Marketing and the Good News: The Good News (part 4)

My friend Bruce told me about his new sports car. He was excited. I was jealous. He told me a bit about the history of the particular model he bought. Initially, sales were flat, but that all changed when the price was raised. He said the price increase was not about costs, but marketing. Then perception of the car, according to him, changed. When it was priced too low in comparison with its competitors, it was considered "cheap" rather than inexpensive. But when the price was raised, consumers found it desirable, and sales greatly increased. It must have worked. Even though Bruce understood the ploy, he wanted one and bought it.

A few years later, when I had a small, struggling, remodeling business, I remembered what Bruce told me. I raised my rates significantly and I got a lot more business, Previously, my rates had been very low. I thought I needed to do that to "get my foot in the door" in establishing my business. I finally realized that if a family wanted their kitchen remodeled, being able to trust a contractor to value their home, possessions, and even their well being was vitally important. With this in mind, they often didn't look to the cheapest price. In fact, a cheap price made them wary.

I believe the same thing applies to sharing the Good News. With the best of intentions, the Gospel is made easy and inexpensive. A few easy steps and your sins are forgiven. Then you begin a personal relationship with God. Most of us would be wary of buying a Rolex watch from a man with a dozen watches on his arm, standing on a city street corner. And the world is wary of us when we try to "sell" good news when nothing of substance is required in return.

Of course, we can't earn or buy salvation, but Jesus often made it clear that it was costly. It requires an exchange of all that we hold dear to gain something much better. The rich young man came running to Jesus and wanted the secret of eternal life. Obedience to the rules was discussed and rejected as being insufficient. Jesus then told him to sell everything, give to the poor, and he would have heavenly treasure. THEN follow Him.

The man was unwilling to pay the cost but understood the value. As he left, neither was in doubt. The cost is his (and my) everything--my possessions, perspectives, and passions. The value received is His Everything--His Provision, Wisdom, Love, and Life Forever.

Marketing that manipulates often produces a sale immediately and buyer's remorse later because the cost or product is not accurately portrayed. Whether in the marketplace or in the church, it's the same. Unfortunately, we often understate the cost and misstate the benefits. That doesn't result in a good retention rate or in good "referrals".

Perhaps, Jesus made it clear that the cost was high both because it was true, and also because He knew people instinctively equate cost with value. If it's cheap, it's of little value. The gospel is neither.

Matthew 19:20 The young man said to Him, "All these things I have kept; what am I still lacking?" 21 Jesus said to him, "If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me."

The Cabbage Patch Gospel: The Good News (part 3)

I remember asking my mom where babies from. I hadn't learned anything from the media. Little kids didn't learn about the "facts of life" and matters of gender specific health issues on TV in those days. Probably no parent is ever really prepared for The Question, but my mom gave it her best shot. She told me that God gives a baby to a woman and man when they love each other. I thought a lot about it. It raised several questions in my young mind. But...? How...?

The answer was appropriate for a preschooler, but not very satisfying in the long term. What she told me was true, but not entirely accurate. It reminds me of how I first heard the gospel presented when I was 13. The gist of it was that I was I sinner and that I could come forward, ask for forgiveness, and invite Jesus into my heart. It stirred me, and at the second hearing a week later, I responded, went forward, prayed, and began my walk with Jesus. I absolutely stand by that decision. I am so grateful that the Lord met me that day!

But, as I began to read the gospels on my own and ask questions, I became concerned. I found no example of anyone who initially experienced God in the same way I did. Gradually, I reached the conclusion that the "Plan of Salvation" that I was given was true, but not entirely accurate. It was the "Cliff Note" version. It hit many of the high points, but lacked content. It was appropriate for a child, but not satisfying for an adult. Very often, though, something very similar is all that is presented. And unfortunately, what I sometimes hear is more like the cabbage patch version of the facts of life. In that answer to The Question, the parent says, "We went to the cabbage patch, found you, chose you, and brought you home." It's a fairy tale.

Christians have fairy tales, too. "Give Jesus a chance." "Start coming to church and your problems will get better." "Ask Jesus into your heart and you'll go to heaven." It seems clear to me that the disciples didn't give Jesus a chance. He gave them a chance to follow Him. I find no promise that love for Christ diminishes problems. In fact, He says quite the opposite, but we have His Peace and His Presence in the midst of them. And I believe Jesus said something about not everyone who says "Lord, Lord"--the right words--will enter the kingdom, but the one who obeys will enter.

The computer geeks say, "Garbage in; Garbage out!" meaning what you get out of your computer can't be better that what's put in. In sharing the gospel, it's no different. If you give a no-cost gospel, you'll get a believer who places low value on his commitment. If you give a simplistic gospel, you'll reap those who mistake platitudes for character. If you give the cabbage patch gospel, the harvest will be those who can't separate the truth from a fable.

Mark 8:34 Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. 36 What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? 37 Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? 38 If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father's glory with the holy angels."

Men Without Chests The Good News (part 2)

Isaiah 30:20...He, your Teacher will no longer hide Himself, but your eyes will behold your Teacher. 21 Your ears will hear a word behind you, "This is the way, walk in it," whenever you turn to the right or to the left.

Much of what we teach in the Church is true, but is propaganda. Propaganda is the presentation of facts, true or false, meant to manipulate, to achieve a desired goal. In the Church when this happens, that goal is allegiance to a specific presentation of these facts. The Biblical goal, as I understand it, is becoming new creations, free individually and corporately to serve and worship God.

I remember sitting by Allen in the second grade, or at least I remember one particular day. The teacher had been teaching us simple addition. Much of it required memorization. What does 2+2 equal? On that day, we each received a mimeographed paper with 100 of those arithmetic problems to be completed in so many minutes. I loved school because I was good at it. The test was a game to me. Not so for Allen. About half way through the test, Allen laid his head on his desk and sobbed. The teacher didn't come to Allen, didn't put her hand on his shoulder, didn't whisper comfort in his ear. The teacher failed to achieve the desired outcome. Allen did not pass the test. Allen didn’t sob because he failed the arithmetic test, he sobbed because he failed to pass a much more important test. He failed to become like the teacher and those who could fulfill her expectations. Inability to assimilate facts and regurgitate them upon command relegated him to being separate from the teacher and most of rest of us. My next clear memory of him is many years later. I can still see him standing around with the worst that our town had to offer. The sobbing boy became a hardened young man with others like him.

C.S. Lewis wrote an essay that he called "Men Without Chests." It's about the result of teaching so as to achieve an outcome rather than teaching the student so as to prepare him to function along side of the teacher. Outcome based education, obviously, believes that the Educator can program the student to achieve the desired result by giving the proper input. Whether that outcome is ultimately good or bad, the process is still propaganda. Lewis uses the analogy of a mother bird leading a chick to become a mature bird, showing by example. She initiates the chick into becoming what she is. He contrasts this with the gamekeeper, or farmer, who manages that chick to achieve his own ends, ends that are unknowable to the chick. Knowledge, true or false, given so as to achieve an outcome is propaganda and produces men without chests, men with knowledge but not hearts. Lewis uses "chest" as a metaphor for those attributes we must admire. Courage. Honor. Honesty. These qualities and all the others that help us rise above instinct and self-preservation are not gained from facts. They are gained through others, whether teacher, parent, mentor, or friend, as they take time and invest in us. They initiate us into being fully human in the way God intended.

The goal that day in second grade was good. When the check-out attendant at the drug store gave me the wrong change the other day, being able to do the math in my head quickly was an asset. It's obviously true that knowledge and how to use it is important, but it's even more important how that knowledge is passed on. Is the teacher a gamekeeper who is entirely different from us, or is he one of us, coming along side of us, showing us how to be human?

The gospel can be true propaganda, knowledge shared to produce the desired outcome of conformity to that knowledge. Such propaganda produces a puppet conformed to the puppeteer, a caricature of the real.

The real gospel is shown and shared, and initiates us to being fully human as new creations. And seeing Him, and others trying to imitate Him, we become like Him, Men with chests; men and women with their hearts of stone replaced by hearts of flesh.

Ezekiel 36:26 “Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

Matthew 1:23'.,.and they will call him Immanuel"--which means, "God with us."

2 Corinthians 3:18 But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image.

The Medium is the Message: The Good News (part 1)

I could not invite my co-workers to our worship.

My local church is precious to me. The people who comprise it are followers of Christ and lovers of the people around them. Many have sacrificially given of time, talent, and resources to help me and others in times of need. Love for truth and doing our best to practice it are hallmarks of our people. Our times of gathering as a local body are characterized by effective, accurate teaching of God's Word and heartfelt worship. The things that follow must have that backdrop or they will not be seen in perspective.

I have been thinking about my co-workers. The Lord put it on my heart to pray for them and I was trying to take that seriously. So I thought about who these men were. I thought about things that they had told me about their children, grandchildren, and wives. I thought about good things they had done, about bad things. I thought about their work ethic. I thought about their love of sports, hunting, fishing and doing work well. And most of all, I thought about their love for their families. They did hard work, made hard choices, and made hard sacrifices to care for those they loved. They bore the cost of being men with a certain pride and honor. Coarse language and crude suggestions often filled the air as they talked, but that describes them, not defines them. They are men who defined themselves by what they did. They are men who are good neighbors, good friends, and who try to be good dads and husbands. It seems to me that they are not unlike Jesus' disciples, workaday men doing their best---and often failing in ways that would be humorous if not so painful.

I've listened to these guys and spoken when it was right to speak about God. To my knowledge, none of them is a follower of Jesus. I considered asking them to visit our local church, and I couldn't. The things that outwardly describe us as we meet could be called our "package." This package that the gift of God comes wrapped in often hides its incredible worth instead of making it more desirable. The package--sitting in pews, listening with no interaction, nice clothes instead of work clothes, and seemingly nothing real to accomplish-becomes a present that many would not want to unwrap, regardless of the content.

Some time ago, a pop culture guru proclaimed, "The medium is the message!" The messenger is also the message. The means, or person, that brings the message impacts the recipient as much or more than the actual message. If I present the good news through the means of inviting a man to sit in a pew with me, he is going to perceive that sitting in a pew is at least a portion of that good news. For many, that would not be good news at all.

Jesus' invitation was consistently to a lifestyle of activity. Our clarion call is to passionately, obediently follow Him; to a belief defined by action. This was the "hook" that caught Peter. Peter had fished all night and caught nothing. He and his partners had come back to shore as Jesus was teaching. As the crowds pushed close, Jesus commandeered Peter's boat and used it as His pulpit. After the teaching was done, Jesus told Peter how and where to cast the nets again. In spite of weariness and doubt, Peter did as he was told. The resulting great catch led Peter to tell Jesus to leave him because he was sinful. Jesus didn't press him to make a "decision" for Christ, or to come to the next teaching, He said, "Follow Me." And as He did, He gave him a task and a promise. The key to Peter's heart was the promise of productivity. As Jesus caught him, Peter would capture others. Peter was captivated by the message and wanted to be like the messenger. The medium was the message.

If we can learn how to corporately live and worship like this, perhaps our local churches will once again be filled with workaday men and women as we invite them to productivity not passivity.

Matthew 4:19 “Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men."

Right Principle + Wrong Motivation =Stumbling Block
Church Without Walls (part 3)

Isaiah 57:14 ... "Build up, build up, prepare the road! Remove the obstacles out of the way of my people."

My father hated the Church, but loved God. He and my mother taught me to pray, but he may have prayed I would never be active in church. I know he was bitterly disappointed when as a teenager, I started going to church.

The single strongest factor for my dad's attitude towards the church was an experience he had as a child. His father died, leaving my grandmother alone with three children. Those were very different days with no social safety nets and perspectives about single mothers that would make us cringe. They were deemed incapable of working while caring for children.

My grandmother was part of a local church that cared about her needs, but acted on their concern in an uncaring way. Their "solution" was to take my father and his brother and sister away from their mother so they could be properly cared for. My grandmother's solution was to leave their little town in the middle of the night to escape the church's concept of care. My father spent the rest of his life trying to continue that escape.

Just a handful of misguided individuals were used as building blocks in the wall that my father started to build to keep the church out of his life. They were his mantra, his excuse for his negative labels he heaped on the church. They likely had no idea of the hurt they inflicted, and probably thought they had been rejected for their service to God.

It's unavoidable that each of us, in spite of good intentions, will sometimes do or say things that become a barrier to others following Christ. Perhaps the key to avoiding most of these painful situations, though, is simply asking questions. "How can we help, Mrs. Jackson?" would have been a way to show real compassion. "We'll take your children because we know that's the best way to help you." shows arrogance. They took a right principle, caring for the widow and orphan, and mixed it with wrong motivation. Right principle applied with wrong motivation produces bad fruit and makes stumbling blocks. When someone, like my father, trips over a stumbling block and is lying on the ground right next to that block, that stumbling block looks big enough to be a wall.

We must be careful to make a way, not a wall, for those around us.

Matthew 18:4 "Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5 "And whoever receives one such child in My name receives Me; 6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

The Klostermeier Effect: Church Without Walls (part 2)

There was a dark time in our lives when we saw the light of Christ in a very unexpected way. We were in inner city Toledo, living in and rehabbing a 5000 square foot duplex that had been vacant for five years. Drug dealers, prostitutes, and drive by shootings were part of our lives. Our income was much the same as our poverty stricken neighbors.

During this same time, we were involved in a church that proved to be as dangerous as our neighborhood. In the midst of some overwhelming family difficulties, it was clear that those with our type of wounds were not welcome. Indeed, our continued presence was no longer requested or desired. I lost my taste for church, but my wife wanted very much to get reconnected immediately. She found a listing in the Yellow Pages that looked inviting to her, and we went to The Church of the Cross.

It was immediately clear that this was the right place for us. The people loved us, and helped us start the healing process. We became part of a small group that helped and encouraged one another in following Christ in the real world.

Meanwhile, back at the duplex....The local drug dealer, who was a 60 year old grandfather, had told me, "You know houses can burn, don't you?" after I had asked the city to tow away the junk car parked on the street. Little did I know that he was storing their drugs in the car. Later, after they threatened to beat up a friend of mine unless we gave them money, we knew it was time to leave. We decided on that Saturday night at 11 pm that we had to move immediately.

The next morning at church, during the prayer request time, I privately told the pastor of our needs. He asked if he could share it with the congregation. As he did, a middle-aged couple listened with compassion. Individually, they each had conviction that they should make a house that they had recently inherited available to us without any rent until we could get back on our feet. Tom came to me afterwards, introduced himself and made their incredible offer. We moved two days later with the help of our small group.

Some time later, I had opportunity to speak to Tom and ask him about his motivation. He shared with me that a few years previously, he had gone through a business failure and bankruptcy. But as God met him in his need, he had been overtaken by compassion for others. He and his wife gave to us in our need because God had given to him in their need.

God changed me through Tom Klostermeier. Ever since that time, I have called that process the Klostermeier Effect. Giving of self and possessions extravagantly because you are needy yourself changes others and they in turn pass it on. It helps build a community of people not divided by the need; a church without walls.

2 Corinthians 1:3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. 5 For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.

The Visitor: Church Without Walls (part one)

Some years ago, I was involved with new church. It had rapid initial growth due to real opportunity to experience community, vibrant worship, and great teaching. It attracted both committed Christians desiring a deeper level of experiencing God and seekers. Sometimes this mixture produces awkward situations. Seekers, by definition, are seeking solutions to their difficulties, and bring their sin with them as they come. This can cause discomfort to those who are accustomed to being around those who at least put up a pretense of acting "christian."

I remember one particularly painful moment. A young seeker was visiting again. He had made no secret of being gay. I saw my friend, who knew the visitor better than I did, speaking to him. My friend soon came over to me and informed me that he had told the gay man to not come back again until he had stopped homosexual relationships. My friend thought he had done well.

Most of the time, we are not this direct. But whether we communicate with words or attitude, sinful seekers know if they are welcome. I've often heard the phrase, "Hate the sin; love the sinner." I understand the sentiment, but it leaves me unsatisfied. I know that I can love a person that I really don't want to spend time with. I can be committed to his good and will do what's in my power to assist him in time of need, but I really don't want spend an evening with him. He may bore me. He may annoy me with his opinions about politics. I love him, but I really don't like him. He is a relative, or an acquaintance, but he will never be a friend. I can love the sinner, sincerely wanting the best for him, but still want no real personal connection with him.

Jesus never minced words about sin, yet he was different than me. In Luke 7:34, He reported what those who hated Him were saying about Him:

The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and "sinners." '

He not only loved the sinners, he liked them. He spent time with them as a friend.

May the same be said of me and you.