In an effort to “… keep my enemies closer,” I occasionally read marketing books and blogs. For who are holding out hope that the two can be married, I hope this post will bury that notion forever.
Seth Godin
Seth Godin is one of the bright lights of marketing especially to those on the cutting edge. He’s written a lot of books and his blog is one that I follow. In his book, “Small Is the New Big” there is one very telling quote:
Marketing is now officially about wants, not needs. That’s what your entire day should be about. Your church, your company, your restaurant, your blog, it doesn’t matter. Give me what I want or I’m out of here.
Do people want to hear about their sin? Do people want to hear about how helpless they are? People need the Gospel but that’s not what marketing is anymore.
I realize it seems callous, but the gospel is a lifestyle with a cost.
For the purposes of marketing, the only difference between the gospel and a product is that the gospel is a lifestyle rather than a good or service.
Sometimes that [communicating the entire gospel] looks like public relations in the form of good deeds. Sometimes it looks like a brand that communicates excitement or simplicity.
But the church succeeds when the world is changed by Christ-followers…
Their understanding of the Gospel and the purpose of the church are quite deficient. “Gospel as lifestyle” is a new one for me. The thing that struck me is that the Gospel is this super life and world changing thing, but nobody wants to tell you what it is. The Gospel isn’t the good news of Christ’s death for sinners, it’s just the thing that the church dispenses. These guys want to talk about the gospel and what it can do, but never get around to actually proclaiming it.
Before Advent service on Wednesday, my pastor says, “I saw your picture on the web today. Yeah, the website for “Transforming Congregations.” My first thought was I was on some wanted list, but I remembered I had actually signed up for their social network while doing opposition research. I started to explain this to my pastor, but he just laughed. He already figured that’s what I was doing.
On that front, things are looking positive. I talked to my pastor, an elder, and several other church committee members and all were in various states of displeasure with the ideas put forth by the Transforming Congregations Network (TCN). I helped solidify the displeasure in several of them by pointing out its non-Lutheran roots which they had missed.
It’s not officially DOA until the elders meet next month, so we’ll see. I want to thank everyone for their support and prayers. I also want to thank those individuals who provided me with specific resources to fight this thing before it got any momentum.
My congregation, Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church, is probably typical of many small churches these days. Membership is flat or declining. Giving is flat or declining. We have budgetary concerns. In short, we are struggling. What to do? As Pastor Wilken points out in his presentation, we call in our heretics, the consultant.
Last night, we had a consultant from the CNH district pitch a process for “Transforming for Mission.” Every good consultant has a mantra, so of course he did. His was, “The Gospel hasn’t changed, the Scriptures haven’t changed, the Holy Spirit hasn’t changed.” This was likely a focus grouped message to quell any concerns of the confessionally minded. I’m sure “adiaphora” will be tossed around a lot in the coming weeks.
So what was the gist of the pitch? Vision, leadership, and accountability. Now those are all words I connect with business, not the church. I envision CEOs, Boards of Directors, vision statements, etc. Well, lo and behold the outcome of this process for another congregation was just such a prescription.
I know I will stand against this, and I fully expect to be the lone voice (Oh I would love to be proved wrong). The problem is that things truly need to change and it is easy to look to man-made solutions to solve our problems. If we stick to God’s vision of the church and focus on His Word and sacraments, will this “inward focus” lead to the death of the congregation? I keep thinking about the antidote for a life without works and that is a life with more faith. I pray for that faith for myself, my congregation, and my pastor.
rent a car bulgariaMy daughter has been doing well at basketball. She is picking up the skills and having fun for the most part. The one thing she will need to acquire is aggressiveness. It’s not really in her personality, and I don’t think she needs to be hyper-aggressive, just enough to go after the ball when she should. But I am proud of her, because she’s doing so well when this is totally out of her comfort zone.
I’ve been helping coach, mostly by herding cats and trying to focus them on what they are supposed to do. I don’t try to instruct because I don’t feel like it’s my place and I don’t want to become one of those parents that’s trying to live vicariously through the kids. I do have a lot of fun running with them during the drills or pretending to be a defender while they are dribbling. I had so much fun yesterday that it was the first time in 5 years that I’ve missed playing. I have no illusions about trying to play again. My left knee can’t survive a half hour of fast walking, let alone running up and down the court. But it sure made me smile watching the kids be so happy after dribbling and coming to a jump-stop.
I was in Bible study yesterday where we are studying the Gospel of John and two asides came up. One was about good works and the other was about how much faith is saving faith?
As I wrote earlier, the good works we do are only viewed by God as such because of Christ’s death on the cross. The discussion in Bible study centered around a Jewish families’ kind acts toward some members of the Ku Klux Klan (I can’t recall the exact story). How could this not be a good work? It was a selfless act for someone with great hatred toward another. Surely God must view it as a good work. It’s probably more selfless than anything that I’ve ever done. And that’s where I think the problem lies. We want to think about our works as good and see others whose acts are greater and more selfless. I have to say what the other person did was a good work or my good deeds, which pale in comparison, couldn’t be a good work either. I wonder if I should just think of works like I do people. Both are conceived in sin and are fallen. Only Christ makes either of them good. Have to talk to pastor about that one.
On the topic of how much faith is saving faith, one of the elders asked if someone open to the possibility that Christ died for them was enough for salvation. Pastor said there is no scriptural evidence pointing to such a thing but pressed the elder on why he wanted to look for this “opening.” The elders response was something to the effect that he wanted to know that he had done his job in evangelizing the person. This point, once again, to our self-centeredness. We want to know that we’ve done our job, that we are making a difference. The fact is, we do know objectively if we have done are job in evangelizing by whether we have proclaimed the Gospel to someone. Whether there is some outward sign or evidence is immaterial.
Misunderstanding scripture and doctrine, like everything else, comes from our sinful nature. We want everything to be about “me” when the only proper use of the word is as the object of a preposition as in, “Christ for me.”
A simple little concentration game with Martin Luther looking on. Listen to some interesting sound bytes as you complete matches. You may even hear some words from Fr. Martin.
That’s what I used to think when I heard those pitches over the radio. I thought people were crazy to get no equity loans and 125% second mortgages. I figured they were putting themselves in financial jeopardy, but what did that have to do with me? As we all know, it turns out this did affect me, it affected all of us. Because of these mortgage products the fundamentals of the housing market were changed. Home prices were inflated because there were fewer homes on the market because there were more home owners who could “afford” houses.
It follows a classic case of unintended consequences. Government officials were upset because people with lower incomes, predominantly minorities, were being rejected for mortgages. This had to be because of discrimination and not income to debt ratios, so the government instructed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make sure the banks weren’t discriminating against these higher risk borrowers. But how did they entice banks to make these risky loans. Well, they bought them from the banks. They lowered their standards for mortgages they would buy so the banks had a market for the higher risk loans. In the old days, banks made their money on mortgages by collecting the interest, now they were making money on the transaction. They no longer had to worry about people defaulting, that risk was shifted to Fannie and Freddie. So what would you do if you had a no risk way to make money? You’d see the dollar signs and milk it for all its worth and of course that’s what the banks did.
Then the economy slowed, interest rates went up, and people with Adjustable Rate Mortgages started getting adjusted out of being able to pay their mortgage. Then house prices started dropping because there were fewer buyers and more houses. This snowballed until we got where we are today. People who should never have bought the homes they did are now without them. People who still have their homes have seen there value drop. Banks folding. Government officials pointing the finger at everyone else and not the rules they setup that created the situation. All because someone thought they had a great solution to end discrimination in the housing market.
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