Truth is ancient; it's grey hairs may make it venerable;
it comes from Him who is the ancient of days. --Thomas Watson

 

14 March, 2007   comments: (0) Today's Pragmatism   Explicit Ads Draw Crowds To Morality Messages Minus The Gospel I won't let my own kids read this post, you shouldn't allow yours to read it either. I'd prefer not to even go down this path, except that it's a significant part of what's popular in church "evangelism" these days. I'm talking about the explicit bait and switch advertising campaigns that churches and ministries are using to draw crowds, and when they have those crowds baited and present, they use those opportunities to preach the Gospel. Don't they? It's been a year since the last time I've posted on this topic. Back then, Granger Community church was pioneering this whole system. They were putting up their My Lame Sex Life billboards around town, which gave no clues as to the source being a church. Besides drawing numerous neighborhood decency complaints, the function of these signs was to funnel people into a website that seemed to offer sex enhancement advice, baiting them into coming to church to get it. Well since then, churches everywhere are doing the same thing; many of them are even using Granger's outline and graphics. Some of these churches seemingly have the goal of pushing the envelope further than Granger did, by employing more shocking catch phrases, graphics, and sermon titles. It's gotten so bad that it's common for these churches to not allow teens and kids to hear the Sunday morning sermon. The concern for kids seems to stop at the mailbox however; many of these churches send their provocative advertising right out in the open on post cards that kids are sure to see. The idea behind all of this is: You think that you are coming to hear how you can enhance your sex life, but what you'll end up hearing is "sex in marriage is best because that's God's design", plus you'll hear a lot of do's and don'ts about what you should and shouldn't do. But what about the Gospel? I listened to one such sermon online the other day; it was part of one church's IamTurnedon.com campaign, which utilized graphics that pushed the limits even for secular advertising. The name of the sermon was "My Angel is a Centerfold", and it was no easy task for me to access it. That's because the computers in my house have porn filters, and the content on this church's blogsite kept clashing with them. Unfortunately after doing so much to draw unbelievers into church, that sermon amounted to nothing more than a morality lesson with no presentation of the Gospel. No death burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ for sinners. It was nowhere in the sermon; not at all. There was lots of talk about how God wants you to surrender your sex life so that he can change it, but that's not the Gospel! Wasn't the whole idea supposed to be - to bait unchurched people into church where you can switch over to the Gospel at some point? Do they not mention it because they are ashamed to, or is it because they are mistaken in thinking that the sex message is the Gospel? Another interesting phenomenon about all of this is that - even the World seems to understand that churches are wrong for behaving this way. Community complaints follow around these shock-campaigns; people are often beside themselves when they learn that it's actually coming from a church. If you are one of the local people that complain about a billboard or an almost-porn postcard sent out by a church, don't expect the church to be sympathetic to your outrage. Michael Lukaszewski is the lead pastor of Oak Leaf Church in Cartersville Georgia; his blog has a rap remix MP3 from some of the outraged community voicemails left for his church. The stock answer that churches like this will give is that, those are not unbelievers complaining, they are "Pharisees", but there is no doubt that numerous complaints are from family-oriented people who do not attend any church. In their case, you have not only failed to reach out to them, but you have offended them. And even one step further for some who have left voicemails, you have mocked them. When you listen to most of the voicemails in that recording, you get the sense that the community has a better moral compass than the church that they are complaining to. Off of churches for a moment, and onto para-church now. Have you heard of these guys? It's a very popular "ministry" called XXXchurch.com, which works on similar bait and switch advertising principles. Their billboards and porn-mobile contain the slogan "The world's number one Christian porn site". The idea is, that's pretty much guaranteed to get curious people to come to their anti-porn porn site. The ministry was started when "God spoke a private message" to one of the leaders. Their video testimony entitled Missionary Positions takes it from there (once again - I'm warning parents, this is not something that you want your kids to see): I kept decreasing the size of that video, to make it less visually offensive even on this page. Those are the same guys that rent booths at porn conventions to pass out bibles that say "Jesus Loves Porn Stars" on the cover; an advertising slogan that is, at best, a biblical half-truth. I looked all around their website for a Gospel message and found none. Now to be fair, they have a pretty big website so maybe I'm missing it somewhere. Does God want the church to use tricky false-advertising to entice people to come to Him, or to simply entice people to live a more moral life? Does He want Christians to evangelize using bait and switch tactics that attract a sex-crazed culture with slogans and imagery that are designed to appeal to the flesh? The World is on to this false advertising; they know it's wrong. As was written on one non-Christian blog: "This week I received another [mail-out flyer from a church]. ... So why not just entice people with a more truthful, and descriptively accurate message? Well, because sex sells, and regardless of how puritan they want you to think they are, these churches fully understand the power of sex to draw a crowd to the pews." Lastly, what about the argument that "sex is in the bible"? Yes, it's in there, but before you say that means we must offer an explicit 6 week therapeutic training series on it, make sure you are willing to preach about other things in the bible as well. Don't just say "sex is in the bible - so we preach it" without also saying "depravity, sin, hell, election, and judgement are all in the bible so we preach on those things too". The bible is not a pick and choose buffet. Most of all, I hope that some of these churches do get around to preaching the Gospel, and not just a morality message of "your sex life has to change". Otherwise you have nothing but a sex-motivated version of what Donald Grey Barnhouse warned about when he said: "Satan's purpose is not to make good people bad or bad people worse. Satan's purpose is ultimately to make people good without Jesus Christ. If the devil owned any one town in the United States, it would immediately become the loveliest town in America -- crime free, prosperous, and everyone would go to church, where Jesus Christ is not preached." Posted by: Jim B.   Link: http://www.oldtruth.com/blog.cfm/id.2.pid.634          Home  |   About  |  Videos   |  Calvinism