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

 

15 October, 2007   comments: (0) Today's Pragmatism   The Offense of The Cross, Not of The Marketing Horatius Bonar had the offense of cross in mind when he said "For we know that the unrenewed will is set against the Gospel; it is enmity to God and His truth. ~ It is the Gospel that the unbeliever hates; and the more clearly it is set before him, the more he hates it". A knee-jerk response to that sentiment by today's relevance crowd is usually "yeah, but we don't need to add to that with our own offensiveness". I can relate to that; it brings to mind the wacky guy in my city who rides around in a graffiti-riddled hearse shouting "turn or burn" through a loudspeaker on his roof. What's ironic though, is that the Christian leaders who are most concerned with being non-offensive today seem to be the most willing to be offensive to the very people that they are reaching out to, if it serves their pragmatic aims. This was recently demonstrated in a story on CNN news. The particular kind of offense that I'm talking about is found on those church postcards and road-side billboards that seem to borrow their marketing approach from beer and sports cars commercials. There's just one problem with this however, it's not beer and muscle cars that they are marketing - it's the Holy God of the universe. The odd thing is, everybody seems to know that this is wrong to do, except for the churches that are doing it! Even the world knows it's wrong; this is especially the case when the marketing seems to have the appearance of softcore porn to it, as was the case in this CNN video clip (parental warning) that recently covered another church's "shock and awe" marketing campaign: Where I come from, saying "sorry" means being sorry enough not to do the offense again, but as you heard in the CNN portion of this video - that's not the case with this pastor. His response may as well have been: "Parents, if I blew away your kid with my sexually suggestive postcard when they went out to get the mail, I'm sorry. But, I don't regret what I did". He's willing to be an offense to many of the people that he's supposedly reaching out to, but it's not the offense of the Cross, it's the offense of a racy marketing campaign that even pushed the limits by the world's decency standards. This church is willing to do this with little regard for right or wrong, because they, like many other churches today, are sold-out to pragmatism. In this case, the ends justified the pragmatic means with an almost immediate count of 87 sex-talk salvations. It doesn't much matter how they got them, right or wrong, it just matters that there's 87 of them. If you think that's ok, then I wonder if you'll also think Charlamagne's method of medieval church expansion was ok; after all - the only thing that eternally matters is "the results", right? The second half of that video clip was a collection of similar postcards and billboards that I've collected from churches through the years, and put to music. Not just any music, it's an audio clip that I've played here before, of voice mail complaints that a church blended with a 'rap' tune. Not only did this church care very little about their offensiveness to the community, but they even went so far as to mock them by putting their complaints to song. Can you imagine how furious those folks would be if they found out what became of their complaint? To put it mildly, they would be even more offended. Last week, that church rationalized their actions by saying: "We're the church in town that does some mail outs, and the images and words on these cards get labeled as provocative. We're accused of going for shock value because we would create a website called "yourgreatsexlife". The fact is, our postcards are designed to attract people that don't go to church, not Christians. The only people that call and complain are Christians. We send them to the whole city so we don't pick and choose who gets them. Sure, our mail outs may be a little provocative, but isn't that the point of advertising. Why would we want to send out a postcard or hand out a flier that DOESN'T get noticed." A little provocative? It only offends Christians? Really? Why is it that they assume someone is a born again bible believing Christian just because they mention God once or twice in their 20 second voicemail? They are phoning a church after all, and they could just as easily be religious mainliners; remember that a majority of Americans consider themselves 'Christian'. Did the family man in that CNN interview seem like a Christian? We don't know. And he wasn't throwing around religious lingo either. Yet the voicemail pastor would likely have you believe that this man was just a nitpicky legalist Pharisee. The voicemails have to be just the tip of the iceberg; there must be many more offended parents in the community who simply never bothered to call in. Once again, it's an offense to people (regular family folks not just pharisaical prudes) but the offense is NOT the offense of the cross. Now I will admit, it's not just the world that they are offensive to, it is Christians too, some of their marketing even affects other churches. The pastor of that same church recommends this secular book entitled Buzzmarketing, and one can only wonder how much of his church strategy comes from business books like that. Combine those ideas with some poor judgment and an abrasive (but culturally popular) choice of words, and you end up with the awkward situation that occurred in the comments of one of his blog posts recently. Apparently what happened was that his buzz-church showed up at an event which included other churches, and began passing out cards that said "Church Doesn't Suck". You can read the comments of an offended pastor in his neighborhood, as he confronts the buzz-church for their actions, saying: "The card itself (in isolation) would clear you of attacking other churches. The venue in which the card was distributed however would give a different impression. I do, however, find it difficult...well, honestly, impossible to reconcile the use of the word "suck" as a reference to the church of the Lord Jesus with the Scriptural admonition to avoid coarse jesting. Particularly since this was not an off-the-cuff comment spoken in haste or emotion, but an intentional use of a crude, crass, vulgar term." Just like the pastor in the CNN interview, the damage control strategy is "bend but don't break". In other words, these marketing churches will: acknowledge their offensive (at least in part), explain the good motives and intentions, perhaps even apologize, maybe remind us that nobody is perfect, but never agree to make any meaningful changes. As the CNN pastor said, he's sorry but . . . he'd do it all over again. If you are like me, you can't imagine the Apostles resorting to these kind of tactics to spread the Gospel. What kind of offenses do we read about in the bible? Yes, Jesus offended the Pharisees, but no matter how much these churches want to label people like us who disagree with their tactics as 'Pharisees', most of us are not. We are saved-by-grace Christians and not inventors of our own religious system (remember that the Pharisees were hell-bound vipers according to Jesus). Other offenses in the bible: Paul talks about the offense of the Cross, but surely a sexually suggestive postcard or one with abrasive language on it doesn't qualify. Perhaps it's time for churches like these (and there are plenty of them) to lay aside their unbiblical pragmatism, and consider whether they are in fact adding their own offense to the Gospel. They are after all, the ones most interested in not being offensive, with their "what God can do for you" sermons, and world-imitating lifestyles. Update 11/7/07: More offensive church billboard marketing is discussed in the post entitled: Trading Good Ethics For Bad Church Marketing. Posted by: Jim B.   Link: http://www.oldtruth.com/blog.cfm/id.2.pid.803   Be the first to post a comment about this article        Home  |   About  |  Videos   |  Calvinism