If you can’t tell from reading my blog, I have a HUGE interest in the area of media and its usage in ministry for spreading the gospel. However, I also recognize that we cannot simply imitate the world around us - we can learn from the world, but we ought to do better.

I visited a church last week that has an entire graphic design and printing workshop built in. It’s a room full of Mac’s and they put out some of the best promotional materials I’ve ever seen, but the materials are worthless unless they convey the right message.

Chris Forbes, over in Oklahoma, has a great mind for marketing the gospel in a powerful and biblical way. He’s written a great post about the subject and we’ve exchanged comments back and forth. I wanted to pass it along…

Using Media for Contextualizing and Contending with the Gospel in Your Community | Ministry Marketing Coach

The Six Church Marketing Bad-Attitudes | Ministry Marketing Coach.

Chris Forbes, over in Okhahoma, has done another awesome job of articulating the attitudes that I believe are killing so many churches today. These six bad-attitudes represent six small-minded, closed-minded ways of thinking about outreach. Well worth the read!

What Does the Future Look Like for Your Church’s Ministry? | Ministry Marketing Coach.

Chris Forbes, the Ministry Marketing Church, has written a pretty great article about writing our future as a church. Goals, dreams, ambitions… though they aren’t everything, they do determine our direction. You lean into a curve and try not to lean into a punch. Are we leaning toward success or failure?

If you could write tomorrow’s headlines for your life, your church, your family, or your organization today, what would you want to write? So, write it, and go for it, and let God have all the say, as well as all the glory

I know this is a sensitive subject, which is exactly why I’m addressing it. It seems there is, in the minds of many Christians, a correlation between “marketing” and compromise. The thought is that if you market the church or its message in any way similar to the secular world, you’ve somehow stripped the gospel of its dignity. I would contend that marketing is what the Great Commission is all about, especially when you include personal, one-to-one (word-of-mouth) marketing as the most important marketing of all.

I would certainly argue that it can be tempting for leaders to water down the message of the gospel to make it more palatable for the public - and this is certainly not an option. But can biblically grounded leaders utilize marketing tools to “get the word out” about their ministry and message? Just read this interesting article by Chris Forbes:

http://ministrymarketingcoach.com/blog/2008/08/02/what-about-the-critics-of-church-marketing/

It’s an interesting point about how great the anti-marketing message gets marketed. It’s something to think about. In my opinion, there’s a great advantage to having a logo, website, advertising, sending postcards, doing direct mail, and even television commercials. It engages people in the context of their current cultural setting. But yes, I’d agree that the greatest marketing of all is still a believer relating to a non-believer compassionately to share the good news of Jesus.

Chris Forbes is kind of a ministry marketing coach. In fact, that’s the name of his web site, www.ministrymarketingcoach.com. He meets a need that exists today within Christian circles of leadership by coaching church leaders toward success. He currently has 2 free ebooks available on his web site, and here’s the link to his download page. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »

I just finished reading Jim Cymbala’s book Fresh Power and it has again revived my thirst for God. One of the most impactful insights from the book is the revelation that if we can explain the success of our churches in terms of programs, personalities, or well-oiled machinery without the power of the Holy Spirit, then we’ve missed the point. Cymbala appeals to A. W. Tozer who proclaimed that if the Holy Spirit were removed from our midst today, most of our largest and most rapidly growing churches would continue as they are because their growth is attributable not to the powerful working of the Holy Spirit, but to a marketing structure, business plan, and organizational genius that is very humanly originated.

We do need to operate in the “fresh power” freely available from the Holy Spirit, God’s operative agent in the world today. We do need to continue the writing of the Acts of the Holy Spirit in our modern world. For the Brooklyn Tabernacle, which Cymala pastors, the secret of this abiding power and presence of God is not merely to be found in a great choir, great preaching, or great buildings. It is found in their Tuesday night prayer meeting which serves as the fuel source for all else that happens.

I believe my favorite chapter is the second, entitled Of Cemeteries and Insane Asylums. Pastor Cymbala writes about the two extremes of today’s Christianity. The insane asylums represent the excesses of the charismatic movement. It describes the counterfeit revivals, the get-rich-quick Christianity, the mass-miracle-crusades without discernment or validation. This is Christianity that has zeal but little truth. The cemeteries are those circles of modern Christianity much like my own denomination, which have so reacted against the charismatic movement that we’ve become boxes of bones with no life. We have our truth, and like Charlton Heston and his rifle, the world can peel it from our cold, dead hands. Shame on us!

What an atrocity that we are so closed to the potential activity of the Spirit of God that we completely deny the possibility that God would want to invade our space, enliven our worship, and move us to a new level of power-filled witness. How we desperately need a fresh infilling of His presence. As we seek a proper biblical balance in all things, let us seek the fullness of power of the Holy Spirit, and let us seek to defend the truth in a pluralistic age. God, may You enliven today’s church by Your mighty Holy Spirit, and may this work begin in me!

“But hath in due times manifested his word through preaching…” -Titus 1:3

To every preacher of the Word, God has committed a sacred trust. He has called and commanded us to proclaim the content of His everlasting word week after week. There are many challenges to preaching as an effective means of communication today. We battle against popular sports on Sunday, longer work weeks which displace Sunday as “the Lord’s Day,” and the decreased attention span of Americans who are addicted to high-resolution, image-oriented marketing. But perhaps the greatest danger to preaching today is the preacher himself.

There is a constant challenge from within the field to weaken or water down the proclamation of God’s Word. Church growth gurus tell us that the world doesn’t want lengthy sermons anymore, but I would contend that the church is as much to blame for this trend as the world. Rather than giving into the pressure to preach all-positive little sermonettes, let us return instead to the biblical idea of proclamation.

One temptation the church has faced is to use the pulpit as a veritable soapbox, spouting the latest political or moral opinions without much scriptural backing. At best we often loosely attach a remote verse and contort its interpretation to fit the principle we desire to communicate. Or worse, we attempt to compete with the world by offering a better self-help message than that which may be found in thousands of bookstores in the self-help section. The pastor, instead of being a theologian before the congregation becomes a mere pop-psychologist.

Another obstacle to biblical preaching is the overwhelming tendency to compete with the world’s marketing strategies, a tactic doomed for failure. Lacking the resources and expertise for the field, the church ends up being seen as a cheap imitation of the culture. In our drive to stay “relevant” we forget that the Word of God, if preached accurately and passionately, is timeless in its application to the needs of mankind.

So, what is the purpose of preaching? It is to proclaim, to make manifest, and to put on display the content of the Word of God. John R. Rice said that our preaching should be filled with “profundity wrapped in simplicity.” It is not our task to make God’s Word interesting, neither is it justifiable to make it boring. The Bible has an intrinsic, transforming power all its own. It merely needs a herald, one who will announce the good news of God to a world gone mad.

If I could think of a word to describe the approach of the Old Testament prophets to preaching, it would be “simplicity.” In a culture of idolatrous self-gratification the prophets faithfully proclaimed their message of “thus saith the Lord.” The last thing the world needs on Sunday is a shallow rehashing of world events by armchair politicians or another self-help message in an age of self-obsession. Rather, let us put on display the Word of God, as it is.

We dare not dumb down the Word, make it boring, or market it to the flesh. Rather, we must live up to the command and the calling to proclaim it loud and clear. If we want to restore preaching to a place of prominence in our culture today, we must remain faithful to this basic task of being God’s spokesmen. The world may not like our message, but they will come to listen. We may end up in chains in the end, but as Paul said, “the word is not bound.” Let us unleash God’s truth to do it’s proper work in the hearts of mankind!

Have you heard a teenager say, “But all my friends are doing it?” Our usual reply is a sharp rebuttal such as, “If all your friends jumped off the Empire State Building, would you do it too?” The darker side of my humor enjoys the cartoon depicted by Gary Larsen in which an enormous pile of bodies is mounting next to a building where a person is poised on the edge, ready to leap. The caption reads, “If everybody jumped off the Empire State Building, after a while it wouldn’t hurt so bad.”

The message of the church to young people today is so often, “Don’t go with the flow, dare to be different!” We realize the serious mistake of giving wholesale assent to whatever popular opinion dictates. We stand on issues such as abortion, homosexual rights, and gambling no matter what the majority rules. All of this is very biblical considering the mountain of Scripture that speaks to us about the doctrine of personal separation from the world.

What happens, however, when we call people to forsake their following of popular secular opinion merely to exchange it for a blind following of ecclesiastical opinion. More simply stated, is it wise to declare null and void any possible argument against what mainstream Christian culture establishes to be so?

We live in an age of media giants who use marketing to shape popular opinion far more than even our most powerful educational institutions. The Christian subculture, unfortunately, follows this trend, even if unintentionally.

John MacArthur has often commented that one of the most neglected Christian virtues today is that of discernment, and he is absolutely correct. To question is to be disagreeable, and to be disagreeable with Christian pop-culture is paramount to being heretical and downright odd! Perhaps we should realize that if many heroes of the past had not presented their questions, we may not have many of the great confessions and creeds that helped to preserve a biblical faith against the work of cultists.

Personally, I’m rather concerned with the swelling tide of Calvinism that is sweeping Baptist seminaries and churches. I’m upset about the number of Bible translations produced each decade under the guise of giving modern readers a more pragmatic rendering of the old, old story (note: Since each publisher seems to want to have their own translation, or two or three, we might go so far as to question the motives behind this translation pandemonium). I’m alarmed at how quickly certain philosophies of ministry take root which seek to strip the Bible of any specific guidance in any area other than theology proper. Heaven forbid we question whether a Christian music artist should be an exact replica of a drug-ridden punk rocker, whether Christian teenagers should really be getting fashion advice from porn-producers such as Abercrombie & Fitch, or whether the Nude Reviled Substandard Perversion is okay as long as it’s understandable!

I say, let’s be discerning! Let’s “try the spirits, whether they be of God…” (1 John 4:1) Let’s “withdraw [our]selves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received from us…” (2 Thessalonians 3:6) Let’s “stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.” (2 Thessalonians 2:15)

We need to return to discernment, to thinking, and to a willingness to express and debate these and other issues rather than blindly accepting whatever is handed down from the day’s most popular Christian resource providers. Let me think on my own two feet and if I don’t show up at the next “Christian rock” concert waving a neon green copy of the newest translation and covered in pseudo-Christian/gothic tattoos, you’ll know I have good personal reasons!