This is not a "niche" blog. This is everything that makes me, me - or at least the bits I write down. There's no such thing as a "niche" person.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Finally, an idea I wanted to write down

Actually, the title of this post is a little misleading. I've had lots of ideas that I wanted to write down, but I finally had a thought that I needed to get down before I lost it, but yet was something that I wanted to share with you, my reader.

The alarm went off at 6.00 this morning but I lay back down on the bed again to wait for the second (6.30) alarm. I was lying there in an almost awake kind of state, and a series of thoughts came to me. This has a lot to do with things I've been thinking about and reading around for a while, so it may be that my brain had finally built a connection while I was asleep. Whatever, the first thought was about how in marketing there is a need to make a new product seem popular, to create a buzz around it, because people (with some exceptions) are not keen to pay for something that nobody else is doing. We're generally herd animals - we follow the pack. Which, evolutionarily speaking, is pretty sensible.

Then I was thinking about evangelism, and about how to get people to come to Christ, or at least to come to church (in whatever form) so that they can hear about Jesus and make a decision about what they'd like to do with their lives. I wondered how much the Church suffers because everyone knows that hardly anyone goes to church, so church is clearly a place where you wouldn't want to go. I was thinking about how to create a buzz around church, and whether we do that, and how much we sell Jesus as something that the world really NEEDS.

This drifted into a thought about permission marketing. To put it very crudely, traditional marketing says "Buy our product. It's great, and it will improve your life." Permission marketing says "I've got a product that I believe in. These are the reasons it can improve your life. What do you think?" (If anyone who reads this knows more about marketing and I've got this totally wrong, please let me know.) Anyway, I was wondering about whether the church uses traditional or permission marketing - which I guess would be the difference between "Believe in Jesus or you'll go to Hell" and "See what a difference Jesus has made to me. Would you like to know more?" The second one is much more difficult to do (at least for me - though I don't do the first one either).

Then I came back to the idea of making Jesus popular, and creating a buzz around church, so that people could pick up on the excitement of being a Christian. I think that I was drifting back off to sleep at this point, because this is where the metaphorical light bulb popped up above my head. I suspect that I was working out the target demographic for an ad for church, and thinking of something that basically said "Church is for people like YOU" where "you" are 25-40, employed, in a marriage or long-term relationship, probably going to have or already bringing up children. Then I realised that it's hard to create a buzz for people like that, because so many other advertisers are already telling them lots of other stuff that they need which doesn't involve getting up on Sunday mornings, never mind devoting their lives to the service of the Gospel, so I was a bit disappointed. Then I had a worrying thought. I thought that if we created a buzz about church, but that young successful people didn't get it, then we'd end up with a church full of misfits and losers. We'd have a congregation full of old people and physically ugly people and not very bright people and unemployed people and alcoholics and drug users and people who could do with having a bath a little more often. At this point the light went on, because of course that's who should be filling the church. To quote what's rapidly becoming one of my favourite phrases, Jesus is for losers.

And then the light bulb got really bright, because I was thinking about how uncomfortable I'd be going to church with a load of loser type people (sorry, being honest here), and I realised that that's because I wasn't actually acknowledging what a loser I am. In Christian language, of course, we don't say "loser", we say "sinner", but it came down to the same thing. I wasn't comfortable because I was thinking of myself as somehow better than some other kinds of people, and the fact is that I'm not. I'm only allowed to be a citizen of the Kingdom of God because of what Jesus has done. I certainly don't deserve to be one. And that's the counterintuitive message of the church. We're here for the people whom we probably wouldn't chose as friends. The unreliable ones. The smelly ones. The ones who drink too much and swear too much and don't bring up their children very well. The losers and the users. In short, people like us. Bad, sad, mad and damaged people, like you and like me.

And that's why I feel uncomfortable with Christian websites that are full of young attractive people and don't have sad lonely losers with rubbish hair. That's why I'm not sure about asking people permission to pray for them. That's why I think that we can be bold about preaching the Gospel, because we know that it's not going to make us look stupider than we already are, because we're humble: we know that the winners in the Kingdom are the losers in this world. We can get churches full of the kind of people that Jesus came to call. Not the well, but the sick. Like us.