avid Fitch of Reclaiming the Mission has begun a new series of posts called “When They Will Not Come”. Here is a quote that resonates with what I’ve been trying to express about hype and takes it in a different direction, namely discipleship.

I believe a host of problems in American evangelicalism originate in our disregard for community. Indeed, our hyped up attractional approach to church has put the individual first in such a way that community becomes an afterthought which creates problems for discipleship, catechesis of our children, as well as evangelism. We seek to draw the individual in, sell him/her a message, and then provide communities. Community by definition becomes commodified. Instead of an individual being grafted into the Body of Christ as the very foundation of his/her salvation, this individual becomes a consumer of what kind of community best suits the kind of Christianity he or she can fit into her life. The ramifications for discipleship are disastrous.

Read the entire post if you get a chance.

f hype is unproductive, like I’ve been arguing, what do we replace it with? If I’m really convinced that most of our marketing and posturing adds unnecessary offense to our churches rather than make them more welcoming, how do we counter that? I don’t think I have all the answers. (Young men in general and specifically young seminary graduates like myself fall easily into the trap of thinking we have everything figured out. There may be no fool like an old fool but there’s no arrogant know-it-all like a young arrogant know-it-all.)

My remedy is that we take what some might consider a negative and make it a positive. Killing your advertising? Tell your congregation that you’re doing it and why you’re doing it. Make it a group rallying cry that you’re going to eschew Madison Avenue and embrace relationships based upon love and respect. There’s a better way to introduce people to our churches.

Here’s another take that I heard while I was in Dallas a few months ago:

Do you know why you can’t get coffee here? Because I’d rather you pick it up on the way in where you know your barista’s name.
-Matt Chandler

That’s what Christians ought to be doing. Go to Starbucks or your local coffee shop of choice and tip well. Don’t sign up for the “church fitness center”; join a real gym and get to know people. Let your kids play sports through the YMCA instead of the church league. Cut the fluff out of the church for the sake of your congregation being involved in their community. Don’t just say, “we don’t do that stuff,” instead, have a reason why you don’t do that. There’s something better than letting our churches turn into yet another hyped-up consumer enclave.

emember in high school when you would be approached by a girl and presented with this scenario:

So, I ended up going over to Tommy’s house last night and hanging out with him. Yes, I know he’s got a girlfriend. Anyway, we watched a movie and toward the end, he leaned over and he kissed me! It was so sweet! Yes, I know he’s got a girlfriend. Do you think it means anything? Do you think he’ll break up with her and go out with me? We would be perfect together! I’m going to go back over there tomorrow night. Which dress do you think he’d find the cutest? I look really hot in the blue one. Alright! I know already, he’s got a girlfriend. What do you mean he’ll cheat on me too? It’s totally different. If you knew her, you’d know why he wants to be with me. It is totally different. Totally.

That’s most church marketing.

If we’re honest, we’ll admit that we’re going for the same pool of consumer Christians who want to be impressed by the hippest, newest thing in the religious world. Non-christians and people who have been burned by the church want nothing to do with hype-driven Christianity - and for good reason.

hen I was first learning to write in elementary school, I remember learning about parts of speech. There were nouns - persons, places, things or ideas; verbs - action words; and adjectives - words that describe. Adjectives were the parts of language that made everything more vivid; you didn’t technically have to have them but they added new dimensions to communication.

In thinking about hype, one of the ways that we allow hype to get into our churches is in the adjectives we use. I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. We have exciting new ministries. We have powerful worship services. We have creative, inspiring, and insightful sermons. We have life-changing songs. Really? Really?

It’s part of the continual push to be newer and better. We might not believe it, but with our rhetoric we’re saying: “Those old ministries are passé, check out these new exciting ministries!” “Those old churches are staid and boring, we’re relevant!” And even if it were true, even if the new things were ten-times more exciting and creative, it doesn’t do us much good in the long run anyway. Why? Because the only people who really care if things are that much more exciting are Christians who already go to other houses of worship who want to be a part of the newest, the latest, the greatest thing.

It’s just too much.

What if we saved the word exciting for things that are truly exciting like the Gospel or a new church being planted or someone returning to the church after years away or a baptism or a first communion? That’s exciting. It is exciting to know that my sins, though they are countless, are not counted against me. It is exciting to know that the Holy Spirit is active in my life, uniting me to Christ. It is exciting to see hearts that were once dead in sin like mine made alive in Christ. The Gospel should be what truly excites us - not a bunch of promotional junk surrounding yet another church program.

The greatest singer in rock and roll
Would have to be Romeo
His vocal chords are made of gold
He just looks a little too old

Wilco, “The Late Greats”

I pray that my church (and I) would never get to the point that the Gospel just “looks a little too old”.

hen he was in Houston last spring, Fred Harrell made a comment about church marketing that has stuck with me.

Advertising doesn’t work. None of that stuff really works anymore. Secular people see it as nothing more than hype.

The quote has haunted me because it intersects with where I live. I follow a lot of blogs; most of them are very much pro-advertising the church. They endorse methods like billboards and monthly mailers to the community and TV ads and carnivals and radio spots and, well, you name it. One of the things that I appreciate about most (if not all) of them is their zeal for telling people about their faith and their local congregation. I find a lot that is laudable in their planning and desire to connect people with the local church to connect them to Jesus. The only problem is, I don’t really think it works in all contexts. Though they’re becoming more similar, a college town in the midwest is different than a beachfront community in Florida. A city in the deep south is different than a suburb in the Pacific Northwest. Even here in the Houston area, The Woodlands is very different from the Heights which is itself very different from the Third Ward.

I live in the ruins of the Bible Belt. We’re not a completely secular culture here in Houston. Though there are people from every corner of the globe and every faith under the sun here, there’s also kind of a cultural echo of Christianity. To put it in clearer terms, there are a lot of people here who have been burned out of the Christian church, many of them for reasons quite unrelated to the Christian Gospel. Billboards here don’t call out to people, “Come, see Jesus, the man who told me everything I ever did! Could this be the Messiah?” like the woman at the well in John 4. They scream, “We’ve got something to sell you!” whether it’s the minister or the programs or the lifestyle of contemporary (predominantly white) wealthy evangelicalism.

Maybe the best and most responsible advertising we could do would be to say something like this to our churches:
“We’ve decided to eliminate the line-item for advertising in our budget. That’s right. Not one dollar will go to billboards or commercials or anything like that. That money is for church planting; that’s where lives are changed, not by a slogan on a freeway. Now it’s your job to get to know people around you and bring them with you to church. We’re not looking for people who go to other churches; we want you to get to know people who aren’t Christians and don’t share our beliefs. We want you to bring them here. We promise that this will be a safe place for them to hear about Jesus without all of the extra junk that so often goes along with it. We’re not going to sell ourselves to anybody. We’re not going to treat human beings as mere consumers. We’re going to be respectful; we’re not going to lie and tell people that we’ve got everything figured out. We’re going to worship God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

How’s that for a marketing campaign?