Secular Marketers are Coveting the Church Format You Hate So Much

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Pastor Foley

I think you know I enjoy reading Dan Pallotta‘s columns in the Harvard Business Review, though he and I could hardly approach the topic of fundraising from more different backgrounds and orientations and in an effort to achieve more diametrically opposite ends. But the guy is smart, funny, and interesting, which is more than one can say about most fundraising writing on the Internet, even, oddly, the stuff I tend to agree with.

Anyway, Pallotta engaged in a rare moment of church envy the other day in his column (typically he is, um, not praiseworthy of Christians or Christian morality or much of anything Christian for that matter) that made me want to switch my membership to whatever church he went to when he wrote the following:

Religious services are a form of marketing. What else would you call being held captive to a rehearsed one-hour message repeated once a week, every week, week after week after week? It’s a particularly productive form of marketing — rich, experiential, and communal. It’s much more powerful than a website banner ad that your retina can filter out before reaching your brain, or a TV commercial you can make disappear with TIVO. You have to sit there and listen. The message is simple: Be charitable, both to your religious institution and to humanity in general. And it works.

I’ve taught and trained hundreds of churches, and I can count on one hand the ones that week in and week out share the simple message, “Be charitable”. Even the ones that share that simple message rarely do so in a way that is “rich, experiential, and communal.”

I wish sincerely that churches were indeed far more guilty of what Pallotta accuses us of and envies so greatly. We ought to be. He’s exactly right: What an opportunity we’re missing! Instead of using each week to share the simple call to generosity, we’re scared even to talk about it. We hope people catch it from the ventilation system, to be sure, but to our shame we are hardly making rich, experiential, communal appeals for charity every week.

In the end, my question remains the same as always, namely:

If the Church’s opportunities to build generosity are so coveted by secular marketers, why are we the ones consistently trying to imitate them?

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How to Build Generosity: Don’t Teach People How to Give More. Instead, Teach Them How to Love More, and the Giving Will Follow

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Pastor Foley

I wrote earlier this week about how much I liked David Brooks’ review of David Platt’s book, Radical, which I am anticipating I will also like very much.

And since I am having a like-fest this week, let me note how much I liked Jan Edmiston’s review of Platt’s book on A Church for Starving Artists, a blog I like a lot in general. In particular, I liked Jan’s honesty as she commented on Platt’s call for Christians to live on $50,000 a year and give away the rest:

I speak for myself here: When friends live in palatial homes with perfect yards and they seem to go to Europe a lot, I find myself jealous and competitive. And the simple truth is that our family cannot afford to live on $75,000 a year much less $50,000. We have multiple kids in college and a mortgage (small house but expensive market.) One of my proudest achievements is that we paid for braces for 3 kids: $18,000 with dental insurance.

This is not to say we could cut back on some things. But honestly, I don’t want to. There, I said it. My Starbucks treats are like little vacations on long working days (and most of them are paid for by generous parishioners who share gift cards.) My car was bought used – but it has a moonroof which frankly adds joy to my life. We have a dog that needs food and vet appointments, but she has made life a little sweeter for all of us.

How do we discern what is excess and what is not?

My own reply is that the question represents the entirely understandable but yet wrong end of the proverbial stick with regard to giving. I mentioned to you that I’ve been writing the chapter on Ransoming the Captive for my upcoming book, so the material for that is fresh in my spell checker. I quoted from it briefly last week, but let me share a bit more as my own reflection in response to Jan’s question. It’s written specifically in relation to ransoming captives, but you’ll no doubt catch the general point:

If Christ sets one free, it is tempting to think that such freedom ought to free one from work that is personally all-consuming, like the work of ransoming the captive. The Trinitarians and the Mercedarians give up a third of their resources in its pursuit. Schindler forks over every last pfennig. Early Christians offer their own lives as ransom. Is it not ransom enough for one to subsidize someone else’s gas and holiday wrapping paper expenses? Why can others not find freedom in Jesus from that?

Such a perspective perfectly misses the point of ransoming the captive, however. As [Carolyn] Osiek deduces in her own study,

“The exhortation to redeem captives is deeply rooted in the biblical message of human liberation and habitually linked with other preaching and work for relief of the needy.”

Habitually linked—both words are crucial, even in relation to Jesus himself. Jesus does not die for strangers—nor does he even die for sinners or for his enemies. That those he dies for are all these things—sinners estranged from God who are thus his enemies—is absolutely true. But who Jesus dies for is his beloved humanity, who have tragically become his sinfully estranged enemies.

And in this is a world of difference. It is the habit of [God] to love human beings with a comprehensive attitude and pattern of direct contact, warm relationship, and unfailing and unwarranted beneficence. Ransoming them is simply the costly consequence of that love. Since the dawn of the race he has done good to them, fed them, shared his bread with them, opened his home to them, visited and remembered them, and healed and comforted them. Having done all these things for each human being, would he not also give himself to ransom them from the very thing that separates them from him?

In the same way, for those ransomed by the blood that courses with his love—for those who have mirrored the fullness of his philanthropy to the world, doing good, sharing their bread, opening their homes, visiting and remembering, healing and comforting, proclaiming the gospel, forgiving and reconciling, and making disciples, what could account for them withholding their own lives from those to whom they have thus given? It is their reasonable and joyful worship of [God].

One may subsidize gas for a stranger, but only the habit of love finely trained through mirroring Christ’s Works of Mercy to the world will prompt one to lay down one’s life. And it will indeed prompt one to do exactly that. One will always do so for a much beloved one. The Works of Mercy train one to love as God loves, with a love of God and neighbor maturing to the full stature of Christ. One will love first those who are of the household of God, and next those in the world, as Paul notes in Galatians 6 and as Jews and Christians from the earliest days on through Maximilian Kolbe in our own era demonstrate.

Even in the world outside of God, if one’s one family member were kidnapped, there would be no question about sacrificing everything to meet demands for ransom; it is the stuff of television. So when Peregrinus Proteus is imprisoned, Christians come from other cities as far away as Asia bringing food, raising money, spending the night with him, bribing guards, helping him, defending him, strengthening him, lavishing their all on him because this is what they always do, because

44ball that believed were together, and had all things common;

45And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.

46And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart,

47Praising God, and having favour with all the people. (Acts 2:44b-47, KJV)

This is what Christ does for them and pours into them to pour out to each other. And it is what Maximilian Kolbe pours out on a stranger because he sees Christ in him. It is a customary and not an odd thing to ransom a captive who is one’s own blood. The miracle is not in the act of ransoming a loved one but rather in coming to love the one who is not one’s own blood in the first place. This is the gift one receives through the habitual practice of the Works of Mercy.

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David Platt, I’ll See Your $50,000 and Lower You $11,500

Posted on October 18, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Just received my copy of David Platt’s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream from amazon.com in the mail today. Can’t wait to finish writing my own book (just two more weeks and two more chapters to go…) so I can read it, along with the 38 other books that I ordered but could not read while in my self-imposed writing cocoon.

I imagine I’ll like the book a lot, for two reasons. First, when I was flipping through it I saw a quote so compelling I had to use it in my book:

As Elisabeth Elliot points out, not even dying a martyr’s death is classified as extraordinary obedience when you are following a Savior who died on a cross. Suddenly a martyr’s death seems like normal obedience.

Got to love a megachurch pastor willing to talk like that.

Second, what actually made me order the book was David Brooks’ review of it in the New York Times. Are you reading all of David Brooks’ New York Times columns? Mandatory, friend. Mandatory.

Including this one. Brooks’ review is edifying reading in its own right.

Maybe the first decade of the 21st century will come to be known as the great age of headroom. During those years, new houses had great rooms with 20-foot ceilings and entire new art forms had to be invented to fill the acres of empty overhead wall space.
People bought bulbous vehicles like Hummers and Suburbans. The rule was, The Smaller the Woman, the Bigger the Car — so you would see a 90-pound lady in tennis whites driving a 4-ton truck with enough headroom to allow her to drive with her doubles partner perched atop her shoulders.

Brooks notes that after the economy “went poof”, values have radically changed:

Today, savings rates are climbing and smart advertisers emphasize small-town restraint and respectability. The Tea Party movement is militantly bourgeois. It uses Abbie Hoffman means to get back to Norman Rockwell ends.

Brooks sees Platt in this vein. He offers several quotes from Platt, including the one that sent me straight to amazon to order the book:

Platt calls on readers to cap their lifestyle. Live as if you made $50,000 a year, he suggests, and give everything else away. Take a year to surrender yourself. Move to Africa or some poverty-stricken part of the world. Evangelize.

I am in love.

My only request is that Platt would consider going with $38,500 rather than $50,000. Maybe when I read the book I’ll discover where the $50,000 comes from, but I suggested the $38,500 as the more appropriate number in one of my own personal favorite blog posts that I’ve done on this site. I encourage you to check it out and, emboldened by Platt, I encourage you to try it out. Or try his way.

Or split the difference and try living on $44,250.

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