Follow the Money
Ok, so Natalie just asked, "What do you think of churches who spend tons of money on facilities for their members or their community?"This is another tricky one, but I really think some churches cross the line with this. The mandates are definitely (I feel) more on the "help the poor" side of things rather than the "build a cool club house" side. That's just personal opinion, though. There's always the tension between the "come and see" model vs. the "go ye therefore" model. I think there are two issues here that I think we should tackle:
1. Do we think that the church has a responsibility to provide a "sacred" space to the community? How far does this thought go? Should there always be a place to pray, like the Catholic or Orthodox churches offer the community? Should we build basketball courts, etc., for the community (or for ourselves)?
2. Lesslie Newbigin (a guy whom we ALL must read!!!) says that the local church is the hermeneutic of the gospel to the community it is within. Basically, the community only knows what the Gospel says by what the church does. I think we have a missional/evangelistic responsibility as the church to our community to handle whatever money God has given us prayerfully and with the realization that our actions are preaching to the world about who God is and what is important to Him.
Roland Allen (another must read) said that the same way we judge Christians in the Middle Ages as Military Christians, who "shared" their faith by conquering people, we will be judged in the future as Financial Christians, who depend far too heavily on money to be the prime element in our witnessing, serving, and mission activities. Allen said this around 1915. If it was true then, can you imagine how much more it applies to us today?
My second point (buried deeply as it is) is that we MUST work out what it means to deal with money in our contexts today. I think this is another part of the ongoing community exegesis our churches must engage in and we must have a philosophy of money, as our churches and our world is consumed with it. Richard Foster has a book called The Challenge of the Disciplined Life, which at first was called Money, Sex and Power. I think each church must deal with these three issues and what it means to have a Christian idea about each of these three issues.
I'll jump off the soap box now and whoever wants to jump on, please feel free!
posted by Wayj @ 7:23 AM
5 Comments:
i too hate the hype. but i can see why so many churches and pastors gravitate in that direction. we apply corporate strategies and marketing techniques because they are "effective." but then sit back and wonder why we don't see converts, disciples, or signs and wonders like we see in Acts. i saw an ad in a magazine for a church sign company that quoted a pastor as saying, "Year to date, we're up over 100 percent. The sign by far is the number one reason."
...holy crap... God Bless Amnerica
Man, that is totally it! I wish you were my pastor, Josh!!!
Ok, if you'll allow me a second to jump back on the soap box *cough*my blog*cough* This is pretty much exactly what my degree emphasis was/is and what I'll probably do my PhD on. We use these marketing techniques without even batting an eyelid because we have no missional outlook on our own culture.
We'll spend months/years and tons of money to study someone else's culture when we're sending missionaries there but just assume that America needs no such scrutiny. If we really thought about what marketing basically is (making people feel bad/ugly/insecure enough to buy your product), we'd be a LOT more hesitant to put it in our tool bag.
Instead, we just assume that our culture is tacitly blessed by God (Christian nation?) and we can just stick a Jesus patch over it and immediately it is of God.
If we stepped outside our culture to observe it, or better yet asked our African and Asian brothers and sisters to give us feedback on our culture, I think we'd be very surprised at what we saw and heard.
Ok, back off, somebody jump up!
Yay Becky!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, I still think that there's room for nuance in this thought as well. There is a difference between marketing and communicating, etc. I still think that Marketing is inherently manipulative, though, and no matter how benign our intentions we can't engage in the market mentality without serious consideration of both "product" and methodology.
As both devotee and student of the Marketing world, please tell us more. I think that our culture (and especially our generation) understands marketing perhaps better than anyone, but I think we have to narrowly define what exactly we're talking about.
Don't forget that it was our generation that they had to pass the laws about mixing commercials of toys with the cartoon tie-ins to those toys. There's a point where we must examine our culture and figure out the points at which God is calling us to give a prophetic vs. a chaplaincy message to America and ourselves.
Beck, I think you'd really like Pete Ward's "Liquid Church" check it out!!!
Well, any idea can be reduced to the absurd, this is true, but I still think we need to be cautious where we say things like "marketing" Jesus or "selling" Him to people, lest we become like Simon the Magician in Acts.
The reason I suggested Pete Ward, though, Becky, is that he sees marketing and the like as another tool that the West recognizes and identifies with and thus we should use it when working with those in Western cultures. I'm still much more cautious in how far we should identify with our culture and how far we should be radicals.
I know you're being facetious, but if you look at the early evangelists in America like Moody or Whitefield or others in the 18th and 19th centuries, they would use things like advance teams to interview people and see who was "close" and then put them on the "hot bench" during the service, placing them strategically up front so Moody could speak directly to them and induce a conversion.
Personally, I think we should downplay preaching's role precisely because of its tendency to manipulate and adopt a more teaching model. Nobody should be able to say something that someone else couldn't respond to. That's obviously just a personal conviction of mine, and we have the legacy of Calvin and the primacy of preaching sort of convictions in many of churches. However, whenever it says "preach" in the Bible, the word simply means "communicate" not give a 3 point, 20-30 minute sermon.
Let's hear from the other two people who read this blog (although Thomas is traveling now ;) Josh, Becky and I have argued for over a decade so we're old hat at it now, what do others think?
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