perpetuates life temporal and secular.
Oh yes. There will be a part 3.
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Hippies & Pomos: Thinking on Christian community a generation apart
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
My pal David had sent me a link a while back about the remastering and re-release of the original Phil Keaggy tour de force, The Master and The Musician from 1977. This wonderful landmark in instrumental music is available here. Do yourself a favor and get a copy.
In the course of looking over his web site, I ran across a detailed history of the project, which included a fair amount of detail about the Christian community Keaggy was a part of in the early 70s leading up to and shaping the project (Love Inn, which is now represented by this very modest church web site).While I don’t have a thoroughly researched hypothesis on this, I can recall several other Christian communities that produced Christian artists and sounded like similarly structured communities (Servant, Resurrection Band, to name a couple others I'm aware of). It seems this was a pretty common alternative expression of the church in that era—consistent with aspects of the counter-culture that the Jesus People movement reflected.
From reading Keaggy’s commentary I get the feeling that such an experience didn’t end well for him. What I’m wondering outloud is what is different today about how Christians view community, simple church, house churches, etc., versus the experience of those who lived in these 70s-era Christian communities or communes. (A offshoot question could be how these respective generations view music ministry.) I can see an earnest attempt to reclaim a truer New Testament expression of the church in both eras.
My snap judgment is that there was probably a little too much unhealthy paternalism and legalism wrapped up in the community approach of the 70s, and perhaps a little too much individualism in today’s mindset. Is this just a pendulum swinging past the ideal? I really have no business writing about this, but I do tend to get sidetracked. I find the Christian Hippie scene of the 70s fascinating.
Other speculation?
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Vinyl Christianity
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
I love a good metaphor. This one struck me while reading a piece in Wired on the resurgence of vinyl media for music
When we allow the pattern of Christ to be reproduced in the grooves of our being, we can more fully express the depth of His love and His Kingdom. The CD and its MP3 offspring are symbolic of modernity’s promise. All of the digital information—the data to reproduce the Kingdom is encoded exactly on the medium, but somehow the warmth and presence suffers when it is played back. All of the information about Jesus and His radical, beautiful, scandalous love for us can be encoded in our minds, but until we “put on love”—live in it and act in it—we’re just a cold, digital facsimile.I’m probably recycling a metaphor someone else already thought of, but I thought it was a cool way to think about it.
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Getting more focused
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Thoughts on thesis, part 7Posts in a series of commentaries on my thesis project for the Master of Arts in Communication.
I haven’t posted about my thesis in a while, so here is a summary proposal of what it looks like now. I will be meeting with my advisor, and this will likely get curtailed a bit—but I wanted to map out the possibilities on all the ground it could cover.
But first, a fun fact from my research: Rocky punches out his message to churches. No commentary—just read the article and visit the web site. Then think some more about audience commodification (see the last post).Personally, I’m waiting for the Saw IV evangelism kit to come out.
Okay, here is my project outline so far:
Overall the project idea is to investigate how The Church is becoming a commodified audience for commercial media: Movies, Music, Books and consumer products. The project would seek create a program of media literacy for churches specific to audience commodification, as well as advocate churches adopting a posture of resistance to commercialization within the church community.
While this is not an outline of the project/thesis per se, it is helpful to break this down into all of the (potential) parts. Some of these may be omitted or combined in the final written paper.
Part 1: The Commercialized Church, and the Commodified Body of Christ. This portion of the project paper would cite examples of churches that are in some kind of partnership with commercial enterprise, whereby the community becomes a target market for both spiritual goods, but consumer goods at the same time (most specifically commercial media: movies, books, music and consumer products). These could be handled like case studies in a journalistic fashion using personal interviews, published articles, etc. to provide examples in the different areas of commercial media.
Part 2: Review of literature A - Works critical of the commercialization of the Church. There are several works in my initial prospectus that are critical of the commercialization of the church. These would be drawn upon for this portion.
Part 3: Review of literature B - Communication theory related to audience commodification through advertising. This would draw upon Sut Jhally, Dallas Smythe, and other communication theorists. Relevant Marxist and postmodern criticism could be incorporated, as well as audience-centered mass communication theorists.
Part 4: Review of literature C - Explore works of theory and research related to communication ethics, advertising ethics and media literacy approaches.
Part 5: Biblical and Theological reflection on the cross purposes of the kingdom of God and the kingdom of capitalism. This is where we exegete the scripture relevant to the mission of the church, the nature of the kingdom and places where scripture--and Christ--make references to money, capitalism, marketplace, trade, economics, etc.
In all, the complete review of literature and the theological portion would provide a basis for part 6 and 7
Part 6: A theoretical and theological basis for resisting the commercialization and commodification of the church. Formal covenant commitments for church leaders to create, preserve and expand communities of faith as “sanctuaries from commercialization and commodification.”
Part 7: A proposed group study curriculum for commercial media awareness, literacy and ethics for church leadership and laity. This would focus on commercial entertainment media and product marketing.
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Commodify me, oh Lord, part 1
Friday, October 26, 2007
When giving my elevator speech on my thesis topic, I’m sure to get this question: What do you mean when you say audience commodification? So, I thought I’d post about it to answer the question and thereby help me get my thoughts together in cogent form. After all, from a communication theory standpoint, this is the crux of my project.The most common way this has been understood is by considering the Television audience. Television is an entertainment medium that is driven (largely) by commercials. Whether it be 30 second spots, product placement or infomercials, the audience is a product that content creators (TV networks) sell to product marketers. The value of this audience is measured by TV ratings and priced by what the market will bear. So, as a monitored and measured audience sitting in front of the boob tube for an average number of hours each day, we are transformed into a commodity sold in an economic transaction. We are the end product that networks sell.
This idea translates to other mediums. Newspapers and magazines commodify their readers for advertisers, as well. As does radio with music.
As an avowed capitalist, audience commodification isn’t necessarily a moral evil. The audience gets an entertainment product in exchange. In a consumer society, this has been how media has functioned successfully and evolved in the past 50 years—farther back if you consider radio and print media. Its wild success in growing American consumerism is why we’re exposed to more than 3,000 advertising messages a day.But my focus is not on audiences in a personal entertainment context, but on participants in a religious context. Specifically, I’m investigating how this process of commodification has shifted (or expanded) from living rooms to churches in the past few years, as commercial entertainment media has sought to get their messages into the Christian context by facilitating sermons, music and outreach. It seems the film industry in particular has fed us the notion that current movie tie-ins are the table stakes for cultural relevance in church ministry.
Unlike evaluating audience commodification purely on economic grounds, the work screaming to be done (in my opinion) is to look at this phenomenon from a Kingdom perspective. The conflict of interest is found at the crossroads of commercial media interests and the mission of the church. This is a story of two kingdoms with competing goals.
Next, in part 2, the Quasimodo factor….
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Stealing music from Jesus
Friday, October 12, 2007
The thought occurred to me after reading an excellent feature in BusinessWeek by Justin Bachman that the woes of the music industry haven’t necessarily been visited on the genre of Christian worship music.
With Radiohead’s name-your-price direct release of their new record, along with a landmark $200,000+ legal judgment against a low income, single mom for stealing music last week (nice PR move, RIAA), the recording industry has been abuzz over the digital shift.“Digital is the new paradigm. Who needs a record label to handle marketing and public relations anymore? Musicians can just set up a MySpace page and talk directly with their fans. Record labels used to help court radio stations, too, to get music on the air. Now you can zip MP3 copies of your first single via e-mail to anyone in the world.”
So what’s different about Christian music? Well, mostly that the lion share of the Christian music business has gravitated to a worship music orientation. In this genre, stealing has different implications. Along with getting sued by the RIAA, there’s the Ten Commandments, of course, and the ongoing guilt of worshipping with stolen art.
Of course, I have no stats on this, so I am just making a broad supposition. But let’s grant this assumption for the moment: most Christians don’t steal their worship music.
This would leave the entire burgeoning genre, which generates a good deal of revenue for the big four record labels, as the sole survivor of the old label paradigm. (How long did we suffer paying $18 for CDs at Christian bookstores when secular music was competing for dwindling market share at Target, Best Buy and Walmart at around $12.)Digital music changed all that. But Christian worship music, because of the ethical standards of its audience, currently stands as an anachronism in the music business. Here are my thoughts about how this works, and they way it may change:
I’ve written about this a little in the past, but I’ll cover some of my assumptions again to set up my hypothesis. Today, CCLI creates a de facto ratings and revenue system in worship music, akin to radio airplay. This keeps the royalty engine flowing for record labels every weekend—something radio, with its limited commercial reach in Christian music, could never accomplish consistently.
There are a few reasons why CCLI can create a conflict of interest for the church, but let’s focus on how digital music and participatory technologies could disrupt this tidy arrangement, and subsequently end major label dominance over the worship music market. In other words, the labels may see Worship music as a boon—and drive even more marketing resources to squeeze more commercial revenue from the old model. But they should be looking ahead to what’s happening in The Church. The party won’t last.If we take new church models seriously at all (House, Simple, Cell, New Monastic, Community, etc.), you have to think about more and more worship music moving into smaller and smaller contexts. That means informal small groups playing worship tunes with no CCLI reporting and, therefore, no revenue drivers (is this stealing?). Add to this the movement to create and share original music in these church communities, and you can see where this is headed.
Connect these trends to digital sharing and creation of new music across small church communities online, and you have even more music being used and created off the label grid. This can’t be music to label executives’ ears. It works against the very things the big labels are good at—large scale distribution, promotion and mass royalty generation.
While the megachurch movement has driven the old label model to new heights in worship music, the micro church slowly chips away at the foundation. The strongest market demographic for worship music is, to a large extent, the same people at the forefront of re-imagining the church—and worship music along with it.
It’s clear from the BusinessWeek article that the labels are looking for new and innovative ways for their marketing engine to make the music business profitable again. They should not be under the delusion that their Christian worship music "industry" will forever be a mighty fortress of steady revenue in the digital, participatory technology age. Especially if more and more people opt out of the system.
Of course, I think that’s a good thing. Your mileage may vary.
Let me know what you think.
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Why I quit the worship team part 2
Saturday, September 29, 2007
We’ve been going through a four-part series on worship at our church that has really helped re-engage and reorient me on what worship is, corporately and individually. It’s been incredibly refreshing and liberating for me, as a refugee from the worship industry (highlight in the video I linked to a couple weeks ago). I’ve posted a bit about this before—about how my participation in the machinery of church worship music (where musical performance is treated as consumable product and marketing evangelism tool) led to my thorough disillusionment with it. As I left the mega-church consumer mentality outright, I also dropped out of “doing” worship music formally (as a church musician) and, instead, chose to redefine what worship is and means—its role in the life of a Christ follower and as part of His church. I was burnt out on worship, true. But I also needed to strip off what I used to believe about it so that I could rediscover it authentically for myself. I’m still in that process today.What the recent teaching series has solidified for me the most has been two powerful principles. One is the spiritual warfare element of all acts of worship (verbal, physical, musical, service, giving, etc.). This reaches back into my Pentecostal roots, but has been given a refreshing theological currency in my recent learning. Two is the importance of diversity in worship expression, and the triumph of creative beauty in all expressions of worship over consumerist and individualistic style preferences. I have learned to embrace “the other” in the body of Christ through sharing in their unique and creative ways of worshipping.
Instead of indulging my musical taste and aesthetic preferences, I have traveled farther down the road of true worship. Subsequently, I don’t “consume” worship music like I do music entertainment. I don’t collect it. I don’t keep it on my iPod. I’m not saying that doing that is bad—just that I don’t want to do that right now. It bothers me to treat it like a product. Instead, I am learning to worship better and more often.
All this is to set up a few select quotes and a link to a lengthy article on this topic published on the Allelon site, written by Sally Morgenthaller, author of the book, Worship Evangelism. Her journey through the evangelical church worship landscape over the past two decades captures some of my issues with worship music in the church today.
Morganthaller recounts a shift in her perspective that began when she met with a colleague and he mentioned issues he had with her book. He explained that churches had produced what he called a "worship-driven subculture” constituting “a sizeable part of the contemporary church that had just been waiting for an excuse not to do the hard work of real outreach. An excuse not to get their hands dirty.”
As Morgenthaller visited more churches, she started to understand his concerns: “Too many times, I came away with an unnamed, uneasy feeling. Something was not quite right. The worship felt disconnected from real life. Then there were the services when the pathology my friend talked about came right over the platform and hit me in the face. It was unabashed self-absorption, a worship culture that screamed, ‘It's all about us’ so loudly that I wondered how any visitor could stand to endure the rest of the hour.”“By 2002 a few pastors of praise and worship churches began admitting to me that they weren't making much of a dent in the surrounding non-Christian population, even though their services were packed and they were known for the best worship production in town. …when I visited their congregations, it wasn't hard to see that the biggest barrier to reaching the unchurched had little to do with worship technique or style. It had to do with isolation and the faux-worship that isolation inevitably creates.”
“In 2001 a worship-driven congregation in my area finally did a survey as to who they were really reaching, and they were shocked. They'd thought their congregation was at least 50 percent unchurched. The real number was 3 percent.”
Read the whole thing here.
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Jesus on the D list
Friday, September 21, 2007
[UPDATED 9-21-07] So, Kathy Griffin wins an Emmy and promptly blasphemes the name of Jesus on national television. No surprise there.
What continues to amaze me is the extent some within the church will go to proclaim judgment over the actions of those outside of the faith—as if Jesus was a helpless kid that needed a big brother to stick up for him. Please.That’s what The Miracle Theater Christian drama troupe of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee felt the need to do on Monday, spending $90,440 to run a full page national advert in USA Today to denounce the D-list comic-turned-reality-show star. Read about it here.
Spending $90,440 dollars to make a point is just beyond reason. They could have spent $440 to issue a national press release on the newswires with the same exact statement. No one would have paid attention, true, but they would have had more than $90,000 to spend on real ministry, instead of the Branson-style musical fare they specialize in. Maybe they could have used it to shelter several homeless people, or fund a missionary family for a few years. Miracle Theater’s so-called family values need a serious dose of Kingdom perspective.This is pharisaical judgmentalism run amok—and more mud on the face of the church. In the end, it’s just more material for comics like Griffin to skewer the church with. Of course, the national press includes the amount spent on the advert. That’s in paragraph two of the story.
As cynical as this may sound, the $90,440 is probably the best advertising money this “entertainment ministry” could ever spend. Sadly, this is a publicity stunt, pure and simple. The advert even looks more like an ad for their show. I can imagine that they’ll have much more market awareness now for their entertainment "ministry" among like-minded churches. It's not hard to think that they may have made a deal Griffin to get first dibs on denouncing her. (You have to watch the video on their website. They market exclusively to the church).
I’m not disturbed or surprised by non Christian behavior. What drives me crazy is the amount some Christians are willing to spend to publicize their retaliatory righteous judgment. Someone show me an example of Jesus ever doing this? Of course, I'm no longer surprised when this self-righteous behavior dovetails with the business objectives of "Christian Entertainers." More fodder for my thesis research.
As for Jesus on the D list, He’s been hanging out there all along. He can take the verbal punches just fine. He’s heard much worse, thank God.
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Damascus road vs. any road
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Joe, from my MA Communication cohort, gave me permission to post this (and the portion below penned by his Wife). It has to do with youth that grow up in the church, and what we as adults, teachers, pastors, youth leaders, etc. tell them about their life "calling" in Christ.
I think what we refer to as God's "calling" is, in reality, as individual and unique as people are. Some will spend their lives following Jesus by making decisions that correspond with their love for Him and their love for people. They'll look at their talents and dreams, and then look for a way to follow Jesus using the resources God gave or grew within them. In addition, there is plenty written in the scriptures about life in Christ to constitute enough divine "calling" for several lifetimes. God's calling need not knock someone down on a Damascus road.
Others (enter the Biblical giants like Moses, Paul, etc.) will have God directly and visibly intervene in their "calling" with audible voices, burning bushes, etc. I believe in a God that also does this at times, but I think His reasons have more to do with individuals and His specific purposes. I don't think it's normative.
The trouble is that the standard approach of many well-meaning youth ministers and adults pushes youth away from embracing the former to seek the latter, leaving many in a holding pattern that robs them of their calling in the end. Many kids wait for a word on what to do--literally stuck, while obvious open doors are left unentered because they don't have the certainty of spiritual experience that constitutes a calling. Sadly, some churches create situations that try to manufacture an emotional experience of calling.
Give this real-life example a read, and let me know what you think. As a parent, I'm starting to think about these issues concerning my children more and more. And will what I teach them at home line up with what they are told at church?
TSAWWT Bookmarks:We have a calling problem in the church. We tell our young people to find out what God is calling them to be, which is to find out what God is "calling" them to do. This is a great disservice to our kids. They are waiting for lightning to strike and the voice to call from heaven…"THIS IS MY BELOVED…" We are convinced and we convince our kids that they dare not follow their dreams and desires since their dreams and desires probably don't correspond with "God's will." Well, I say, "KNOCK IT OFF!" Here's why:
I have a beautiful sixteen year old daughter who has been given a tremendous singing voice and a desire to build meaningful friendships. Her capacity to understand literature, speak foreign languages, and excel in all she does is far beyond the abilities of her parents. Yet, she trembles in fear because she doesn't know what she is "called" to do. What if she just did what she enjoys? She could take classes that excite and challenge her. She could work as a teacher or a writer or even a model. Her passion for Christ would shine through in her work and she would be an effective minister. Yet we insist she find her "calling." If you ask me, she is already fulfilling her calling. She loves God and loves people and seeks to be HIS in the world in which He has placed HER.
She expressed to me her fears of never finding her calling, much as her dad has never found his. I used his situation as an illustration for her. I explained how many well-intentioned preachers and teachers had encouraged her dad to "feel called." He was not passionate about pastoral ministry but one day experienced an emotional "call to ministry." What her dad was excited about was writing and sports. I wondered out loud what would have happened if he had been encouraged to follow what he enjoyed and then let life take him where it took him.
She expressed a desire to know her direction. I told her to use the freedom she has been given in Christ and explore what might open up before her.
Who says we must be called? Can't a pastor be a pastor because he loves people? Does he have a higher calling than a road crew worker? Isn't our calling to be close to Christ and follow him with all our hearts, no matter what we do?
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Why I quit the worship team
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Okay, so that was a couple years ago now--not at the church I go to now. But this sums up why I just couldn't do it anymore. Sorry. I had to find another way.Brian McClaren on the Worship music industry and how it is affecting the church.
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Post and response on LC.tv
Friday, August 31, 2007
Someone new commented on my last post about LifeChurch.tv in Second Life. The poster made a really good point that I am responding to at length in this post, instead of cramming it all into a comment post. So, here's his post and my response. I get a little long-winded, which I apologize for. There are several things that have entered my thinking recently and caused me to keep writing. Certain aspects of my most recent class have been intriguing.The Comment: The amazing thing is, though, LifeChurch has seen dozens of salvations of Second Life that ARE real and have been followed up in Real Life. So I agree that missionaries should not jump on some kind of bandwagon, but at the same time churches and people that have the resources should definitely meet people where they are, even if it means creating an avatar to do so.
The Response (which is more like a discussion): It's good to hear that the SL effort is being fruitful on the offline world for LC.tv. That’s reason for praise and celebration, indeed. I do still think we can raise and discuss questions about LC.tv’s approach. Here’s my very lengthy elaboration on why I think this:
My contention is that building a virtual megachurch may not be the way to go in SL--that it may undermine real relationships in the long run because of the very underlying idea that makes SL successful as a social network. That's why I think other ideas like the confessional may be valid approaches to explore (although I have no research to back that up—obviously much more research is needed). There isn’t exactly a book on evangelism or missiology for this medium.
The idea about masks is at the crux of this. This isn't really a question about whether LC.tv is doing something wrong--but rather, what is the best evangelistic approach to take given the context of masked people within what I would consider a new type of culture? Many media ministries can claim some effectiveness--and a measure of fruit. But that doesn't mean the end always justifies the means. Televangelism is a pretty good example of this, in my opinion. Looking at hard, ethical questions of missiology and cross-cultural communication in a web 2.0 world is a valid pursuit. I'm also advocating exploring approaches that seek to understand the epistemological and spiritual reality of a given medium and culture (in this case, the virtual reality world of SL), and respond accordingly.The Wired article I cited points out an important finding--that commercial brand marketers are largely failing in SL. If we don't come to understand why this is the case, I think more marketing-oriented evangelism approaches may share the same fate. Now, I'm not fan of commercial marketing to advance evangelism--I'll be clear on this--I'm very biased. And, I want to admit to my bias that I’m not a fan of LC.tv’s offline ministry model. I’ll have to risk that this admission might cause some people to write me off. Nonetheless, on this matter, the Wired article underscores the need to count the cost of how we evangelize. Clearly, Paul's hyperbolic charge to "become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some." [1 Corinthians 9:22 TNIV] shouldn't be used as an excuse to justify anything and everything with no regard for a medium’s effects on the message. That very passage, in fact, concerns embracing differences in religious culture and power structures.
Here’s another question to consider: why “brand” the effort in SL with LC.tv? If Christianity is known for disunity and hypocrisy in the real world by it’s various “branded” identities, why not enter SL without all those labels? It would seem like an opportunity to, perhaps, lose that baggage. What about the evangelistic effort requires LC.tv as and identifier? This connects back to the Wired article. Commercial brands may not work in SL. The level of mistrust toward brand marketing may be much higher. People may assume we have something to sell them. Branding may put the Gospel in this same commercial context, and be more repellant than attractive. The Church at large needs to consider this possible outcome. We can’t just think about who is converted (praise God for these), but we have to think about those we may alienate. Because I’m not talking about spiritual resistance to the Gospel (which I believe does exist). I’m talking about resistance to unbiblical elements of church culture we may bring with us online. (When I say unbiblical, I don’t mean wrong—I only mean that these cultural elements aren’t rooted in the bible or Christ, they’re just cultural.) SL has its own unique culture(s), and have we considered the cross-cultural implications of our communication in that medium? Clearly the commercial marketers highlighted in the Wired article have not.
So, should LC.tv close up shop in SL? No way, but neither should we avoid a discussion of the missiological questions that LC.tv in SL raises. So far, I’ve not read of these issues being thoroughly discussed in the blogosphere—but I must admit, I haven’t done a thorough search for it. So, as a student of communication, these posts are my effort to get this conversation into the foreground—moving beyond the easy publicity of being the first megachurch in SL. Plus, we can credit LC.tv for getting the whole idea of how to approach this type of evangelism on the table in the church.
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Masks and web 2.0
Saturday, August 18, 2007
My post about Lifechurch.tv’s mission endeavor to Second Life led me back to the ideas presented in TrueFaced, by Thrall, McNicol & Lynch. This led to a few more thoughts and questions to mull over:Second Life is all about living out an alternative you in an alternative world. Essentially, all Second Lifer’s don masks.
Yet masks undermine healthy relationships with God and each other. In fact, we don’t really need Second Life to help us wear masks. We’ve been doing it since Eden:
“Where are you?” said God. “I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself,” replied Adam. [Genesis 3:9-10, my translation]
Can we be true with ourselves and others in a world that trades on Adam's mask? Is it even possible to take off the mask I am wearing in the real world through interactions in Second Life’s alternate reality?While I think it’s theoretically possible for someone to be more open, honest and true to themselves in Second Life (people may be more free to speak their minds, for example, or express their true feelings), I can’t get past the idea that any such perceived freedom requires masked anonymity to be realized.
The question is, can we reach those who are masked by wearing masks ourselves? Is participation an effective witness or an effective barrier to advancing the kingdom?
Here’s the portion of TrueFaced that struck me the most:
“It is very expensive to wear a mask. For one thing, no one—not even those I love—ever gets to see my face. … Worse yet, I never experience the love of others because when I wear a mask, only my mask receives the love. I sense that I’m still not loved and self-diagnose that maybe my mask wasn’t good or tight enough. … And if that’s not painful enough, get this. I also cannot give love from behind a mask, at least not love from the real me. The ones I long to love experience the cloying attempts of someone who doesn’t exist.”
Maybe it is lifechurch.tv’s approach of planting a megachurch community in Second Life that needs more thought. I urge them to think differently on this one. If we cannot love in truth, what kind of gospel can we bring masked others?
Given the power of masked anonymity, perhaps it is the Catholic practice of the confessional that could be more successful. Instead of trying to simulate an event-driven cyber-church “experience” with our best evangelical avatars there to invite the unwashed masses to a rad rockin’ service, why not give the anonymous citizens of Second Life a place to speak to God and the Church with the honesty that their masked anonymity engenders. They have already chosen to don the masks, but must we? Or can we imagine an expression of the Church in Second Life that connects confession to redemption? I don’t know what that would look like yet, but it has me thinking.
I suspect that LifeChurch.tv could inspire a virtual land grab for missions in and to Second Life, much like it has for business. My concern is that, like Wired’s report on the mostly failed commercial forays into this virtual world, Churches and missionaries will spend thousands to create fabulous virtual masks to evangelize no one real.
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Amanpour on the Myth
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Holy cow. A couple months ago I remember being told CNN was visiting Woodland Hills—talking to Greg Boyd about The Myth of Christian Nation and going against the grain of mainstream evangelicalism in America. Little did I know it was for a segment of God’s Warriors by Christiane Amanpour, to be aired August 21-23. 
If you have cable/sat TV, be sure to catch this fascinating three-night report, along with the extensive companion web site at CNN.com. As for Boyd, a diary version of his interview with Amanpour is available online, under the link to Christianity/Video Diary/Politics & Faith.
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Let's play church
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
So, LifeChurch.tv set up a cyber-megachurch in Second Life, complete with a (fake) 16 acre campus. (More on it here.)
Oh my. That's a lovely new Home Depot.... Wait. I mean church.This news broke earlier this year, but I missed it. So here’s a very late post with my very unimportant, snarky and a few serious thoughts on it.
First, here’s is an alternate communication thesis topic right in front me: Mediated religious communication and expression through Second Life’s user-generated technology. I don’t know what to think of this general idea yet, but I’m biased by a pretty low opinion (sorry) of LifeChurch.tv’s media ministry model. If I don’t study it, somebody definitely should.
Second, leave it to Madison Avenue to lead uber ambitious Christian media enterprises like LifeChurch.tv around by the nose. Second Life seems to be a bust for most commercial marketers, according to Wired magazine’s Frank Rose. Read his recent take on the millions being spent on the marketing wasteland that is Second Life (thus far).
Considering the costs involved in setting up shop (or church) in Second Life (it takes a lot of programming to make cool places in SL), it looks like LifeChurch.tv’s supposed cutting-edge ministry move into the virtual world may be throwing good money (donated or otherwise) after bad.There are so many philosophical and theological questions about the validity of evangelism by means of digital avatars, it looks like someone missed a more pragmatic question: If we build it, will they come? If Wired is right, I seriously doubt it.
LifeChurcher, Bobby Gruenewald even commented in response to Nicholas Carr’s blog: “Surprisingly, we actually did think quite a bit about what it means to have a church community in the virtual world. :) Even with the forethought we still have more questions than answers and hope to use the effort learn a lot more."
I smell a publicity stunt. Sorry about gettin' all up in their grill about it (admittedly frank and a tad too judgemental, I agree), but my PR Spidey sense is tingling. And as far as PR goes, mission accomplished. Real mission is another matter entirely, and the jury is still out.
Call me a spiritual luddite on this one, but I need to work on advancing the kingdom in the real world before I can give a whit about doing it via avatar. I could be wrong, of course. This could be the most important “church plant” of my generation. But somehow a LifeChurch.tv outpost in Second Life seems about as far away from a "truefaced" commercial-free faith as one could get. That's my snap judgement on it.
More on this in a future post.
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A reckless and necessary change of course
Friday, July 27, 2007
Thoughts on thesis, part 7Posts in a series of commentaries on my thesis project for the Master of Arts in Communication.
I’m taking steps now to change the focus of my thesis at this point. Proof positive that my blogging has helped me get in touch with what really matters most to me (and hopefully others), I’m moving away from the idea of doing a rhetorical analysis of church advertising and toward developing a project around commercial media in the church and the notion of sanctuary. This has been what has resonated the most in my review of literature and is what I consider the most important area for me to concentrate my studies. You get a good flavor for this from reading my June 2 post, entitled "clarity, at last."
This means throwing out a good chunk of my prospectus which would have eventually made up the theoretical and methodological portions of my Thesis. But, I feel like this is the right decision—this is where my heart has been for some time. While church advertising is more of a tactical issue relating to the syncretism of consumer marketing and evangelism, commodification of the church itself as target market is more about the core of how we define the church and its role in advancing the kingdom. In addition, I’ve observed little reflection on this ethical dilemma in my research.
I’ll keep you posted on where this goes.
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Clarity, at last
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Thoughts on thesis, part 6Posts in a series of commentaries on my thesis project for the Master of Arts in Communication.
My thesis prospectus is done, and handed in. Now, we pray.
But to tide interested readers over, here’s some new excerpts and commentary. I plan to use much of this post for a formal speech in class next week. I most recently read some works by Sut Jhally, a professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts. He cites Tibor Scitovsky and Dallas Smythe on commodification and consumer culture, paralleling Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice. (again, I'm thinking about this as it concerns the commercialization of the church):
Scitovsky observed in 1976 that as consumers, human satisfaction is derived from “novelty and stimulation” in consumption, which is made into a “homogenized experience” to serve capitalistic enterprise. The comforting experience derived from consumption is addictive, and like many addictions, provides diminishing levels of satisfaction as it ceases to be novel and stimulating. Adding to this, Smythe said that “mass media” produces audiences as commodities for sale to advertisers—and subsequently to product producers. This is exactly how TV, radio and newspapers function in our economy. But should the church now play this role, as well?
When viewed from this perspective, both the church itself, and the church consumer are commodified. The church is a product, and the congregation is transformed into a product—a quantifiable audience that can be delivered to a marketer.
Hollywood is catching on to this in new and ingenious ways. I recently took a web trip to ArkAlmighty, which is a Craigslist-type localized church charity tie-in to the movie, Evan Almighty. Now, there seems to be no downside to enlisting Hollywood in the effort to promote acts of kindness and charity throughout the church. There are aspects of it that are very admirable and right. But here’s the uncomfortable part: This whole endeavor also aims to deliver The Church (God’s community of people) as a commodified audience for a commercial purpose. It is ultimately intended to drive tickets sales in the hope of making Bruce Almighty the Billion dollar goldmine that The Passion of the Christ was.That is what is so hard about deconstructing what is occurring in today’s church. Commercialization is becoming so sophisticated that church leaders must thoughtfully and critically discern the potential bad in the good. Where do you draw the line? Does ArkAlmighty bring enough community benefit that it’s worth the tradeoff of helping generate publicity for a product (the film). Maybe? What about Chrysler sponsoring a Gospel music tour in your local church? Would you put a plasma screen in your lobby with ads for Zondervan bibles if they helped fund for your food shelf ministry? How about ads for Toys ‘R’ Us in your Sunday school wing? Or a Starbuck’s coffee kiosk?
It’s not only the conflicts of interests that may arise between church teachings and the cultures of these commercial yet pseudo ministry enterprises. That’s just the surface. What’s much more alarming is what it communicates to people. They aren’t part of The Church anymore, they are an “audience” with a commercial value. Everything about the Sunday morning, event-driven churchianty so prevalent today reinforces that notion. People attend, consume and help financially support and build an enterprise. When the services and ministries of the local church are commodified through marketing and advertising, it’s just as easy to commodify the congregation. It many cases, the church has been doing this for several years.
There’s not that much of a difference between the temple environment that enraged Jesus in John 2:13-16, and what is happening in some Evangelical churches today. It just doesn’t look like dusty money-changers and merchants selling sacrificial doves and other religious supplies in the temple courts:
When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father's house into a market!” (TNIV)
I strongly believe that our houses and homes of worship must return to the concept of sanctuary, and become places of refuge from commodification, consumerism and competition. Admittedly this is especially hard to do in a culture that we are called to remain within in response to our missional calling. Yet, I think there are old and new ways to do so—and that a new attractiveness of Christianity in today’s world may be found in helping create a commercial free context where people can rest in God’s presence, grace and the presence of each other.
Let’s call it: “commercial free faith.”
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TechnoratiWe want your soul
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Thoughts on thesis, part 4Posts in a series of commentaries on my thesis project for the Master of Arts in Communication.
I was pointed to this clip by a poster on a recent Out of Ur interview with Shane Hipps. I'm using it for my prospectus presentation to set up the cultural backdrop for my study, which will be centered on competition, consumerism and commodification in church advertising and marketing. I highly recommend the Out of Ur post and a trip through the comments by readers. I'm not sure if anyone has seen this video before (it dates to 2003), but I thought it was a great illustration.
At this point, I'm planning to look at examples of advertising and marketing materials from churches and apply a media-centered critical methodology rooted in McLuhan's media ecology and Innis' communication bias. In short, advertising is a non neutral medium, despite the prevailing assumptions of those who use it to promote churches. Here's one excerpt from my draft prospectus:
According to Vincent Miller, author of Consuming Religion, “religion is as susceptible to abstraction and reification as other aspects of culture” (2005, p. 105). There is no neutral ground in mediated communication if Innis, McLuhan and others are taken seriously. The forces of consumerism in contemporary culture endanger the message of the church by reducing it to “abstracted, virtual sentiments that function solely to give flavor to the already established forms of everyday life or to provide compensation for its shortcomings” (p. 105-106).
Looking back at the video, is the church allowing itself to become just another consumer option vying for brand awareness and patronage?
The new paradox of church choice
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Recently ran across a book and an article about the problem of too much choice. The hypothesis put forth is that consumer satisfaction degrades when presented with increasing numbers of choices. While Americans have become a society obsessed with consumer-driven choices (many of us believing more options are always better), the “piling on” of decisions is resulting in growing levels of fatigue and buyer’s remorse.
Read the article here, and reference the recent book by Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice.How does this apply to the notion of the church in America today? A few thoughts that have crossed my mind in the past few days: For the past 100 years or so the number of denominations and sects in the United States as grown to huge numbers (around 30,000 for protestant groups alone). In addition, large mega churches have become known apart from denominational affiliation in local, regional and even national contexts. Add to this the multiple service format and venue trend, and you exponentially multiply consumer options. Simply put, people who may consider attending a church next Sunday face an extraordinary number of choices. Sure, not every group is represented in every community. But gone are the days of the Walnut Grove-esque church or the all-American town with just a handful of mainline churches to mull over—each with little metal signs on the outskirts of town. Today’s church shopper has a shopping mall full of options to consider.
Now, evangelistically oriented people will point out that growing communities need more churches to reach a growing population. At face value, this is a perfectly reasonable assumption. But it breaks down when you apply the supermarket analogy. The article mentions how today’s supermarket carries more than 30,000 items, and 20,000 new products are introduced each year (most of these fail to catch on). Because people come to the supermarket to choose from these products, they don’t consider the impact of a growing population on their ability to choose a product. They make individual choices facing the same pool of options regardless of how many other people are shopping (even though the store may become more crowded—but let’s not take the analogy too far). The point is, population growth and increased church planting only adds additional choices for people, and these choices are not limited by increased population or actual church capacity in any way. We may need more churches to accommodate growing communities, but this also unavoidably adds more for people to choose from.Here’s the problem: The more attempts that are made to package and expand the church to reach people (new churches, venues, alternative services, more programs, etc.), the more options everyone considering church participation has to choose from. As the article and the book point out, this leads to people who are “less satisfied and…less happy…with those choices.” This presents the new church choice paradox.
Is it any wonder we live in an age of church hoppers and increasingly demanding congregations?
The PoMo and the bait & switch
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Thoughts on thesis, part 3Posts in a series of commentaries on my thesis project for the Master of Arts in Communication.
There are two lines of thought emerging from the review of literature at this point. One is the point of departure for postmodern advertising from modern, pre 1990s advertising. Where modernism created a consumer culture by harnessing image and textual advertising to stimulate and cultivate desire and felt needs for products, postmodernism is an evolved consumer culture where advertising transcends product by presenting a hyperreality where self becomes defined by consumption and brand images become iconic—disassociated from the products they represent. The second is a recognition of the aware consumer of the postmodern era with a highly evolved sensibility when it comes to advertising that is perceived to be deceptive or misleading. The “bait-and-switch” of some ad messages creates and increasingly guarded and skeptical consumer, the effects of which can even bleed over into other brands and products. It’s a break in the sacred (or profane) bond between consumer and producer where consumers are aware and accept they are being sold to, and in exchange for receiving a sales pitch, expect to be given honest, albeit hyped, information.
In the case of the former line, church growth advertising fails to recognize the impact of the postmodern shift as it pertains to advertising messages. Many church marketers make the faulty assumption that modernist approaches in creating advertising messages will reach postmodern-minded people. The truth is that both modern and postmodern consumer messages are problematic at best when applied to fulfilling Christian evangelistic aims. Product marketing approaches targeting consumers often repackage the enterprise (institutional services) of a church rather than present a gospel message. Or, the Gospel itself is productized as a turn-key consumer product, making conversion purely transactional rather than transformational. Theologically both productizing the church and elevating Christianity or the church to image-driven brand status is troubling. There is much to explore here.
In the case of the second line, some church marketers have resorted to concealing their true identity in their messages in order to create “buzz” marketing campaigns to bring more people through their doors (like the one pictured that made national news last week). The trouble with this technique, as advertising research tends to support, is that the consumers intrigued enough to investigate the “buzz” inevitably find out the truth: the mysterious entity that is advertising on billboards or via direct mail is really just another church. This risks developing a growing audience of disappointed and even avoidant consumers. Churches overestimate their ability to truly differentiate themselves from traditional churches once the switch is made. Rock music worship and relevant, entertaining messages hold less sway with postmodern consumers with vastly superior alternatives to choose from. In such cases, I propose leading with spirituality and the message of Jesus could be a more effective (and honest) message strategy.Do either of the approaches generate a backlash with certain people (postmoderns seeking spiritual connection)? Does growth in simple, neo monastic and house church movements constitute a reaction to such approaches?
On message with the Kingdom revolution
Friday, March 23, 2007
I don’t spend time reading political blogs or news sites, but I recently caught this link from another blogger. The article by Zack Exley published Alternet.org is a fascinating look at the kingdom revolution underway through the eyes of progressive liberals. Overall, I think the piece is a pretty good outside interpretation of what is going on. Quotes and references include Rob Bell, Greg Boyd, Jim Wallace, and others. 
...the Revolution is not primarily a reaction to Republican attempts to politicize the church. What sets it apart from mainstream evangelicalism is not a liberal rejection of Republican politics, but rather a more radical rejection of conservatism and liberalism, and anything else that is not the "kingdom of God." To the Revolutionaries, what seems righteous or commonsensical to humans does not matter; all that matters is what God wants. Boyd writes in Myth of a Christian Nation: "To the extent that an individual or group looks like Jesus -- dying for those who crucified him and praying for their forgiveness in the process -- to that degree they can be said to manifest the kingdom of God. To the degree that they do not look like this, they do not manifest God's kingdom."
And if you can stomach some rants, the comments also worth a read (in some cases) to get an insight on how people outside the church perceive this movement (for lack of a better term). The article also describes this ‘whole deal’ as a sort of convergence of the emerging church, evangelical progressives and kingdom revolutionaries. Sign me up!
It's all been done
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Thoughts on thesis, part 2Posts in a series of commentaries on my thesis project for the Master of Arts in Communication.
Even when you think you are approaching a topic or research question with relatively little written about it, some earnest research for your literature review turns up enough published sources to prove you wrong—at least partly.
And so it is with my project this week. I made a trip to the library to retrieve my first batch of books for review and possible inclusion in my prospectus. Here’s a list of nine titles I need to get through in short order:
Budde, Michael L. - Christianity IncorporatedShelley, Bruce L. - The Consumer Church
Miller, Vincent J. - Consuming religion
Wells, David F. - God in the Wasteland
Fitch, David E. - The Great Giveaway
Kenneson, Philip D. - Selling Out the Church
Lyon, David - Jesus in Disneyland
Roof, Wade C.- Spiritual Marketplace
Twitchell, James B. - Branded nation
Amassing a wealth of published literature on my topic is very important—and the big jackpot with some of the books are the bibliographies. They can be the jumping off point for many other sources that my feeble research at the University library didn’t yield.
Back to my earlier point, there is more out there to draw upon than I originally thought. Yet, I don’t feel it has all been said before. I think my hypothesis and approach is unique enough to add value to the conversation. What’s painfully clear in my research so far is that, while a large segment of the church has bought into consumer marketing, very little if any research (as far as I have found) has been done on how Christian messages and concepts translate into consumer advertising and marketing.
Time to starting filling the vacuum.
The modern versus postmodern consumer
In other words, who’s the shallowest, most self-centered, consumption -oriented, jerk out there?
All that, and a bag of chips on my shoulder
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Thoughts on thesis, part 1All that, and a bag of chips on my shoulder
Posts in a series of commentaries on my thesis project for the Master of Arts in Communication.
I’ve had recent misgivings about what is emerging as my MA Comm thesis topic, mainly because there is en element of negativity that I can seem to shake. Part of this comes from a place of disillusionment with modern Evangelicalism in America. My experience both in attempting a church plant (as a team member) and serving in a mega-church wannabe congregation have contributed to an enormous drive to open the books on consumer marketing trends prevalent in the church that I hypothesize to be counterproductive to the mission of the kingdom.
But all this amounts to a pretty whiny-sounding thesis. I want to acknowledge up front that I recognize that. I guess what the project must endeavor to accomplish is a logical critical analysis of these trends and the potential unwanted effects on targeted consumers with regard to their beliefs and opinions about Christianity and the Christian church.As a card-carrying member of Generation X, it’s my contention that the majority of the consumer marketing tactics being employed by today’s evangelical churches serve to reinforce and strengthen the established modernist worldviews of existing Evangelical elites, while disillusioning those outside of the church that hold a more postmodern worldview. In short, advertising and marketing tactics attract a specific “customer” type, while “dis-attracting” a growing segment of society. Since I believe consumerism is the antithesis of kingdom life, I have an obvious concern that such marketing practices are practically and spiritually counterproductive in expanding the kingdom. (Pretty obvious if you go back through and read the Church category on this blog.)
I hope to do this by taking a theoretical communication approach to the preponderance of consumer messages that are used in church marketing materials. I’m not wanting to quantitatively prove that X percent of churches are using consumer marketing. But rather, making the assumption (based on observation) that some churches are using consumerist messages, I want to critically analyze how these messages are likely understood or interpreted by audiences using a primarily postmodern mode of critical analysis.
I’m in way over my head.
Amusing ourselves to death for one hour each Sunday
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Most recently I completed my Advanced Media course for my MA in Communication. One of the required readings was Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. 
Aside from a historical and well-thought-out indictment of TV media, I was struck with what Postman had to say about the Church. At the time if his writing, the PTL and Swaggart scandals were fresh memories for Postman. Televangelism was his ripe target for criticism. What is amazing is how applicable his words are for today. The entertainment and marketing driven local church was just a twinkle in some pastor's eye in 1985. Postman's work can be recast to analyze the folly of experience-driven, productized churchianity. In my last paper for the class, I propose just such a reading of Amusing Ourselves to Death--a cautionary tale for today's Church.If you're brave or bored, feel free to read the attached five-page review with this perspective.
Wake up and smell the kingdom
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
“But thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ's triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are an aroma that brings death; to the other, an aroma that brings life. And who is equal to such a task? Unlike so many, we do not peddle the word of God for profit. On the contrary, in Christ we speak before God with sincerity, as those sent from God.” 2 Corinthians 2:14-17 TNIVI looked at this passage in a couple of other translations. I was intrigued by the notion of a for-profit Gospel, and how Paul slices through it with a higher, kingdom calling. But as I re-read it, I began to think more about the metaphor of aroma that Paul uses to describe our evangelistic role as believers.
To me, an aroma, or a smell, requires close, personal contact. You don’t get a true scent of another person by sitting in an auditorium and watching them perform on a stage, or by watching television or by visiting a church’s retail welcome center that’s been laced with a potpourri fragrance like a Bath & Bodyworks store. This passage in 2 Corinthians led me to ask myself some uncomfortable questions: Can people smell the knowledge of Christ and His kingdom on my skin? Am I getting close enough to anyone to let them get a whiff? If they do get close enough, are they smelling the authentic me in Christ, or some kind of artificial, Old-Spice scent hiding a really obnoxious odor underneath?
Corporately, are we more concerned with presenting our churches as clean-smelling, deodorized, never-let-them-see-you-sweat, retail experiences in hopes of attracting the right customers? Or do we create authentic communities of grace that aren’t embarrassed by a little body odor, but also understand the power of the kingdom aroma we have together in Christ?
Emergent thought in early America
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Some have criticized the emerging church for eschewing a definitive statement of faith. I realize this is kind of late to this discussion and dated information, but I ran across this text recently which provides a strong rationale for not attempting to create a doctrinal statement for something as dynamic and conversation-driven as the emerging church. The excerpt was included in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (required reading for my advanced media course), and is taken from the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Within that work Franklin quotes Michael Welfare, one of the founders of a noncreedalist religious sect in that day known as The Brethren or The Dunkers (see this wiki for background). When Franklin suggested Welfare publish a doctrinal statement to help abate misinformation about the group that was spreading in society, Welfare responded with this incredibly modest and cogent statement:When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors, and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now we are not sure we have arrived at the end of the progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that, if we should feel ourselves as if bound and confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.
Newsweek covers the cross and politics
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Don’t miss this rather lengthy exploration of the emergence of political evangelicalism in America. 
Given the outcome of Tuesday’s elections, I found it worth the time to familiarize myself with this historical perspective, since the American conservative politicization of The Church has largely been a phenomenon that has occurred in my lifetime. The comments to the article on the web site are also very interesting.To add some perspective to this in light of last week’s other notable event (Ted Harggard’s resignation over scandal), I include this excerpt on political evangelicalism from Gordon Macdonald in Leadership Journal’s Out of Ur blog (props, again, to Knightopia, who also posted this stub).
Our movement has been used. There are hints that the movement—once cobbled together by Billy Graham and Harold Ockenga—is beginning to fragment because it is more identified by a political agenda that seems to be failing and less identified by a commitment to Jesus and his kingdom. Like it or not, we are pictured as those who support war, torture, and a go-it-alone (bullying) posture in international relationships. Any of us who travel internationally have tasted the global hostility toward our government and the suspicion that our President’s policies reflect the real tenants of Evangelical faith. And I might add that there is considerable disillusionment on the part of many of our Christian brothers/sisters in other countries who are mystified as to where American evangelicals are in all of this. Our movement may have its Supreme Court appointments, but it may also have compromised its historic center of Biblical faith. Is it time to let the larger public know that some larger-than-life evangelical personalities with radio and TV shows do not speak for all of us?
Yes, it is.
Wake up to postmodernism
Thursday, November 09, 2006
It's real. Get used to it. Tune in and turn on your brain. Knightopia has posted a link to some great free audio programs from Brian McLaren speaking at Wake Forest University Divinity School recently. Go grab some excellent talks on postmodernism, empire and the Kingdom. As Steve Knight says, if you have never heard him give his series on postmodern thought, this is an excellent source.
A strong case for power under versus power over
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
I’ve got a few personal reasons for not saying too much about the LWCC/Bachmann mis-endorsement incident and fallout on my blog, starting with my intention that I don’t blog to be conversant on politics (not that there is anything wrong with that). But I do want to post a link to this op-ed article from Sunday’s StarTribune, because I think it is a fantastic witness to The Kingdom and its proper relation to human politics. I am sure some will disagree, but I am just as sure that the perspective given in this article is underrepresented in public discourse. And I want to raise awareness in whatever small way this blog can.Your best life is just a game
Sunday, October 22, 2006
This not parody. This is a real product created by real people.
I was sure it didn’t get any more absurd than the Left Behind video game. But then the big O from Lakewood has to get all low tech on us to revolutionize church small groups with a board game (or is it, bored game).Unbelievable. As another blog pointed out, what is the fate of those who lose, your worst life now?
Growing up I always preferred LIFE to Monopoly because, even though the person with the richest bank account won the game, you could still finish with a respectable 2nd or 3rd place. Monopoly always seemed to be about the total economic destruction of your opponents.
In the case of the Christian “Life,” perhaps we should leave the “games” to Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley.
The Body politic
Friday, October 13, 2006
Short notice, but the Bethel University Student Association is sponsoring a "Faith and Politics" dialogue between Jim Wallis and Greg Boyd October 23. 
The event will take place on Monday, October 23, from 8-10 p.m., in the Benson Great Hall. Wallis, founder of Sojourners, is on a book-signing tour for the paperback release of God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. The hardcover spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Wallis will sign books after the evening event. Also, Boyd will do a signing for his latest book, The Myth of a Christian Nation.Rediscovering the lost art of evangelism episode 10, the last
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
This is part 10 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 10:
Remember your friends. Be nice to the people on the way up because one is likely to see them again on the way down. Once an evangelist has achieved success, he shouldn't think that he'll never need those folks again…
“Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not think you are superior.” Romans 12:14-16 TNIV
“We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. We should all please our neighbors for their good, to build them up. For even Christ did not please himself but, as it is written: 'The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.' For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope. May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you the same attitude of mind toward each other that Christ Jesus had, so that with one mind and one voice you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God." Romans 15:1-7 TNIV.
I choose to end this series on a few very simple readings from Romans. Chapter 12:14-16 is a very direct confirmation of what Kawasaki is saying in his last point of the 10. Romans 15 points this idea in a very specific missional direction, to “please our neighbors for their good, to build them up.”
I’ve been thinking about this a great deal lately, spurred on by the most recent teachings at our church. It makes me remember the time when Sinead O’Connor performed on SNL (in the 90s) and finished her tune by holding up a picture of Pope John Paul II and tearing it in two, saying, “Fight the real enemy.” Sinead had the wrong picture, but the right idea. We are to fight the real enemy, and our fellow human beings are not it.Too often we have these pictures of apparent human “enemies” we carry in our heads and our hearts that we like to expose and tear to shreds in righteous protest. They are politicians, celebrities, criminals, dead-beat dads, drunk drivers, drug dealers, or even the neighbor next door that you have been feuding with for 20 years.
When we stand up to speak out in indignation and judgment, who is our audience? Are we really railing audibly against the spiritual powers of darkness. Or are we more likely verbally tearing up the pictures of fellow sons of Adam and daughters of Eve that have been co-opted in the great rebellion.
They are not the enemy. They are the prisoners, the kidnapped, the lost ones suffering from a distinctly spiritual Stockholm Syndrome. They are our brothers and sisters gone missing.
They can even be evil, but they are not the enemy.
“Do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.” Matthew 39-42 TNIV
Jesus instructs us not to attack or retaliate. We are not the avengers. Instead, we are to join a rescue mission. We are to be a posse of compassion—vigilantes of love (with my apologies to Bill Malonee).
I like that idea: the vigilante justice of love and mercy riding out to fight the real enemy.
These very works become the guns and ammo of the spiritual war. While you are physically ministering to another human, you are dealing damaging blows to the real enemy.
It can be overlooked how Paul recalls the Proverb in Romans 12:20 for the New Covenant: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” TNIV
The burning coals reference is, of course, metaphorical. I’ve never seen third-degree burns on someone’s head caused by aggressive compassion ministry. But I don’t think it is incorrect to infer that the physical metaphor has a very real spiritual dimension. Burning coals connote warfare, as we read in Psalm 11:6 (and many other places), and purification, as in Luke 3:17. John the Baptist makes a direct link to the spiritual impact of our acts of compassion prior to verse 17:
“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”
"What should we do then?" the crowd asked.
John answered, “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.” Luke 3:7-11 TNIV
We should consider social justice, love and compassion as primary spiritual weapons in our arsenal—on the same level as prayer and worship. They are not merely some add-on to our lives and church communities designed to make Christianity more attractive and generate good PR. They are not nice-to-haves that are less important than evangelism, but rather an integral component of our mission constituting the spiritual ground breaking that must occur before planting and harvesting (I apologize for the mixed metaphors).
Are we clear on our mission? Are we are clear on the means. Are we clear on whom we are evangelizing? Do we know who the enemy is? And do we know how to fight this enemy? These are the essential questions that have engaged me as I have written this series. I think I’m starting to sort out some good answers—at least for me and my life. I hope this has been helpful for anyone else that has taken the time to read it all. I’ll be moving the entire series to the serial posts page section soon.
Rediscovering the lost art of evangelism episode 9
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
This is part 9 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 9:
Never tell a lie. Very simply, lying is morally and ethically wrong. It also takes more energy because if one lies, then it is necessary to keep track of the lies. If one always tells the truth, then there's nothing to keep track of. Evangelists know their stuff, so they never have to tell a lie to cover their ignorance.
One can’t really argue with Kawasaki on this one. Here we have commandment number 9 of 10 (Exodus 20:16). When it comes to evangelizing our faith, no one intends to lie. That would be completely counterproductive.
But that’s what sometimes happens.
In the quest to grow churches, we often end up become product evangelists for our church organizations rather than Jesus and his kingdom. In doing so, we can end up creating a proxy for the kingdom designed with a wide variety of ministry and life solutions. A mega-mall for Christian consumers.
And this is encouraged by mega-aspiring church leaders precisely because it helps grow their organizations. Recently one person was “selling” my sister-in-law (a believer) on their brand of church by talking about their exciting new family church program. “Think Disney,” she said.
We are driven to invent new marketing slogans to try to impress the marketplace and help differentiate our product: “Church for those who don’t ‘do’ church,” I saw recently. “Been there, done that” was another with a traditional church steeple in the background. "We’re not your father’s church,” another tag-line read. True enough, I guess. Are we talking about cars or church? Or consider the one pictured. Was church not worth "doing" until this church came along and made it cool? One church leadership conference advert asked, “Is your church buzz-worthy?” And I think to myself, is your church marketing cringe-worthy?We dress up the Bride in the latest fashions and expensive jewelry. We do her hair and makeup. We throw in all the frills to make the Bride attractive, desirable, hip and relevant to the popular culture. And boy is she a hottie. We end up saying, “Ask us out on date. We may be ‘the one’ you’ve been looking for all your life.”
Unknowingly we tell a lie. It’s not about the Bride. It’s about the Groom.
Let me step back and say that there is nothing wrong with large churches and extensive ministry programs with manifest creativity. If your church is blessed with these gifts, outstanding. You can serve people and build the Kingdom in greater and greater ways, praise God.
But we lie when these things are what we evangelize—when we make ourselves and our churches into the good news, rather than the person of Jesus.
David Fitch writes about it this way in Out of Ur: “…we have organized church life around the busy lives of Americans living the dreams of capitalism and democracy that leave little time for mission, community and worship. I fear the ‘church’ for evangelicals has, in George Hunsberger’s words, become ‘the distributor of religious goods and services.’ As a result, I fear we evangelicals are becoming less and less noticeable and barely distinguishable as a people from the rest of our society who live as if God does not exist.”
The goods and services, the brand that produces them (a church) become what we “market” and “sell” to consumers.
I think every long-time Christian has heard at one time or another that the newly saved are the most excited and most motivated to evangelize. And I’ve found that new Christians are usually the most focused on Jesus, and what he has done to transform them, rather than what a church has done for them.
Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing found the same truth about consumers. He concluded that the most powerful word-of-mouth advocates might be the customers who have only done business with you once so far. They are the most excited; repeat customers are probably accustomed to the great product/service and therefore, ironically, less likely to talk about it.
The problem with marketing-driven evangelism is that your product has to get better, cheaper and/or faster to keep driving new and exciting marketing fodder. That’s a lot of pressure. When your product is a church—when you have productized your church in order to market it—that becomes a real problem at some point. It can be exhausting to continue to impress and inspire your existing customers, as Sernovitz points out. Instead of making converts and disciples you have cultivated fickle consumers.
Fitch sees this pattern in the church today: “…The church in essence is left to be a sideshow to what God is doing for, in and through individuals. We no longer have a need for the church to be the social manifestation of His Lordship where He reigns over the powers of sin, evil and death, the very inbreaking of the kingdom of God, where His mighty works are made manifest and put on display before the world (1 Pet 2:9), where hospitality is such an overpowering ethos that the lost in this world are compelled by this invitation. As it is right now, we lack a way of life that people look at and see and say, ‘Look what manner of life has been made possible in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.’” (I recommend this entire post by David Fitch)
When the overriding goal becomes presenting Jesus embodied in our community—our local expression of The Church—the pressure to sell, market, persuade, etc. falls away.
Consider the well known verse, Co 5:17 TNIV “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
The truth of Jesus we are compelled to share need not be made new through our creative effort. It is already new—and continually so. In Christ all things are new. Our story to unbelievers comes out of living this life “in Christ” individually and as a community. We need not dream up a new Madison-Avenue-inspired church marketing campaign every Fall. Instead, we simply must live this life like we mean it, and tell our stories (yes, even in creative ways*).
Don't sell a new and improved Bride of Christ.
Don't sell anything.
Just be “In Christ.”
Honestly.
*I don’t want to confuse the creative evangelism of the gospel with what I am talking about in this post, which is the evangelism of a church, it’s goods and services. Creativity can help express our stories in wonderful ways. Marketing, on the other hand, can too easily contextualize our messages into products.
The trivial nature of eschatology...
Saturday, September 02, 2006
...really lends itself to some kickin' video game development. The book of Revelation is a gold mine of gaming scenarios and visual ideas, once you get past the King James English.Left Behind Games, the geniuses behind the upcoming computer/video game, “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” have been working overtime lately claiming to correct misinformation in the blogosphere and defend their dubious endeavor.
[actual screen shot]
But I think it is totally unnecessary to tear into this thing. Just go to their web site and learn more about it, look at the screen shots, see how they pitch it, read the marketing hype and get the story straight from the horse's mouth. If you can come away without any kind of uncomfortable or soiled feeling (like maybe some spiritual discernment kicking in), then by all means, buy this game as soon as possible. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it as much as the other kids who were left behind—in school.
But if you can't take the time right now, just read this quote from the CEO of Left Behind Games and think about if for a while (reported by Skye Jethani in Out of Ur):
"Troy Lyndon...says the game will probably appeal to the same audience that was undisturbed by the violence and gore in 'The Passion of the Christ.' Lyndon says he anticipates those on the liberal left will criticize Left Behind: Eternal Forces, 'but megachurches are very likely to embrace this game.' And they will be the main marketing outlets for the product."
Kingdom transparency
Friday, September 01, 2006
There has been a great deal of press on The Myth of Christian Nation since the New York Times article broke July 30, 2006. The topic of God and politics aside, I ran across something in reviewing the recent media coverage that I feel compelled to share. I have rarely read someone giving such a transparent, heart-felt mea culpa related to something they had written.I think we all have things we regret we said or wrote in the past. I have not (yet) published a book to have to worry about this on a large scale, although this blog and my verbal rants likely have seen some low moments that will become more apparent to me as I grow. Hindsight is 20/20, but it’s blind if you never turn around to take a look.
As a persuasive writer, doing a complete one-eighty on something you wrote is excruciating stuff. So I share this quote from author and speaker Dave Burchett from His Crosswalk blog post about Greg Boyd and The Myth of Christian Nation. I pray that I will have the maturity to recognize and repent of any of my former mistakes in such an open manner—even for something like political opinions. I don’t know much about Burchett, but I like him already.
“I have been roundly criticized for supporting George Bush in my first book, When Bad Christians Happen to Good People. I regret the political references I made in that book. I wish I could remove them because I found out that political remarks polarize and deflect the message of the Cross. I tried to make it clear that Christians were making a mistake by trying to change our culture through politics instead of by changing hearts for Jesus. That book was written during 9/11 and after I had been personally convicted of my sin toward President Bill Clinton. I did not pray for Bill Clinton. I did not respect him as the authority my sovereign God allowed to be in power. I regret the impression that I gave to some readers that I believed the Republican party was the official party of Christianity. I do not believe that at all. And yes, I expect to see Democrats in heaven. And Libertarians. A few Republicans will be there too. But the common link will not be political ideology. The link that will bring us there will be Jesus. Period.”
Lost in transmission
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Something to noodle on while I am out of pocket on TSAWWT blog posts for the next week or so. Read. Chew. Comment. Repeat.Much of the modern evangelical church is a step behind huge sociological and communication shifts. Most notably is the transformation from consumerism to producerism—from cool spectator-driven to warm participation-driven media and communication. In a recent PRSA presentation I downloaded from Andrew Lark, a communications consultant, he describes human communication in terms of major eras we have been moving through over time driven by our communication media.
1) The Transmission Era
2) The Triangulation Era (Web 1.0)
3) The Participatory Era (Web 2.0)
The modern church still fits squarely in the Transmission Era in many ways, whether the media is print, preaching driven, radio, film or TV. But The Church didn’t used to be this way. In the absence of any prevailing communication method aside from verbal (literacy and written communication was quite limited, the impact of epistles notwithstanding), the early church was much more participatory. It had to be.
Today, in the postmodern era, communication media is increasingly characterized by participation. Of all the potential or pitfalls of postmodernism, this is the most exciting and encouraging aspect to me—an opportunity to bring us back to a more of a New Testament church ethos, albeit in new, and even digital, wineskins. And the church communities that will thrive (regardless of old or new, high or low, large or small) will be the ones that emphasize participation rather than passive, one-way transmission of consumerism. And this isn't just about blogs and wikis. It's about how you do everything.
A few of quotes to provoke thought and comment:
“We are entering one era in which the technological infrastructure is creating a different context for how we tell our stories and how we communicate with each other”
- Andrew Nachison, Director, Media Center
“One of my new laws for communicators is 'the more you participate, the more transparent the dialog becomes'"
- Andy Lark
“Whether the existing church likes it or not, we are giving birth to a generation of people who view themselves as participants. … Our elders, the Baby Boomers, learned how to communicate to consumers, but to find success in the future, a new generation will need to learn how to speak to a new breed of producers who have been radically transformed by using the Internet. ... Emboldened by this participatory movement and empowered by easy-to-use technology, we are starting to expect different things from our churches, pastors and denominations. We look forward to something more profound from our churches than vision casting, finding our spiritual gifts, mall-like facilities, coffee bars and candles. We expect to participate; we expect to co-create the church. As bloggers, we take an active role in our personal spiritual formation.”
- Tim Bednar
Making The Church safe for democracy
Saturday, August 05, 2006
Okay, this has got to be my last post about this. Sorry--bear with me for one more round. With The Myth of a Christian Nation gaining quite a bit of attention since the July 31 New York Times article, I thought I’d post a link to a piece recently published by Next Wave, but originally written in 2003. It’s another good take on the issue of politics, patriotism and The Church. It’s unfortunate that some in full-time ministry have been displaced over these issues (as mentioned in this piece), but I pray the growing awareness will make it safer for more people to affirm a view of the Kingdom that places power under people rather than seeking power over them. Not left, nor right, just the Kingdom.Also, Nick Coleman of the Star Tribune did a nice piece on Greg Boyd's NYT odyssey in this week's paper. Since the NYT article, Boyd's book has rocketed from #32,738 to #20 overall on Amazon.com sales charts. Now, do I need to change the diagnosis of BF from Bono Fatigue to Boyd Fatigue?
Get that guy some sun block
Friday, August 04, 2006
The infamous Pat Robertson has now done a 180 on global warming, claiming in a 700 Club broadcast that the recent heat wave is “the most convincing evidence I've seen on global warming in a long time.” He continues, “We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels. It is getting hotter, and the icecaps are melting and there is a buildup of carbon dioxide in the air.” (We’re running out of oil, too, Pat! In case you didn’t notice paying $3.20 a gallon today.)
My recommendation to the rest of us? If you happen to be near a TV set and the 700 Club comes on, walk right up to that TV screen and wipe some SPF 40 sun block right on Pat’s face. Sure, it sounds crazy and will make a mess of your set, but he’s gonna need some for sure.
Three degrees of separation
Friday, August 04, 2006
Club Three Degrees is depending on City of Minneapolis zoning laws to keep a new strip club from opening in close proximity to the club. As this Strib article points out, there is some disagreement (and confusion) over whether the club should be considered a church or a nightclub. To be honest, the wording of law (with its specific reference to alcohol sales equating nightclubs with bars) and C3D’s non profit status (zero profit and mostly volunteer run) should be enough to give it legitimacy as a ministry. (What nightclub in there right minds would be a volunteer-run, no drink, no profit venture?) Although it may sometimes be hard to differentiate it from other aspects of the Christian entertainment industry (yeah, I’m talking about you, Nash-Vegas), Club Three Degrees has always been an out front evangelistic ministry. Sure, it thinks of itself as a nightclub venue. It holds concerts and sells beverages and appetizers. But, it doesn’t do it to make money. It does it to spread the gospel. Knowing Nancy and Steve Aleksuk for several years, I can personally vouch for that overriding mission. They’re obsessed (in a good way) with this purpose.So will the strippers prevail? In an updated article from the Strib today it looks like they did—at least in this round. The full Minneapolis City Council voted 10 to 3 to grant a business license to the strip club owners. C3D is now investigating legal action. The council can vote any way they choose to, but it doesn’t mean decisions are legal. That’s up to the courts. But legal action versus the City could prove too costly.
Even if the Divas club does begin operating, there will still be a burning light at C3D in the dark nightlife of our city.
The multi megas, coming soon to a theater near you
Thursday, August 03, 2006
I’ve been linking around the ‘net looking at various blogs—especially some that have sprouted more recently dedicated to church marketing. Obviously in the age of the mega church, consumer marketing has become an important endeavor for some of these congregation. It’s quite interesting to see this happen—I feel a little torn. On the one hand marketing can be fun—100 times more interesting than other ecclesial concerns. I’m a creative, so the temptation to make marketing, branding, advertising and PR into tools of The Church appeals to me on a professional and missional level. On the other hand, I have an enormous amount of discomfort with tactics that seek to grow individual churches on the back of the consumer marketing strategies. However noble to goal (reaching the lost), sometimes the means and message just don’t translate well. What can be very successful tactics for selling fashion wear, iPods and dishwashers, just doesn’t do a good job really connecting lost people with Jesus. The “conversions” in this sense can become conversions to a specific brand of church, rather than into a transformative relationship with Jesus as His Bride.Often all this marketing does a much better job of selling one church versus the competition to existing customers (read: Christians). So, who’s the competition? Don’t assume it’s the world or the culture. Usually it’s the 100-year-old church down the street that just plods along doing what it can to serve the Kingdom. Sometimes it’s just another baby church plant without the hip creative resources or big budget. Or it may even be another multi-mega church.
Then I see the most recent business marketing trend to hit The Church codified in a new book (pictured) and something begins to make more sense to me. The latest buzz, the multi-site church, is being advocated with a fairly consistent definition of what “church” is—a definition that needs to change. You pick up on it in the marketing language of this book: on the book jacket, the blurbs and in the reviews on Amazon. It’s inherent in how they define church in very local terms—almost never universally. First, there’s the subtitle: “Being one church in many locations.” The fact is, The Church already is that. Do we really need a single congregation to divide up geographically when parishes and communities of various denominations already have done so? Are we certain they are ineffective? Another quote from the back cover: “Churches are growing beyond the limitations of a single service in one building.” But does everyone need to “go” to your church in order for you to have advanced the Kingdom? Or look at how the language describes the multi-venue church as a better way to “ensure a successful DNA transfer” than traditional church planting. I’ve heard this phrase before, but what does it imply? DNA is unique, like a fingerprint. The DNA metaphor is used in this case to mean that an additional multi-site venue approach better ensures that one church’s personality and characteristics will be replicated. Replicated DNA is known as cloning. To be sure, cloning is easier than giving birth or resuscitation. But with regard to that I simply ask, is this what the Kingdom looks like: a Starbucks on every corner?
In the interest of full disclosure, I have not read this book. So my critique is more directed toward the marketing of the book, than the actual content, although the primary content and viewpoint of the work is pretty clear. If I’m taking this all the wrong way or pushing my emergent agenda a little too far, then let this reinforce the point that the language being used describe the multi-venue movement is very telling. However well intended, it belies the isolation that exists among different churches, denominations, movements. And this isolation is a bad thing—something we should be tearing down rather than finding innovative new ways to reinforce.
This siloed view of The Church leads to larger, more powerful multi-site congregations operating more independent of others rather than more interdependently as the body of Christ. This is neo-denominationalism in an age of large non-denominational churches. Separated kingdoms working in a vacuum. Coordination with other “churches” often amounts to a city wide worship event or prayer breakfast for pastors.
Deuteronomy 6:4 TNIV “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” So is His Church.
I’d be much more willing to consider what proponents of this movement (“revolution” is too generous a way to describe it) have to share if their marketing language more often referred to The Church as a unified whole (all of us), rather than positioned it as varied and competing locations (or even franchises). There are likely some very good reasons for considering a multi-site approach. But we need to consider these new options and the advocacy of them looking through the lens of the “universal” Church (a nod to the Catholic tradition) and in coordination with the outposts of the Kingdom that already exist. I see little of that in operation today or in this movement. Why? Because it is hard and slows the momentum of a rapidly growing customer base. (Remember how I am defining customers in this context.)
I am heartened that a few of the large churches in my neck of the woods are not buying into multi-site trend and have, instead, moved to creating deeper relationships and partnerships with other smaller churches and ministries across the city. Here you have interaction across denominations, congregations, races and cultures that unites the diversity of The Church and ignites a passion to advance the Kingdom. It isn’t a proven business model and mixing up the DNA can be a messy job. But the result can be beautiful. It looks a lot more like The Bride every day.
A new liturgy of repentance, baptism
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
I’ve missed attending services at Woodland Hills for the past four weeks now—chalk it up to travel and family matters. It’s been delightful to catch up via podcast. I listened to the 7/16 message last week, which ended with the recitation of a home grown liturgy on baptism. Being new to liturgy, I’m not sure what those with liturgical backgrounds would make of this. Upon hearing it recited I felt compelled to key it in and share it more widely via blog. The declarations really relate to the topic of my most recent post on The Lost Art of Evangelism (Episode 8)—so this had special relevance to me.Renouncing Satan, His Works and His Pomp
By the grace of God and the empowering of the Holy Spirit, we who are called to be part of the Kingdom Revolution pledge our lives wholly to our Lord Jesus Christ
We renounce Satan, all his works and all his pomp.
We pledge to acquire all our life, worth, and security from Jesus Christ alone.
We renounce all idolatrous ways of getting life, worth and security.
We pledge to living in Christ-like love for all people, at all times, in all circumstances, including those who might regard themselves as our “enemies.”
We renounce all tribalism, all racism, all sectarianism, all hatred and all violence.
We pledge to living as a bridge between people and God and between people with one another.
We renounce the sinful walls that separate people from God and divide people along ethnic, national, political, generational and economic lines.
By the grace of God and the empowering of the Holy Spirit, we pledge our lives wholly to Jesus Christ,
We renounce Satan, all his works and all his pomp.
It's about time
Sunday, July 30, 2006
The New York Times ran a front page feature in today's paper about politics and evangelicalism that focused primarily on Woodland Hills, Greg Boyd and his Cross and the Sword sermon series that became the book, The Myth of a Christian Nation. You can read it in its NYT site context here. There is also a video piece that looks very good--let me know if anyone can get the audio to work (we had issues getting the sound to work).
We were in attendance a couple of months ago when the Times photographers were in our service getting some pics for this piece. Needless to say, today's article and chain reaction media exposure is bound to get Boyd and the church much more attention from all over the country. While our congregation has, in many ways, gone through the challenging times with this back in 2004 and moved on, I think the pressure from the outside will likely grow as we progress through the 2006 and 2008 elections.By this a.m. Boyd said he was getting an Email about every 60 seconds about the article. I wish he had his own blog so he could share some of this. I'm also imbedding a link to a PDF version to be accessible once the web page is archived by the Times. You can get it here.
Rediscovering the lost art of evangelism episode 8
Sunday, July 23, 2006
This is part 8 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 8:
Ignore pedigrees. Good evangelists aren’t proud. They don’t focus on the people with big titles and big reputations. Frankly, they'll meet with, and help, anyone who “gets it” and is willing to help them. This is much more likely to be the database administrator or secretary than the CIO.
This is a great principle of evangelism. Pride has no role. Anyone can be evangelized—anyone who is willing to listen. Do not play favorites or be prejudicial.
I’m going to drill down into the topic of prejudice with this post. Sorry for the digression. But I think it will be worth it.
I finally got around to seeing Crash on DVD last night. With two kids, we don’t often make it to a cinema to see films in their initial release.
Watching Crash was like a two-hour gut punch. With so many characters—most if not all exhibiting some form of prejudice, stereotyping or racism—it was too easy to find something of myself on the screen. Very troubling.
Now, I have deep agreement with the racial reconciliation mission of my church. I believe in equality under God for every person. All are made in His image. All are equally injured by sin. All have unsurpassable worth. This is high truth.
Col 3:11 TNIV “Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.”
Gal 3:28 TNIV “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Yet, I do see ugly glimpses of myself in the characters of Crash. While there are those extreme examples in the film (the kind that make you say, “I could never do or say that—that’s terrible!”), it’s the subtle behaviors that are the most disturbing—the well-hidden, barely noticed, but subversive feelings of insecurity and fear that tend to push us to our worst moments. A flippant remark. A judgmental facial expression. A wrong conclusion jumped to.Granted, it’s not like this world is a safe place. It’s a war zone (quite literally in many places). There’s a lot to be afraid of. Fear drives the Sherman tank of this spirit warfare right through our souls. We often mistake fellow human citizens for the spiritual insurgents that prey on a fallen humanity. We put labels and judgments on fellow victims of this warfare. Mug shots and suspect descriptions are on the 11 o’clock news every night. We find ready reinforcements for our fear all around us.
This kind of fear is behind my own thoughts and words when I descend to anything less than love for my fellow humans. Of this I continue to repent—as often as I must.
Colossians 3:7-8 TNIV “You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips.”
(Sidebar: Often Christians have defined “filthy language” in this passage as expletives, etc. I think this should be applied more broadly. “Filth,” as I choose to define it, must be any words or thoughts that degrade and devalue our fellow humans, even if we do it with G-rated or even biblical language. Crash is R-rated and full of filth, both in expletive and G-rated forms.)
Fear begets more fear. If I live in it, I will die in it.
Romans 8:12-16 TNIV “If you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live. For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.”
There is that wonderful idea that we are God’s children—His offspring, each one with the complete and total worth He ascribes to us.
This terrified old man of sin inside of me—the one that resists leaving my secure suburban bubble, avoids certain parts of the city, resists interacting with other races and mutters shameful stereotypes in my mind—must be daily put to death.
I’ve posted about fear and evangelism before in this series (episode 5), but I think it is very central to the question of racial reconciliation on an individual level. What the film Crash exposed for me with painful clarity was the leading role fear plays.
But I know there is no fear in love. Fear is a manifestation of evil. As difficult as it may be to believe at times, this societal fear we are immersed in is connected to the sin that enslaves all of humanity. It was not God’s idea. But love is God’s answer.
1 John 4:16-18 TNIV “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear….”
How do I do it, then? How do I live in love and drive out fear every moment of every day?
I need to step out and go to where I can break through this enemy stronghold and tear down the prison walls. I need to live this out intentionally by building relationships across these societal divides. I need to put myself in a position to act in love and for love’s cause. Too often I prefer to avoid it instead.
It’s like having a phobia. One can either avoid the triggers or try to beat it. Often people undergoing psychotherapy to cure a phobia work towards a point where they confront and experience the thing that they are most afraid of: flying in a plane, riding in an elevator, listening to David Hasselhoff music—whatever it may be. They must ultimately act to break through the stronghold and gain victory over their fears.
So it is with my own fears. But I am not asked to act alone. I have my Father to embrace me as His child. I have the Holy Spirit to empower me. I have Jesus to show me how to live this way. I can act in love with great confidence knowing that I participate in dealing the death blow to the real enemy in the spiritual war to overcome the divisive evil that enslaves humanity. But I must act.
Romans 12:21 TNIV “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
[POST AMENDED 7/28/06]
A few days after I posted this is stumbled across this passage in James in reading to my Daughter. This pretty much drives it home (and writes me under the table):
James 2:1-10 TNIV "My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. Suppose someone comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor person in filthy old clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the one wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the one who is poor, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,” have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?
Listen, my dear brothers and sisters: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? Are they not the ones who are blaspheming the noble name of him to whom you belong?
If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing right. But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers. For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it."
Mercy me.
Freedom isn't free (but it can be tacky)
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
A few short months ago I posted a plug for a great new book by Greg Boyd—The Myth of a Christian Nation. The book cover depicts a redone photo of the statue of liberty holding a cross instead of a torch. Lest anyone think that such a depiction is merely an isolated visual commentary, one congregation has gone and actually spent a quarter of a million dollars to revise Lady Liberty in just such a fashion: Our Lord’s Lady Liberty–The Statue of Liberation Through Christ. I don’t think they would be fans of Boyd’s work.
They have an elaborate web site with Q&A document to help justify their artistic and evangelistic endeavor. Of course, one could argue with many of their points. However, I was disappointed by not being able to find this question or a response: Don’t you think something this completely cheesy devalues both American patriotism and your gospel message? Well, we live in the land of the free, indeed—but that doesn’t guarantee us freedom from tacky (and wasteful) Christian artifacts.
Thanks to Zach Lind http://www.findingrhythm.com/blog/ for blogging this item. I like your blog a lot. Lind is the Drummer for Jimmy Eat World.
Church rotates on its axis
Saturday, July 15, 2006
It’s been all over the emergent blogosphere since last week—Willow Creek shuts down it’s AXIS worship service (its well known and much lauded Gen-X, then also Y, service begun in the 90s). After taking some time to discuss this with my friend, who found himself inside and then outside leading a similar effort at another megachurch, I went back to reread Dan Kimball’s post about it from last week when the news broke. Inside of this very insightful post was some brilliant wisdom that I think extends beyond just generationally focused worship services to an even wider megachurch trend of creating culturally relevant worship venues. Here’s the excerpt that makes the critical point not to be lost in all the hullabaloo over returning to more “intergenerational” worship:"When launching a new worship gathering in an existing church, the question is - are the changes occurring out there, mainly generational (music style, appearance, language) which changes every generation? Or are the changes bigger than that in worldview(s) and more about how people learn, specific values people have, how people think of God and the spiritual world etc.?
If it is just a generational change, then might as well just change the music, add some candles and create hip environment and play a video of the senior pastor. [Sound familiar?] That’s doing some outer dressing work—and I think that if we really peeled back the layers of the majority of these alternative services in existing churches—that is what you would find.
However, if the changes in culture are bigger than that…then it is absurd to think that creating a different aesthetic environment and changing the music is really being missional. If we are specifically looking at a mission to our culture, then it means looking at community different, spiritual formation, evangelism, membership, leadership, communication etc.—the whole culture of a church will change. Not just what happens in a worship gathering."
Careful little mouths what you say
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
I grabbed a news clipping from Monday’s Chicago Tribune and was interested to read that the United Pentecostal Church in Harvey, IL is paying people $25 to attend their church services—a novel new evangelism approach.This is fascinating to me. I’m not going to jump all over it with an opinion on the merits of this idea. It’s definitely worthy of some discussion and thought. I believe I may have half-heartedly suggested this idea a few years back to my own congregation at the time.
But there are two specific statements made by Christians in the article that I do wish to comment about because I think there is something to be learned for pastors and lay ministers alike:
In the article a pastor commented on the evangelism campaign saying, “It doesn't matter how we get them in the door as long as we get them here.” Later in the piece, another church member is quoted saying, “We’re told to spread the gospel by any means.”
Now, I believe that both of these folks have the best intentions at heart in spreading the Gospel. But this illustrates with painful clarity the need to be aware of what we are saying to the world when we describe something like evangelism to a reporter.To be sure, the reporter did nothing but record what they said. But with media relations, it’s what you do say that can cook your goose in the end.
I think most Christians, upon reflecting, would agree that those two statements are hyperbolic and not theologically true. The problem is, that’s not how an outsider would necessarily understand them.
There are certain things we definitely would not do to “get people in the door” or spread the Gospel. The great commission does not come with the additional instruction to employ “any and all means necessary.” We do draw the line somewhere.
This reminds me of one story from the 80s TV show “Real People” that featured a stripper for Jesus—a women who felt her professional skills could help bring people (men) to God. I remember watching this family program when I was a kid and exchanging some very confused looks with my brother (we were preacher’s kids and had some understanding of conventional evangelism). We also giggled a fair amount, as boys are apt to do in response to such subject matter.
That is, of course, an absurd example to illustrate my point. In the case of paying people to attend church, I’m sure the fellow Christians I mentioned were simply overstating their justification. But the problem with hyperbole in today’s literal media culture is that our words can be used to seemingly demolish all kinds of ethical boundaries. A reporter or reader may not understand the comments within the same sub cultural context—and won’t necessarily assume the same or any level of exaggeration was used to convey the ideas. In effect, this means our words are most often taken at face value. A theological inexactitude is mistaken for uniform Christian dogma.
This makes Christ’s instruction in the Sermon on the Mount even more valuable:
Matthew 5:33-37 TNIV “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.’ But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. All you need to say is simply ‘Yes,’ or ‘No;’ anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”
I don’t think exaggeration is wrong—please don’t misunderstand. In fact, there is a lot of hyperbole in the teachings of Jesus, Paul and others in scripture. I love Hyperbole. Hyperbole is a friend of mine.
What I’m suggesting is that in the context of talking to news media, an awareness of how our words will be heard and/or read in their context is as critical as what we are saying. Straightforward, direct messages, as suggested in Matthew 5:37, are most often the best route to gaining a proper understanding from your audience.
How often have we commented that someone was misquoted or had their words taken out of context in a news article? I’m not promising that this can be avoided entirely, but I do suggest that we are better served using simple and face-value messages with the news media.
Rediscovering the lost art of evangelism episode 7
Saturday, June 24, 2006
This is part 7 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 7:
"Provide a safe first step. The path to adopting a cause should have a slippery slope. There shouldn't be large barriers like revamping the entire IT infrastructure. For example, the safe first step to recruit an evangelist for the environment is not requiring that she chain herself to a tree; it’s to ask her to start recycling and taking shorter showers."
Here’s where things might get a little bit controversial with me. For a long time now many evangelicals have embraced this concept of providing “a safe first step” by redesigning the Sunday worship service experience. The thinking is that The Church should make their buildings and worship times as comfortable and inviting as possible. It’s even been heralded by some church growth experts as “the showroom floor” principle applying a consumerist metaphor to spreading the Gospel.
We’ve invested loads of money in buildings, lighting, comfy seats, multimedia, cup holders, etc. We’ve redesigned the weekly service to be experientially satisfying for modern consumers, including current and individualistic pop worship music, dynamic video production, drama and comedy, and a life-practical sermon (often in a culturally relevant serial format) all presented within a carefully timed, one-hour package. Undoubtedly deciding to visit one of these services is about as safe as it gets. As a visitor (read: prospective customer), it’s all about serving you.
Aside from my obvious bias in how I wrote the above lines, I’m not going to dissect this approach right off the bat. Instead, let’s put it aside for a moment, and think about Kawasaki’s Principle 7 differently. How did Jesus provide a safe first step in his ministry on earth?
To be sure, Jesus wasn’t always a “safe” person. He often challenged the status quo in society, and his closest allies, the 12 disciples, must have certainly felt nervous about their own safety from time to time. It reminds me of the passage in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe where Lucy asks Mr. Beaver, “is Aslan safe?” To which he replies, “No, child, Aslan is a lion. He is not safe, but he is good.”
So instead of defining a relationship with Jesus in terms of risk, think in terms of what a safe first step towards His Kingdom would be. Here the last shall be first and the first shall be last. Here the economy of love is generous and free:
Matthew 5:45-47 TNIV “…He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?”
Brain McLaren writes in The Secret Message of Jesus, “[Jesus] loved to compare the kingdom of God to a party. He would demonstrate the open border of the kingdom of God by hosting or participating in parties where even the most notorious outcasts and sinners were welcome.”
Jesus’ first act of ministry (and sign of the kingdom) was making sure a wedding host didn’t make a major social mistake by running out of wine at his own wedding party. Jesus did this even though his “hour had not yet come.” (John 2:4 TNIV) A quiet act of kindness and grace: Jesus’ generous and kind spirit was the embodiment of His Kingdom message.
This was the standard mode of His ministry. Rather than set up a central venue or regular event (even though people gathered to listen to him teach in droves) in Jerusalem, he was perpetually on tour. He quite often traveled the fringes, met people on their turf, got involved in their homes and lives. And this also was his charge when sending out his disciples on their mission.
Mark 6:8-10 TNIV “Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. Wear sandals but not an extra shirt. Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town.”
In other words, be mobile. Step out. Go to them. You’ll be walking a lot, so wear sandals. But don’t be self sufficient. Be vulnerable. Be dependent on others (and God) to get on in life. Learn to accept generosity as well as extend it to others. Stay in a host home that welcomes you. I honestly believe these instructions were intended to help the Disciples learn how to conduct themselves in relating to people as much as they were to facilitate the logistics of their mission work.
The generous spirit of Jesus ministry was exemplified in his open invitation, table fellowship evangelism. His presence, conversation, friendship was the safe first step toward transformation. He took a step toward us to make it safe for us to take a step toward him.
McLaren continues, “By accepting and welcoming people into his presence, just as they were, with all their problems and imperfections, Jesus was exposing them to His example and to His secret message. In this way He could challenge them to think—and think again—and consider becoming part of the kingdom of God so they could experience and participate in the transformation that flows from being in interactive relationship with God and others.”
So what is the safe first step that The Church can provide for people in today’s world. I would argue that enough time, energy and resources have been dedicated toward creating bigger and better weekly, 1 hour experiences. It is possible to over invest in something—and I think we may have over invested our Kingdom resources in this single form for the past two decades (and likely longer). I’m not saying abandon the effort, but rather moderate the event emphasis and reallocate the resources. Instead, we need to take a step toward those on the borders of the kingdom (to steal another metaphor from McLaren).
What if all the money (read: tithes) spent on venues, sound systems, talent and media was funneled back through the congregation and spent on throwing extravagant and generous parties for our neighbors. Would that be heresy? What if 80 percent of the church budget was directly spent on connecting individuals with the safest first step of all: transformative friendships? What would that look like? I don’t exactly have the answer, but I’m willing to think differently about it. Can I exchange my cozy slippers for some tough leather sandals?
I served briefly on a mega-aspiring church’s marketing committee just a couple years ago. The ad hoc group was tasked with developing marketing messages and tactics to promote the weekly services or sermon series. While this can be a fun exercise for a PR and marketing professional, I began confusing people when I suggested that we take the church outreach (read: marketing) budget and look for ways to rain love and generosity on people in the community. Instead of a 4-color postcard mailer for the DaVinci Code sermon series, let’s develop local teams within our congregations that can create and give gift baskets to their immediate neighbors (with yummy home-baked goodies, free transit passes, or a new tree or plant, etc.). Then use the gift-giving as a means to invite their neighbors to dinner at home, or a small group gathering, or a back-yard barbeque. No church promotional brochure or flashy church service promo DVD inside. No marketing trinkets and trash. No buzz marketing campaigns or brand building tactics. Just something highly personal, generous and home-spun. Something leading to a lasting friendship. A safe first step.
They have since sent out two DVDs in mass mailings featuring their new worship center and worship team music at a cost I can only imagine.
My questions are these: Are we more interested in growing weekly church services or expanding the borders of the kingdom? Have we capitulated Christ’s calling to pursue transformative relationships (safer for the seeker) in favor of leveraging our event-based marketing strategies (safer for us)? Does this need to be an either/or strategy as it seems to be in many cases?
Jesus is calling us out of the safety of our buildings and on to the borders of the Kingdom to extend welcome to the world-weary immigrants who seek safe passage. If we want to provide a safe first step, we need to step out and get our sandals good and worn out.
The Holy in the common place
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Cousin Joel’s post (Weeds) connects with a song that I mentioned in a comment over on The Voiz blog by Aaron Flores. He had posted about “what it means to be a Christian” last month which couldn’t help bring this song to my mind: “I Just Showed Up for My Own Life” by Sara Groves and Joel Hanson. Since I have been remiss in pointing out the specific song for him, I thought I’d do it here. (Aaron is a church planter, family guy and prolific vlogger.)Cousin Joel’s spiritual revelation brought about by weeds and lawn mowing is a perfect example of finding “the holy in the common place” that Sara sings about. The lyrics follow.
Just Showed Up for My Own Life
by Sara Groves and Joel Hanson
Spending my time sleep walking
Moving my mouth but not saying a thing
Hoping the changes would take by working their way from the outside in
I was in love with an idea
Preoccupied with how a life should appear
Spending my time at the surface repairing the holes in the shiny veneer
There are so many ways to hide
There are so many ways not to feel
There are so many ways to deny what is real
And I just showed up for my own life
And I'm standing here taking it in and it sure looks bright
I'm going to live my life inspired
Look for the holy in the common place
Open the windows and feel all that's honest and real until I'm truly amazed
I'm going to feel all my emotions
I'm going to look you in the eyes
I'm going to listen and hear until it's finally clear and it changes our lives
There are so many ways to hide
There are so many ways not to feel
There are so many ways to deny what is real
And I just showed up for my own life
And I'm standing here taking it in and it sure looks bright
Oh the glory of God is man fully alive
Oh the glory of God is man fully alive
Weeds
Saturday, June 17, 2006
My wife’s cousin Joel (professional chef and proud father of three in Omaha) recently sent out a writ to his pastor and family that deserves a wider audience (as if this blog would ever be considered a wider audience). I don’t think Joel puts his thoughts down like this all that often—which makes this gem even more significant to share. Read it here (pdf).
Beyond his very insightful central message about the spiritual weeds that encroach upon our souls, it also serves as a reminder to us all to keep our spiritual eyes and ears open in the midst of every day things such as mowing the lawn. You never know what life lessons the Master has in store. Makes me wonder what I missed yesterday when I mowed the lawn with my iPod earbuds jammed in my ears, slowly deafening me. Why do I sometimes prefer to be numb instead of fully alive? At least I’ll get another shot at the divine in a few more days.
Peace and stillness at 1,110 miles per minute
Monday, June 12, 2006
I’ve added something to the header of my blog: the number 1,110. This is quite literally the speed the earth travels (1,110 miles per minute, or 18.5 miles per second) as it orbits the sun. You could say it is the speed at which we travel.
I reflect on this now after putting in just under a year writing this blog. It’s all gone by so quickly. While our orbital speed around the sun remains constant (not technically true, but practically speaking), it would seem that the rest of our lives continue to accelerate. The centrifugal force increases. We begin to spin out of control, away from the center.The reality of this was brought home to me last year when I listened to a sermon about the J-curve phenomenon, and reclaiming the centrality of Jesus in everyday life (recorded 3/28/2004). Some of the research behind the sermon was based on the work of physician and theo-futurist, Richard A Swenson in his book Margin. It has been around for a few years, but I highly recommend this work. The statistics alone will freak you out.
In the sermon, entitled “The Widening Gyre,” the speaker quotes part of a poem by William Butler Yeats:
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
I won’t try to re-preach the sermon here, but I hope this background helps explain something of how I came up with this blog’s title. At least, when you see 1,110 you’ll be reminded of this little object lesson:
You can be traveling at 85 times the speed of sound and yet be still and at peace orbiting the constant, stationary and centered grip of the Master. Or, you can lose this tethering force, and began accelerating in an ever-widening gyre, faster and farther away from who and what you are in Him.
How fast are you spinning?
I’m with stupid
Thursday, June 08, 2006
I posted a couple weeks ago about a C.S. Lewis quote and its applicability to the current mega-church and mega-aspiring church proclivity toward entertainment media in their worship services—to the point of making the Sunday event their primary evangelism approach. I riffed on Marchall McLuhan a bit in that piece, and was fascinated to read that my application of his medium and message theories to church practices was not at all unique. The EmergentYS imprint of Zondervan has recently published a book by Shane Hipps, Lead Pastor of Trinity Mennonite Church in Phoenix, Arizona: The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel, and Church. 
Hipps knows his subject well, having a former career in advertising and communication planning for high profile brands. In the book “Hipps analyzes the broader impact of technology and media on the church,” according to Amazon.com.This post is no book review, but don’t be surprised if insights from this work pop up in some of my posts down the road. Like my early indications about Hipps, I’m not opposed to new communication avenues in worship, church community or outreach, but I’m very serious about analyzing the implications of what we are doing--how it affect our message, our relationship with God, fellow believers and fellow humans. Context is crucial, which gets at my recent post and quote from Watts Wacker.
One of the most interesting research papers I wrote in college was about religious broadcasting, and the implications of presenting the Gospel message in the TV context. That was in 1989, fresh from the media madness of the PTL scandal (which was the topic of my High School senior research paper). Today the context is TV, HD, Film, iPod, MediaShout, PSP, Flash, Blog, V-Cast, MySpace, etc. The question is still relevant, if not more so.
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.
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.
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.Rediscovering the lost art of evangelism episode 5
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
This is part 5 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 5:
Let people test drive the cause. Essentially, say to people, “We think you are smart. Therefore, we aren’t going to bludgeon you into becoming our customer. Try our product, take it home, download it, and then decide if it’s right for you.” A test drive is much more powerful than an ad.
I’m going to focus on one aspect of this principle here because I plan to touch on the rest of it in the next two episodes (those two principles seem highly related to each other and to this one). I don’t want this nugget of insight to get lost in the shuffle.
Non Christians are not dumb.
I don’t know how often I’ve discerned the subtle ways in which we marginalize the intelligence of the lost—in my own language, in sermons, in Christian media, web posts, or even cheesy Christian radio morning show DJs. There can be a smug judgmentalism that creeps into our discourse. And when you listen to it with the ears of an outsider (and perhaps the ears of Jesus), it can be down right offensive.
Yet, we Christians can’t even agree on the details of the Gospel truth ourselves (unless you think some 33,000-plus U.S. denominations divided over theological lines something The Bride of Christ can be proud of).
Let me state the obvious: Faith does not signify superior intelligence, any more than superior intelligence produces faith.
Yes, we think we’ve found the eternal truth of the universe. Yes, it’s hard to see why this isn’t obvious to everyone. From personal experience, it can be a tad bit frustrating to see people who are undoubtedly smarter than I am reject this truth.
So does this threaten our faith? Are we worried that moving up the ladder of intelligence will produce the same result with us? I think for some, this is an underlying fear. All of our posturing about the greater truth we’ve found amounts to nothing more than a defense mechanism for our self esteem and transforms our walk of faith into the crutch so many outsiders judge us by.
This insecurity is not of God. How this insecurity makes us act—what it makes us say, likewise, is not of His Kingdom.
I John 4:17-18 TNIV “This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”
While I had this passage in my mind while writing this post, I didn’t remember what preceded it in this chapter until I looked it up. The writer spends the earlier portion discussing how to respond to those that reject Christ, or distort the truth—and what to conclude by it. It’s rather telling that he then moves on to talk about loving without fear.
So what is there to be afraid of? In our striving to ascribe worth to others (see prior posts), let us include a generous assumption of human, God-given intelligence as an act of love. This becomes a kind of golden rule of evangelism—which really should be modus operandi for The Church in all of its dialogue with the world.
You may even want to apply the aphorism my mother told me once in an effort to keep me from becoming too smug when I excelled at something in school: “Just remember, no matter how high your grades are, there’s always someone smarter.” (This was always preceded by a generous amount of praise and encouragement, of course.)
Assume intelligence, rather than ignorance. Like Kawasaki says to potential converts, “We think you’re smart.” As St. Thomas Aquinas prayed, “Lord, in my zeal for the love of truth, let me not forget the truth about love.”
Rediscovering the lost art of evangelism episode 4
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
This is part 4 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 4:
“Localize the pain. No matter how revolutionary your product, don't describe it using lofty, flowery terms like “revolutionary,” “paradigm shifting,” and “curve jumping.” Macintosh wasn't positioned as the third paradigm in personal computing; instead, it increased the productivity and creativity of one person with one computer. People don't buy “revolutions.” They buy “aspirins” to fix the pain or “vitamins” to supplement their lives.”
I’ve noticed something much more in recent months. I don’t know if I’m just more sensitive to it or what, but there seems to be a lot of marketing hype being used in The Church today. You see it the most in the advertisements that fill the pages of Christian magazines (which seem to be growing in number every day). Ads for ministry/evangelism tours (a showcase of several different preachers or teachers), various conferences (youth, worship, marriage, women, men, etc.) and other products in the Christian market.
Without passing judgment on specific ministries (or businesses), what they all seem to have in common is an extraordinary amount of marketing hype—the kind of lofty, inspiring language described above.
As a marketing and public relations professional I understand the motivation around this. They want to get their message out—and they want to cut through the clutter to get people to attend their outreach events. Attendance makes the endeavor both profitable and means that “people” are being reached with the message (which, at face value, would be the Gospel).
But what if all that hype, while successful in corralling the sheep that have already been tagged as part of the flock, was actually an inhibition to others that really need to hear this message?
Now, before I go too far here, I’m willing to grant that there are new converts reached by many of these ministries—and that some hype has its place. What I’m talking about is evangelism, and the process by which you either attract people, or maybe put them off, or confuse them about the Gospel altogether.
If we take Kawasaki seriously, and consider his experience in “converting” people to become deeply loyal customers, then I think this particular principle has something important to tell us: Effective evangelism also is about people’s pain.
All the hype and marketing spin in the world can’t connect with this core reality. What Kawasaki is saying is that people don’t necessarily look to buy into the grand and glorious messages of The Church or religion. They’re looking for deliverance. They’re highly motivated to find a way to end their pain. And if we are to connect them with the saving message of the Gospel, we need to understand this—and seek to understand their pain. This must, in turn, inform how we advance our message to the world.
While there were times Jesus was not all that easy to understand, I would never consider his words to be filled with hype. His stories, instead, involved the lives and challenges of everyday people. His message of the Kingdom and his acts of compassion were about healing and deliverance—the “signs” of the Kingdom. He came to end the pain.
We are charged with advancing this Kingdom of healing and light against the kingdom of pain and darkness.
So instead of spending so much effort on how to hype the message in an advert for maximum marketing impact, perhaps we should spend the bulk of our energy on getting to know people’s pain—and why the Good News of this advancing Kingdom is the Rx they are looking for.
Don’t interpret this to mean that we can promise people a pain free life in this war-torn world. But we have the ultimate answer—and this we can promise, through flickerings of the Kingdom life on earth today, to its final and culminating establishment over all the earth tomorrow.
Revelation 21:3-4 TNIV “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
More on this in my next post in this series.
The unpopular politics of the Kingdom
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Greg Boyd has finally put his provocative “Cross and the Sword” sermon series in book form with the upcoming Zondervan release of The Myth of a Christian Nation.
I listened to this particular sermon series a little over a year ago as a podcast—and was simultaneously blown away and gratified to hear some of my own thinking confirmed and expanded upon. I also have to admit that I was challenged as well. (To subscribe to podcasts from Woodland Hills Church, hit my Church Online page for the RSS feed.)If you’re wondering about my current view of faith and politics, this book will likely tell you all you need to know. This excerpt is a good start. I also must acknowledge that having my friend Pete in Magnetic North (my on and off band) had an impact on my thinking as well—one I very much appreciate (not that I am going to presume Pete agrees with Boyd on this or other topics—that’s only for him to say. Just props for being a positive influence on me). And, of course, Dawnshelle, her brother Derek (and wife Becky) and I have shared many conversations around the kitchen tables of life.
I recognize now that people are already starting to buzz and fume about this book and its title, getting all sorts of things out of whack in the process. My Mother relayed some opinions that friends of hers had shared about Boyd when she told them where I was now attending. At the time, they seemed way out of left field. Now that I know this book is gaining some pre-release notoriety, I can see where they may be coming from, even though much is getting confused. Boyd is in for a firestorm of criticism over this work. I wish people would just read the book. Every Christian needs to read this book. (My comments are based on the sermons, of course. I have not read the book yet myself--but look forward to it.)
Boyd has said Woodland Hills lost 1,000 people over this sermon series.
Now they can make that 996, net.
Missional impossible
Thursday, March 23, 2006
In the world of evangelical Christianity, a newly coined word or phase lives but a moment as a interesting and valuable way to capture a new idea, and dies a thousand deaths as a overused and misappropriated buzz-word. Think: post-modern, emerging, relevant, and now, missional.I saw “missional” show up recently in a powerpoint presentation as a way to explain why a congregation was endeavoring to start satellite venues to expand its reach. The video-preaching, multi-campus plan was referred to as “missional.” I think that was the moment I decided to quickly exit to grab a Caribou, lest I rush the stage screaming like a crazy activist. Discretion is the better part of valor.
To be fair, missional is not an easy concept to wrap your head around. I confess that I should not be regarded as any kind of authority. But I have spent some time learning about it from those that are immersed in it up to their eyeballs. I’m attempting to understand it better, and practice it more in my own walk.
So when I see it reduced to a new buzz-word in an attempt to make a trendy and ill-conceived mega-church expansion plan sound more hip and relevant, I cringe. I’m even more discouraged that they may have picked up the term from me (see here), although I may give myself far too much credit (or blame).
For this purpose, I will relate the definition I began with, so aptly described in Brian McLaren’s Generous Orthodoxy:
“Jesus comes with saving love for the world. He creates the church as a missional community to join him in His mission of saving the world. He invites me to be a part of this community to experience his saving love and participate in it.”
“[This] eliminates old dichotomies like ‘evangelism’ and ‘social action.’ Both are integrated in expressing saving love for the world. Those who want to become Christians (whether through proclamation or demonstration) we welcome. Those who don’t, we love and serve, joining God in seeking their good, their blessing, their shalom.”
McLaren later quotes an unnamed source, “…in a pluralistic world, a religion is valued based on the benefits it brings to its nonadherents.” Which begs a missional question, what benefits of the Good News are we bringing to our communities and cities?
So why do I get so worked up about this? Because I’m very interested in people of faith being exposed to what being missional truly is. And I’m dismayed that a congregation of 1,000-plus, well-intentioned believers now think that being missional is all about starting satellite video church venues and having small groups that center around the weekly service and sermon series.
McLaren continues, “Just imagine if every Christian could learn that this is what it means to be a missional Christian: to join Jesus in expressing God’s love for the whole world, to follow Jesus in his mission of saving love for the world.”
This is simply a word to the wise for church leaders (which includes three fingers pointing directly back at me). Please understand a word, concept or idea more fully before you present it to the laity, and resist the temptation to bootstrap it onto your own ideas to give them more legitimacy.
Rediscovering the lost art of evangelism episode 3
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
This is part 3 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 3:
"Look for agnostics, ignore atheists. A good evangelist can usually tell if people understand and like a product in five minutes. If they don't, cut your losses and avoid them. It is very hard to convert someone to a new religion when he believes in another god. It’s much easier to convert a person who has no proof about the goodness or badness of the evangelist’s product."
For much of my life I’ve had the mistaken idea that “witnessing” was a task accomplished by successfully arguing “the case for faith” to those that had heretofore not accepted the idea. This is not to say that some people don’t require or benefit from a well reasoned argument that they should believe in the gospel of Jesus. In my case, however, I always felt very uncomfortable and ill-equipped in this role. I think this third principle of Kawasaki gets at that for me. It’s really hard to argue your way to a conversion with an atheist. Kudos to those that do it successfully. It’s not my gift.
It took a long time for me to start to see another way to go about this.
While Christ spent some time talking about who he was, he never really debated whether or not there was a God. Most if not all of the people He spoke to needed no such convincing. And I’m not sure things are that different with people today.
Instead, I think today an agnostic is all about asking questions. And there are many places that offer them answers. Answers that all make well-reasoned arguments.
But answering questions isn’t limited to speaking or writing the words of truth as we know it. We need to become the answers with our very lives.
Col 3:8-11 “Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”
I love this passage. Here we have love and racial equality in a perfect blend.
While people may ask us many valid intellectual and spiritual questions regarding the faith, and we should stand ready to give an answer as we are called to (I Peter 3:15-16), we also must clothe ourselves with the answer to their deeper question: “If there is a God, does He love me?” In doing this, we are answering, “Yes, He does. And His love looks like this. His love looks like Jesus” Only then does what we say with our mouths matter. We are the proof.
If I persist in mentally disparaging the person I am trying to convey the Gospel to (as I am prone to do when I argue), I am doomed. If, instead, I put on love, and apportion them the worth that they have in Christ, I can play a role in the work of the Holy Spirit to draw them to Himself.
The attraction to Jesus while he walked this earth was not principally his well-reasoned arguments or superior logic (which he had in spades and primarily aimed at the religious elite), but it was about who He was. He loved. He healed. He told stories. He spent his time with everyday people. His time was limited, and he knew they were worth it.
I can’t be a rock star apologist. I can aspire to be like Jesus, and in doing that become the best answer to an agnostic’s questions.
Rediscovering the lost art of evangelism episode 2
Thursday, March 02, 2006
This is part 2 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 2:
"Love the cause. “Evangelist” isn't simply a job title. It's a way of life. It means that the evangelist totally loves the product and sees it as a way to bring the “good news.” A love of the cause is the second most important determinant of the success of an evangelist--second only to the quality of the cause itself. No matter how great the person, if he doesn't love the cause, he cannot be a good evangelist for it."
In my last post I wrote about “doing love” as the primary (maybe even primal) means of evangelism. In the context of Kawasaki’s second principle, “love the cause,” we can take some steps away from this idea being a nice platitude and closer to making it an everyday reality.
I read two separate items in the past few days which helped me better define this idea of doing love as our chief cause.
The first was a quote of the week from Judith Hougen that went along with her January 29, 2006 post, “Knowing and Loving.” It comes from Parker Palmer’s book, To Know As We Are Known.
“The intimate link between loving and knowing is implicit throughout the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. The Hebrew Bible uses the word ‘know’ to indicate the conjugal relation of husband and wife (as in ‘Abraham knew Sarah’), the same word it uses for our knowledge of God and of the created world. The most common New Testament word for ‘know’ is also used for lovemaking. The images that inform the biblical understanding of what it means to know--images of personal involvement and mutuality--are neither accidental nor antiquated. They reflect the quality of knowing at its deepest reaches.”
There was an interesting comment discussion after my episode 1 post in this series (link to those comments here), and reading this Palmer quote led me to make this observation: To love someone—especially to the point of having an overt evangelistic impact—we must be willing to know them. To love well, one must know well.
Take this to the utmost level, God knows and loves us infinitely and perfectly.
As His beloved adopted sons and daughters, we are called to play a part in God knowing/loving others, and in others beginning to know/love God as His children.
In simplistic and clichéd terms, to know people is to love them. And “loving this cause,” as Kawasaki puts it, is performed by striving to know people as God knows them.
Personally I am guilty of having completely wrong ideas about what love is. This has begun to change slowly as I have aged—more so now that I am a parent. And my long-held, dysfunctional ideas about love seem to be pretty widespread among Christians. This passage from Don Miller in Blue Like Jazz really captured this for me. He describes the prevailing economic metaphor often used to describe or define love and relationships.
“The problem with Christian culture is that we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. … If somebody is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us, and, perhaps we feel they are priceless. I could see it so clearly, and I could feel it in the pages of my life. This was the thing that smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. The church used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who didn’t agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did.”
As I read that for the first time I found myself in violent agreement and deeply convicted. It was a personal revelation worth much more than the price of the book. Miller continues:
“I used love like money, but love doesn’t work like money. It is not a commodity. When we barter with it, we all lose. When the church does not love its enemies, it fuels their rage. It makes them hate us more.”
It’s pretty easy for an American, white-male, middle to upper class, conservative republican type like I am (or maybe once was in the case of the latter two) to embrace and live this economic model of love. It’s really emotional supply side economics. And in my observation this attitude is exhibited by such a large percentage of the evangelical church, that I believe there is a critical need for a real love revolution—a revival of love.
In another of Miller’s books, Searching for God Knows What, he makes this observation on Scripture’s defining metaphors of our relationship with God:
“Biblically, you’re hard-pressed to find theological ideas divorced from their relational context. There are, essentially, three dominant scriptural metaphors describing our relationship with God: sheep to a shepherd, child to a father and bride to a bridegroom. In fact, few places in Scripture speak to the Christian conversion experience through any method other than relational metaphor.”
More of this particular excerpt can be found here—additional food for thought on evangelism.
This knowing and loving is all relational—and can be exhibited at all levels when we think about doing love personally, locally and globally. The personal context is obvious, albeit the most challenging for me. Likewise, doing love locally means coming to know your surrounding community and culture. Rather than random acts of love (which are still positive things), knowing the personality, needs and issues of your communities makes expressions of love more intentional and effective from a Kingdom perspective. Globally it is the same idea, but at a macro level. Knowing your global community can help drive your political outlook and shape your democratic voice (if you have one) from the perspective of wanting to express love and compassion as a nation.
To “love the cause” of God’s love for humanity and truly begin to love others, I must first dislodge and discard my old defining metaphor for love. Love is not currency. Relationships are not a zero-sum game. This is not to say doing love and truly knowing others is without risks and the potential for pain. It most certainly is. Early church history is filled with accounts of such sacrifice—leading back to Christ’s ultimate act. But the Source of love is infinite, inexhaustible and true.
Rediscovering the lost art of evangelism episode 1
Sunday, February 26, 2006
This is 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 1:
“Create a cause. The starting point of evangelism is having a great thing to evangelize. A cause seizes the moral high ground. It is a product or service that improves the lives of people, ends bad things, or perpetuates good things. It is not simply an exchange of things/services for money.”
In the context of a Christ follower, the question of having “a cause” may be too quickly and easily answered. After all, our cause should be very clear, right?
Mark 16:15 TNIV “He said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.’”
But I don’t understand the great commission as my ultimate cause. Rather, I see it as an outgrowth of something far more profound. The great commission meets the great commandment:
Deuteronomy 6:5 TNIV “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
Love is at the core of who God is. And so the cause, as I understand it, is love. It is a love that seeks to include me in the divine and triune bond of infinite love between the Son, the Father and the Spirit.
This is what I aspire to (and in fact have attained in Christ)—and this is what I must let drive me.
John 4:13 TNIV “Those who drink the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
John 6:35-37 TNIV “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
This is LIFE worth living both in the temporal and the eternal. Forget selling more fire insurance. Forget selling a more tidy and cohesive earthly life. Forget “selling” anything.
Let’s put it another way. If our 80 years of earthly life were to be all that we would ever have—no after-life in a heaven or hell of eternity, and no tangible earthly benefits—would we still choose to be bonded to Christ in love, versus a life spent apart from His love in the pursuit of our individual happiness?
Our own depravity and combatant evil powers may hold us down on this, but we can still recognize true love. You can’t sell it, but everyone knows it when they see it. And being “in love” is worth it, even without considering our own finitude. Whether we choose to respond to His love or not, we know this innately—I think because we were fashioned by Him to know this. We’re wired to want and need His love.
But do we live a life “in love” with Him, or in our evangelism are we selling something else altogether and just hoping we can develop a better, more effective marketing plan for it? Have we reduced our cause to “an exchange of things/services for money” hoping to convert as many units as we can so that we win a set of steak knives?
Indeed, this cause requires a re-think of the modern evangelism paradigm, where people are attracted by clever messaging, gathered in an auditorium for an event, presented with an entertaining sales pitch and given an opportunity to respond (with financial support, and with raised hand or repeated prayer). We ask people to come and “get saved”—but from what? And to what?
Instead, how should we best express this great love? Personally? Locally? Globally?
Love is our true cause.
As in Kawasaki’s principle of evangelism, our cause truly “ends bad things” (separation from our Creator’s love) and “perpetuates good things” (abundant life via infinite and eternal love).
I want to help save people from a life without His love, and to life made full by His love. I want to do it by following His example—His way of evangelism.
1 John 3:16-18 TNIV “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for one another. If any one of you has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in you? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.”
You want to be a better evangelist? Here is any easy, two-step formula:
Step 1: Do love
Step 2: Repeat step one
Lessons from a different sort of evangelist
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Steve Knight, Minnesota native, blogger and long lost pal relocated to NC in the Billy Graham corporate move, pointed out a post by Guy Kawasaki last month that got my brain buzzing.
Kawasaki is an author, speaker and venture capitalist in the tech world. He came to notoriety in the 80s as the Macintosh “Evangelist” at Apple Computer—widely seen as the first role of its kind in the business world. His approach has gone on to impact how companies market their products ever since.I preface this with a caveat about the dangers inherent in applying business principles or marketing tactics to church evangelism. I loathe applying businesses approach to church leadership, ecclesiology and outreach—put me on record. What struck me when I read Kawasaki’s post was how his 10 principles of evangelism surpassed business and marketing “tactics” and suggest an authenticity that rings true to me more than some of the ways churches are currently attempting to do evangelism.
So here goes--my first series. Take these for what they are worth. My opinions are based on my own experiences (with my own attempts at evangelism and as part of The Church at large), and as such they may be over-generalized comments or criticisms that don’t apply as broadly as I think or may be viewed as overly critical. Consider them food for thought—chew on them and spit out what you don’t like. I’m learning these principles personally as I am sharing them corporately via blog, and I definitely have a long way to grow as evangelist of any sort.
I’ll begin by bringing in the complete text from Kawasaki’s January 12 post, The Art of Evangelism (at the risk of not having official permission). Then, I’ll post an interaction with or reflection on each of them in a series of posts. Check back from time to time under the title: Rediscovering the lost art of evangelism.
Here is the original post by Kawasaki:
Out of curiosity, I went to SimplyHired, a vertical search engine for jobs, and looked for openings containing the keyword “evangelist.” Amazingly, there were 611 matches--and none were for churches. It seems that “evangelist” is now a secular, mainstream job title. Indeed, the first eight matches were for evangelist jobs at Microsoft--go figure.
As people hit the streets with this title, they need a foundation of the fundamental principles of evangelism. Fulfilling this need is the purpose of today's blog.
Create a cause. As the previous blog called “Guy's Golden Touch” explained, the starting point of evangelism is having a great thing to evangelize. A cause seizes the moral high ground. It is a product or service that improves the lives of people, ends bad things, or perpetuates good things. It is not simply an exchange of things/services for money.
Love the cause. “Evangelist” isn't simply a job title. It's a way of life. It means that the evangelist totally loves the product and sees it as a way to bring the “good news.” A love of the cause is the second most important determinant of the success of an evangelist--second only to the quality of the cause itself. No matter how great the person, if he doesn't love the cause, he cannot be a good evangelist for it.
Look for agnostics, ignore atheists. A good evangelist can usually tell if people understand and like a product in five minutes. If they don't, cut your losses and avoid them. It is very hard to convert someone to a new religion (ie, product) when he believes in another god (ie, another product). It's much easier to convert a person who has no proof about the goodness or badness of the evangelist's product.
Localize the pain. No matter how revolutionary your product, don't describe it using lofty, flowery terms like “revolutionary,” “paradigm shifting,” and “curve jumping.” Macintosh wasn't positioned as the third paradigm in personal computing; instead, it increased the productivity and creativity of one person with one computer. People don't buy “revolutions.” They buy “aspirins” to fix the pain or “vitamins” to supplement their lives.
Let people test drive the cause. Essentially, say to people, “We think you are smart. Therefore, we aren't going to bludgeon you into becoming our customer. Try our product, take it home, download it, and then decide if it's right for you.” A test drive is much more powerful than an ad.
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.
Provide a safe first step. The path to adopting a cause should have a slippery slope. There shouldn't be large barriers like revamping the entire IT infrastructure. For example, the safe first step to recruit an evangelist for the environment is not requiring that she chain herself to a tree; it’s to ask her to start recycling and taking shorter showers.
Ignore pedigrees. Good evangelists aren't proud. They don’t focus on the people with big titles and big reputations. Frankly, they'll meet with, and help, anyone who “gets it” and is willing to help them. This is much more likely to be the database administrator or secretary than the CIO.
Never tell a lie. Very simply, lying is morally and ethically wrong. It also takes more energy because if one lies, then it is necessary to keep track of the lies. If one always tells the truth, then there's nothing to keep track of. Evangelists know their stuff, so they never have to tell a lie to cover their ignorance.
Remember your friends. Be nice to the people on the way up because one is likely to see them again on the way down. Once an evangelist has achieved success, he shouldn't think that he'll never need those folks again. One of the most likely people to buy a Macintosh was an Apple II owner. One of the most likely people to buy an iPod was a Macintosh owner. One of the most likely people to buy whatever Apple puts out next is an iPod owner. And so it goes.
I know. I may be a Mac fanatic, but at least I'm trying to channel it into something with more eternal significance. Thank you for putting up with it. Look for the first in the series soon. My apologies in advance to Mr. Kawasaki.
The porch on the front page
Thursday, February 16, 2006
The good folks at Solomon’s Porch were featured on the front page of last Thursday’s StarTribune in an article that featured the local spin on the emerging church. It’s always interesting to me to read how a daily newspaper journalist approaches a subject like this—what they end up highlighting, emphasizing and ignoring. Overall the article is a brief glimpse of this local congregation and the whole emerging church. The author does seem to get a bit sidetracked by body praying, which I think comes from a journalist’s predisposition to focus on the unusual. I also bristle at the reference to being young and “hip.” That’s one stereotype the emergent crowd needs to work on dispelling. And, there is next to no direct comments from Doug Pagitt—which may be intentional on his part. In any case, this is a nice bit of free publicity for this congregation. Now, how they react to rapid growth (which may be around the corner after such awareness) is possibly their next challenge.
Scene from a Porch gathering
Photo Credit: Jen
Outreach® Marketing scares me
Friday, January 20, 2006
Perhaps you may have noticed, as I have over the past 5 years, direct mail pieces littering your mailbox from local churches created by a company in California called Outreach Marketing. I must admit that I requested a package of resources from this outfit back when we were involved with a church plant circa 2000. For what they do, they have a nice array of identity materials and graphics that churches can use to do awareness-building communication in a community.However, they also make a lot of money convincing churches to employ their direct marketing tools as a means of evangelism, promotion and church growth. That’s not all bad—but as I’ve posted before, what do you have going on when every one in town gets a slick postcard (produced by Outreach) promoting a pop-culture-inspired sermon series from each congregation “on the market,” so to speak? Do we really want to be so clearly perceived as marketing the gospel or The Church?
Ever since The Passion of the Christ (or perhaps even before that), Hollywood tie-ins have become as popular for churches as they are for McDonald’s Happy Meals. (Which makes me recall recently receiving a gift bag with a coupon for a free McD burger inside a coffee mug emblazoned with the logo of the church I was visiting. Hey, I’m lovin’ it.) Outreach offers and promotes these movie-to-church campaigns—developing partnerships with the film studios to acquire the rights. Film studios have caught on, making this a part of their promotion strategy and budgets. Christian merchandisers follow suit with books, music and attractive nick-knacks. Certain spiritually neutral stars (or ministry personalities) make the rounds at premier time with the Christian media. It all sells very well. (Mighty Aslan roared King Kong into submission at the box office this past winter).
This leads me to some hard questions about “marketing” and “products” in this context. Is buying into this a way to exhibit an authentic community of faith to the world? Is the Church also being co-opted into a direct marketing empire and a new entertainment business model? (Outreach, Inc. is not a non-profit ministry, by the way, although they call themselves a ministry in their “statement of faith.”) If so, is that okay with us? And do we think we can register more butts in the pews or real conversions based on a local-church funded promotion campaign for The Chronicles of Narnia (a fine film), or a response campaign to The DaVinci Code? For that matter, why not a good horror flick? Check this idea out (created by Van S. at MissionThink.com).
Of course, this parody takes it to the point of the hilariously absurd (although, I think a congregation could get something meaningful out of viewing and considering this particular film).I’m compelled to question this church marketing trend in particular—blockbuster evangelism. Is it worth spending tithes and offerings on cross-promoting (pun intended) entertainment media that seeks to make a profit for its own self-interest (even though there’s nothing wrong with a business simply wanting to make a profit)? Can you feel the same dissonance I often do? As a person of faith, part of the Body of Christ and a movie lover, the conflicting interests concern me deeply. I tend to regard this as discernment—but I may just be breathing too much of my own exhaust.
Honestly, I don’t want this to be another cynical or hyper-critical rant. But I think these questions are important enough to begin asking. Anyone else out there squirming as much as I am? Or are you thinking, “come-on—lighten up, you big fat party pooper”? Your commentary is welcome.Now that Emily Rose is out on DVD, I thought the time was right to share this and the hilarious marketing parody from Van S. I recommend his post surrounding it, as well. In the spirit of Van S., here is my contribution under the new direct marketing brand, Watchout® Marketing (pictured left)
Look for more great marketing products from Watchout® Marketing in the future, right here.
Soon and very soon
Friday, January 06, 2006
You know, even Pat Robertson will die one day.I hope I don’t show my theological stripes too obviously on this one. You may have heard about the recent stark raving mad comments from Pat Robertson about Israeli Prime Minster, Ariel Sharon’s recent stroke. Unfortunately, everything crazy Robertson says on the 700 Club gets picked up by the entire world news media. (What is that 700 in the show’s name, anyways, his SAT score?) Hats off to the NRB for this contribution to the Kingdom.
The New York Times has it here, as stated by Robertson on the 700 Club, saying, in effect, that “[the Bible—the prophet Joel] makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who ‘divide my land.’” He goes on to posit that Sharon “was dividing God’s land, and I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease [the European Union, the United Nations or the United States].”
Hogwash. I wonder if Robertson is familiar with the New Testament, or the New Convenant we have in Christ? Or maybe he should ask a Jewish Rabbi for some insights on interpreting the Old Testament prophets—someone like apostle Paul, prophet Jeremiah or Jesus:
Jeremiah 31:30-32 and Hebrews 8:8 “…I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them.”
Romans 10:11-13 “As the Scripture says, ‘Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.’ For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Hebrews 9:15 “…Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance—now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant.”
It’s time people of faith stand up and question (severely, when necessary) those most-visible icons who claim to speak for us to the world. Robertson no more speaks for me and my faith than a $1.99 per minute astrologer working in a Scranton phone bank.
I wrote this post because a friend of mine from work brought it up out of the blue in conversation. I have no idea if this friend is a believer or not. I should, and plan to find out—and hope that Mr. Robertson’s comments don’t stand in the way of an effective Christian witness going forward. The Holy Spirit will tend to that.
Someone please be sure to let me know what the angle will be on God’s judgment when one day Robertson finally succumbs to some physical ailment (since the man himself won’t be around to interpret it on his TV talk show). I, for one, will NOT be suggesting that it is merely God working out all His pent up divine enmity because “Pat kept shooting his fool mouth off.” Although, in my theological view, this is still possible for a God of the New Covenant. Just ask Ananias and Sapphira. Or does anyone think he will be caught up to heaven in whirlwind like Elijah?Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Feeding frenzy
Sunday, January 01, 2006
A recent post of mine sparked a discussion where my friend Pete eventually posed the question, "When did the primary purpose of church become that of "feeding" attendees?" It went on to question the conventional evangelical wisdom that one should find and attend a "bible believing" church where one can "be fed." (Pardon my brief paraphrase--you can see the comments post by linking here--thanks, Pete.)Aside from the bias of language like "bible-believing" churches (which I assume must be better than churches that don't believe the bible), the notion of needing a church that feeds you well doesn't sit right with me either.
This idea could likely originate from Jesus' admonition of Peter in John 21:17-19--"Peter, do you love me? .... Feed my sheep." And perhaps it also comes from other food-related metaphors in the teachings of Jesus or Paul.
If you define The Church only as a physical place with a professional clergy, then passages like John 21:17-19 are your proof texts. But to me it means more than that. It also means that all believers should use their gifts to feed the body of Christ (clergy and laity alike)--wherever that may be--because of love (just like a parent would feed her own children).Boiling this down to being a proof text to justify judging a local church by how well they feed their sheep turns The Church into a barn and the sheep into swine. How, then do you evaluate a church, by the quality of the pork? I'd rather be a vegan in this regard and just stick to the fruits: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Indeed, The Church should seek to feed and be fed with an objective of discipleship and Christian formation--but the way that happens isn't limited to one model. Using the term "fed" in a pejorative fashion makes The Church into a service provider to individual consumers, rather than the personhood that comprises the community of all believers.
Relevant like sugar water
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
I remember discussions a few years ago with former members of a church plant we were a part of about how many churches were adding the word “relevant” to their mission/purpose statements, names, or subtitles, etc. I bristled at the trend because I couldn’t shake the idea (being the gen-x contrarian that I am) that if you need to come out and say you are relevant, then you probably aren’t anymore. It reminded me of my work in advertising and marketing related to writing promotional copy. There comes a point when using trendy language to describe yourself becomes antithetical, and subsequently clichéd. For example, if your church is relevant, is the one down the road irrelevant? And to whom is it relevant? And if every church claims to be relevant, then what basis does the spiritual seeker have for deciding to drop by?Pastor and V-logger, Aaron Flores captures this in his blog entry from this past weekend: “Frequently, to be relevant or culturally engaging is mistaken for a hipper aesthetic that packages church in a more culturally user-friendly package. The argument against relevancy and cultural engagement often claims that the church has become cultural synchronistic or secular. However, relevancy and cultural engagement has more to do with marketing than with actually being genuine of a cultural context or, in other words, being in sync with culture and the secular. Like Disneyland who attracts families by its culturally relevant family entertainment for American consumers, our modern tendencies tempt us to make an attraction and monstrosity of our churches in order to market them to certain demographics.”
Amen, brother. Do read the whole thing—it goes far deeper. I love the indigenous idea later in the post.
When it becomes clear to an intended audience that terms like “relevant” are really marketing clichés employed by churches to give their product greater consumer appeal (and I would argue that it already has for those in the post-modern world), then what is left for those that reject such an appeal? Rejecting the message of the gospel on this basis is tragic. But sadly, in the suburban world I inhabit and have grown up in, many evangelical churches have thought it best to market the gospel to consumers like the flavored sugar water of Coke or Pepsi, rather than actively transforming the earthly culture they inhabit with the other-worldly culture of grace and love we find abiding in Christ.The metaphor of The Church marketing cola is so interesting to me. How do you differentiate from the competition? Different formulas or sweeteners? Pepsi One, C2, Zero, Clear, New Coke? Product placement? Celebrity endorsements? Or rather, 40 Days of Purpose, CCM worship, The Passion, WWJD, Jabez, etc. What’s the flavor-of-the-month?
To quote Steve Jobs’ infamous question to John Sculley when he recuited him from Pepsi to join Apple Computer in the early 80s, “If you stay at Pepsi, five years from now all you’ll have accomplished is selling a lot more sugar water…. If you come to Apple you can change the world.”
I think God is asking the same question in the emerging church (sans the Pepsi and Apple part). I’m through with working so hard to “sell” sugar water. Where can I sign up to change the world?
Been there, got the t-shirt
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
It’s a little disturbing to read about your spiritual journey in the context of an article about the stages people experience with church involvement and disillusionment. But there we are—right there between stage five and six. It’s a lot to swallow when you see yourself so easily (and accurately) categorized, and then see the other stages laid out ahead of us. Are we really kidding ourselves here? Is our inward urging and nascent calling really just a tidy little justification for being dissatisfied with church life?Link over to this blog entry by pastor and writer, Dan Kimball to read up on the 10 stages of Reality Church. Where do you find yourself on this continuum?
As for us, we certainly need to take this to heart and consider it very carefully—no doubt about that. One can’t ignore something so blatantly obvious. At the same time, some thoughts do rise to the surface that make our future direction seem more like a calling than a coping mechanism.
First, the rise of participatory technologies coupled with the postmodern shift has created a challenge and opportunity that the modern evangelical church is not addressing (in large part) in its current structure. Subsequently, our ministry is squarely aimed at people that find no welcome in many of those churches today. Secondly, I’m still convinced that once you stop drinking the current evangelical mega-church flavored Kool-aid (another nod to Doug Glynn for the Kool-aid remark), there’s really no going back to where you came from in terms of that particular church form, mode and method. So, we’d either be finding a church community of some type that was on different path, or we’d be doing what we are thinking of doing in this case. In other words, we’d never get to stage 10 with a smile on our faces.
The perspective I’m trying to keep in all this is that there is a certain domain of effectiveness in the modern evangelical approach even with all its flaws. That is to say, the Sunday-centric/building-centric/preaching-centric method reaches certain types of people very well. If we take that at face value, then what we are looking at doing reaches out to a different domain—attempting to reach a segment of society where the traditional approach is not effective. And certainly we will have flaws too.
At the end of the day, if this really is a ministry calling, it’s not about us and how we feel. It’s about Him, and expanding His kingdom. We must avoid becoming dissatisfied consumers of church product. Rather, defining ourselves as co-laborers in the kingdom mission, we are expressing a different vision of how that mission can be conducted. It’s not a mutually exclusive vision, but one that complements other expressions of The Church.
(A shout out to Derek--and a happy birthday soon--for turning me on to the musical stylings of David Brent earlier in the year via DVD. Brent is pictured with this post and responsible for the flippant headline.)
Substance abuse
Monday, November 14, 2005
So here’s a little opinion poll (and I hate applying emerging as a type of label, but I will in this case): Link over to this church web site. Would you define this as an “emerging” church? Is this a postmodern ministry church? Why or why not? Okay, go! Your comments are welcome.
Judith Hougen, writer, blogger and English professor from my alma mater, posted about this new church after seeing a promotional postcard they sent out (apparently targeting NWU students, faculty). I recommend her post on the topic. Check it out after you consider my poll above.
There they go, off into the deep end
Friday, October 28, 2005
Well, we've gone and done it now (he ominously posted). The long road toward our new calling has led us to a feeble attempt to describe our ministry vision in writing. Dawnshelle and I will pause now for a few moments to catch our breath while we let everyone in our lives get the skinny on what we are thinking about doing next. Pray for us--we hope no one worries that we are going off into the deep end. In many respects, we are going off the high platform into the really deep end. Plus, we don't really swim very well. And we don't like getting wet.Feel free to peruse our ministry proposal and send your very thoughtful feedback. I'll post more as things progress. You can read it as an attached file by clicking here.
My new big, fat, Greek word
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Funny how the church is also known as the bride of Christ, and how I learned a new Greek word and idea that I thought I would share, and how this movie title ties those two things together in a mildly humorous way.Okay. That's a bit of a stretch, but maybe it made you smile.
In any event, I ran across this concept in linking to the church site of a Blogger and V-Logger I have been reading/viewing in the past several months. In working out the mode and practice of what our little emerging ministry will become, I think this is something worth considering. Here's a quote from the church's website:
“MetaKaleo is a Greek word meaning to ‘call through.’ To our community it is an analogy for our time together in communion. We are called from individualism to being in communal relationship with one another and God. MetaKaleo also reminds us of the need to invite others into relationship and community. The first Saturday of every month, we gather for MetaKaleo. In community, we celebrate the sacrament of communion by having a meal, sharing life, prayer, and worship with one another.”
With all due props to Circle Church in Orange County, CA, I love the alternative this presents to consumer oriented, individualistic body life.
And while few would argue with this idea of MetaKaleo, in practice I see many churches pursuing ever more creative ways to make the consumer culture work to their (and God’s) advantage, asking: how can our message connect with the individual (or target market segments)? Rather, maybe the question should be: how can we help connect the individual to the community, and how can the community integrate the message relationally.
Small groups, Bible studies, cell groups, growth groups or whatever they may be called to connect people in a larger church body is not exactly what this is getting at (although these groups can be wonderful vessels of relational community).
Instead, what is done through the sacramental elements, common meal, interactive prayer and worship facilitates being “called through”—beyond a strictly personal faith to the relational, communal life of the body Jesus describes as His kingdom now come.
It's good to expand your vocabulary once in a while.
May the force be with you
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Here's a new simile to ponder: The American mega-church gospel is like Star Wars Episode I-III. The gospel of the kingdom is like Star Wars Episode IV-VI.Relevant magazine just published a really nice, brief interview with LA pastor and author, Erwin McManus. I’ve noticed that he is often invited to speak at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, and have been intrigued by the titles of his books (The Barbarian Way, etc.)—definitely books to put on the Fall reading list. I like this guy.
Here’s a taste of the interview with McManus: "Unfortunately, I think the Gospel in America is like a blockbuster, $200 million, Star Wars kind of thing. The irony is that [the new] Star Wars has made more than $360 million so far, but I don’t know how many people would say it’s a truly great story. For a lot of us, people are running into our megachurches, and we’re building these massive buildings and we say, ‘Look! The Gospel’s a hit!’ What we’re not realizing is that yes, people are going to see the blockbuster, but they’re not really buying the story.”
Love beyond the Thunderdome
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
I've avoided blogging in the past two weeks as the Katrina events have unfolded. So many have written some excellent posts, while others (on and off the web) have demonstrated some awful examples of theology. I also apologize for the levity of the photo tie-in to this post. It occurred to me to find this movie poster when someone forwarded me the text of a recent sermon from pastor and writer Max Lucado. I don't want to make light of the tragedy or of the heroic efforts many have made to rescue and bring aid.The Lucado sermon resonated with me. I fully agreed with the assertion that any person, but for the grace of God, is capable of new levels of evil. And those in his congregation likely need to hear this when reacting to what they have seen and observed. And in a weird way, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome may have some small insight into that--exhibiting the positive and negative reactions to catastrophic events. There is good in us. We are the children of God. But we contend with a fallen nature and a chaotic spiritual and physical world at war. And this extends to how those in The Church pass judgment on those trapped in the conditions of the dome and convention center in NOLA. Indeed, the redeemed seem to be capable new evils in our high and dry pews, pulpits and church signs. I pray that the rule of Love wins the day in The Church and the Gulf Coast cities that are in need, something I think Lucado should have hit on much harder with his flock.
I can't agree with the perceived implication early in Lucado's sermon that Katrina (or the tsunami, 9/11, etc.) was God's providential vehicle to teach us these things (and others). He does bring good things and human instruction out of such events--but is glorified even more by doing so without having been the cause.
Sorry for my divergence into open theism. I do recommend Lucado's sermon as a mostly edifying read. I also recommend Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, if only for the 1985 kitsch.
We don't need another hero. We just need to know the way home.
Counting and sorting sheep
Friday, August 26, 2005
Senior pastors from the evangelical ranks fret about Sunday morning church attendance. I speak from personal experience as a pastor’s child and a former elder board member of a church plant. Often other forms of church expression and ministry live or die by the perceived impact (for better or worse) they will have on the attendance board (last week’s performance data) posted on the sanctuary wall next to the pulpit. I question this.
Children of mother necessity
We’ve all heard the church referred to as all of the followers of Jesus—the church universal, as it were (this also is the definition of the word “Catholic”). In practice, however, actively being the church required the gathering together of local bodies of believers to learn, edify and serve one another [Hebrews 10:24-25]. To do that logistically required some fragmentation. First, among the earliest churches by town or community. Then, in the Roman Catholic empire, bodies were organized along both geographic and political lines of empire. Post reformation, fragmentation was aided by divergent theologies and worldviews within the realm of the Christian faith. Still, the sheer logistics of gathering together believers still made it necessary to divide up people into subgroups geographically. Fast forward to the present, we find layers of locally dispersed church bodies, overlapping and largely unconnected with each other (and individuals from other congregations) on a local level. Instead, local church bodies are connected (if at all) to a centralized bureaucratic body (denominational leadership) that itself is overlapped by other similar, yet different organizations of faith that make up present Christendom.
A footnote in “A Generous Orthodoxy” by Brian McLaren gives an even better 30 second overview of this aspect of church history: “Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism officially split in about 1000 AD, which was roughly speaking an East-West split. Protestants in Northern Europe (including Anabaptists) split off from Roman Catholics in Southern Europe in about 1500 AD. Liberal and Conservative Protestants began to diverge in the 1800s, and Pentecostals arose from within Conservative Protestants--also called Evangelicals--about 1900. These latter divergences were conceptual, without geographic correlates." (Page 56, note 25.)
Of course, this is no earth-shattering observation. None of this comment required any in-depth research to surmise. And there is a ton of important and instructive church history that gets brushed aside in what I just said. For the sake of making a specific point, however, I want to only focus on the heretofore necessary fragmentation of local church bodies.
Today’s model expression of the church is rooted in the necessary practice of forming individualized and contained church bodies, which has become institutionalized over the course of the past 2,000 years.
There might be a tendency to see this approach as an ideal expression of the church. And in large degree it has been fruitful and effective in advancing the kingdom over time, despite the setback of theological disunity among the universal community of faith (division over some important and some trivial matters). In a pre-digital, pre-wired, (pre-modern and modern) world this really was the only path. One can argue over the detrimental impact of denominationalism, but other necessary fragmentation would unavoidably remain. There are millions of Christ’s followers—we can’t all attend the same worship service or bible study—occupy the same local space-time community in person even if we are one bride, one universal body.
So I don’t assail the traditional and necessary form of church organization we see today, only the idea that it is the best expression of the body of Christ (or the best we can aspire to). As other forms begin to emerge for fulfilling life together as a community of faith, we must be willing to see the former for what they truly are—forms borne out of necessity, not necessarily the last or only word.
Fragmented bodies of believers also bear the necessary burden of labels. To keep track of categories and classifications, humans label things (by type, locale, social caste, race, etc.)—and this is especially true of our church bodies. You are a Catholic, or a Lutheran, or an Adventist or a Baptist. Or you go to the First Baptist Church in Springfield, or attend Prince of Peace Lutheran in Cedarvale. The danger with labels is that they can supplant real meaning with presuppositions that de-personalize and marginalize. Kierkegaard noted, “Once you label me, you negate me.” Or in other words, once you label someone, you lose all understanding of them. A word to the wise.
Beyond counting and sorting sheep
"Pastors need to redefine success. The popular model of success involves the ABCs - attendance, buildings, and cash. Instead of counting Christians, we need to weigh them. We weigh them by focusing on the most important kind of growth - love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, kindness, and so on - fruit in keeping with the Gospel and the kingdom." (Dallas Willard, Leadership Journal, "The Apprentices," Summer 2005)
We need to begin to consider alternatives to the conventional wisdom that “church growth” is only evidenced and measured by the invitational growth model of our traditional, geographically-based and categorized congregations. The expanding kingdom of God has room for a multitude of varied expressions which fit into the pattern given in scripture. At the risk of sounding crass, counting the butts in the seats on a Sunday morning only measures one dimension of effectiveness for the traditional (and not ideal) approach. I would go so far as to say that the numbers on the old attendance board hold little meaning beyond their face value.
It is really in this vein that I am currently engaging in an exploration of God’s direction for me and my family—integrating the church body in new ways, seeking to move beyond institutionalized fragmentation toward a new form of unity. I’m quite certain that no particular approach is the “ideal.” But my inclination is that, taken together, a multiplicity of expressions of the bride of Christ can become more and more ideal and true as time passes.
Six degrees of Brian McLaren
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Great sessions by the way--all included with Cornerstone admission. The article, posted on the Evangelical Covenant website, is a good (very brief) overview of McLaren's current work and thoughts. Here's a quote that definitely had me thinking:
"You can be sterile and right, but you have to be fertile to be good. I think this is where the kingdom of God exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees. The Pharisees' view of righteousness was basically summed up in the idea of 'Do no wrong.' Jesus's was summed up in 'Let your good works shine.' I think this is one of the deeper challenges we face. Christianity has practice in being a civil religion, a custodial religion, in being isolated or persecuted. We don't have enough practice in being a positive and constructive force."
Bride of Frankenstein revisited
Sunday, August 21, 2005
For those left wondering about what the Bride of Frankenstein has to do with the body of Christ 
Strange love: How we learned to stop worrying and love the bride
Thursday, August 18, 2005
In our ongoing saga of reevaluating our church community, Dawnshelle and I have come to a decision point (for this season of our lives). It stems from a further unpacking of our issues, our emerging calling and a providentially timed message from our pastor a week ago.
"Yee Haw!" Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove (I couldn’t resist the inference).
You will recall my last post about the Bride of Frankenstein, which hints at an area we feel some kind of calling to. We’ve come full circle on what this may mean for us and how we might be able to see God bring it to fruition. He seems to be calling us to first try to do this where we are now—stay put instead of head for the hills (inside joke intentional)—take a step of faith and see what He does.
Where this comes from is a growing recognition that, however imperfect, as a part of our church community, we are what WE are (just as God is the I Am that I Am). Let me explain. I’ve oft overdone my critique of the institutional church (the church as a place or external body) and readily included our local body in this, when in reality I am a part of the bride of Christ by default. It’s fascinating that I let myself get the most frustrated with how the church acts toward the outside world, while Paul writes in Romans 7:19, “What I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing." [NIV] All those personal pronouns make me nervous. The finger-pointing has to include me. I have to be personally accountable, and I can’t do that by cutting myself off from the body and looking back. There is no out-of-body experience here. We ARE the bride, and the weaknesses of the church are reflections of individual weaknesses—that means me, buddy! Change must begin inside of myself AND within the community context of the body. Nothing can truly live and grow in the love of the Bridegroom apart from the body of the bride. We are commanded to love God, love ourselves and love each other—that’s beyond dispute (Mark 12:28-34). In light of scripture I conclude we cannot really love ourselves if we don’t love each other. Such love amounts to narcissism, lust, ego.
So we are being called to minister out of our love for the bride and bring about change from within. What that change is and what it looks like are subjects for another time (and more unpacking and praying needs to be done before I can open up more on that). For now, God is calling us to act in faith. We may be politely rejected or grossly misunderstood or both. We may even be forced deep underground. Or, we may be embraced and supported by our local church community. Regardless, God will be faithful to us and lead us onward if we only trust him and act.
-Todd
The church is like the bride of Frankenstein
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Take it as a compliment.
Romans 12:5 [The Message]
"The body we're talking about is Christ's body of chosen people. Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body. But as a chopped-off finger or cut-off toe we wouldn't amount to much, would we?"
Revelation 19:7-8 [NIV]
"Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear."
Let's face it, with thousands of strands of believers divided along ideological, political and theological lines, the Bride is a broken, chopped up mess. Yet scripture seems to point towards a future with a Bride made ready for her Bridegroom. As we work to expand the kingdom, how do we reconcile present reality with this future revelation? What would be able to change how we now are? Some miracle?
I submit that the re-animation of the bride, and the grafting together of the separate and broken pieces may begin to happen in a different place: on the computer network (the Internet). Now before you write me off as living in some kind of 1999 pre-millennial denial (not the eschatological pre-millennial, but the pre dot-com bust sort), hear me out. While we may not be interconnecting very well with the rest of the body (bride) in our present brick and mortar congregations, this interconnecting may be happening digitally (via written communication). For some, it already is happening.
Think about it. Can the internet have a church split? Not really. People will always be able to isolate themselves from others, both on and offline. But without our institutions of identity to exist within, the church (at large) interacting with one another in a global and local online community starts to look a whole lot like a unified whole--those being spiritually formed, moving toward and into the kingdom of the Bridegroom.
Recently I ran across some thought-provoking words along these lines which I cannot do justice to in a short article. But consider the Frankenstein's bride metaphor and the scripture above as my small addition to the conversation. To get a real thorough picture of what is happening, link over to this Blog and read the attached paper, "We know more than our pastors." Don't let the title throw you. It's no anti-pastoral rant--it's brain food. In addition, check out the online version of the "Cluetrain Manifesto" and try applying all the ideas that describe corporations to the church and church leadership. Mind-blowing. Then comment on this here and let's talk about it.
I think the bride is kinda pretty--always have.
Okay, end of metaphor.
Why would you leave the perfect church?
Saturday, August 06, 2005
In the limited conversations I have had with friends and family about our recent re-evaluation of our choice of church home, I think some might too easily pigeon-hole what it is we are looking for in a congregation/community of faith. From the outside looking in, the emerging church movement may give the impression that it is all about making improvements and modifications to "how we do church." Adding in the ancient and the modern--pursuing some kind of post-modern chic. If it is that at all, it is the very least of it. What has been going on in my soul is more akin to some kind of reformation of faith. And this decision is to find and become a part of a community of believers that are experiencing the same kind of reformation in their own lives. It is about the kingdom of God and what that should look like. To me, that looks less and less like where we are right now. I'm driven to find the heart of it and reside there.To help in understanding, please check out this fine article in Christianity Today by Brian McLaren. I especially like the quote he copped from Dallas Willard (and I think Willard copped it from Andy Grove or someone else from Intel): "Our system [in this case, the evangelical church] is perfectly designed to deliver the results we are now getting." If you look at the recent research on the expansion of the church by body count from Barna Research, that is nil. All the Willow Creek molded plants, 40 days of purpose programs and seeker-sensitive "Sunday as the superbowl of God" services have built some nice, big churches (and I'm not going to critique any of these things) --perfect by design. But what do the numbers show us? And what is this evangelical juggernaut in America known for, its love or its politics?
So this shift in direction for me is both inward and outward: inward in continuing to develop my own faith, and outward in the type of missional community I'm being called to be a part of going forward. It is a reformation level event for me.
As an aside, it's been a blessing to be in complete sync with my mate on this. Having unity and knowing we are in this together has helped propel me forward. This is not to say we have made a decision yet. We are still very much in flux--but in it up to our ears together. And that's nice.
The church dysfunctional
Saturday, July 09, 2005
We are in the midst of re-evaluating our home church decision, made last year in the wake of our adventure in church planting. And this is a hard thing. While others in our circle are having some specific issues with the church, we have been dealing more with a general sense that (insert church name here) may not be the place for us. The whole modernist, mega-church model is being embraced rather than seeking an authentic, home-grown fellowship (not that this has anything to do with church size). Would this church be a safe place for an agnostic or liberal to engage someone in conversations about Jesus? Would I feel good about inviting someone from my office (unchurched) to come visit? Increasingly the answer to those questions is no. It's difficult to explain just why that is. D and T are still in process on this--we're not going to make a snap judgment. And then, where would we go or what would we do if we moved on? Another tough question.In any case, here is an article that is worth a read--especially the quote it includes toward the end. It is now a part of our conversation on this important issue of community and kingdom life.
Should I Stay or Should I Go, from Relevant magazine.