Scratching Where They Itch?

Brett McCracken — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:07:05 -0700

One of the most troubling things I see when I look at contemporary Christianity is the mentality that the church should fashion itself according to the needs and wants of the “audience.” It’s an idea that grew out of the evangelical church growth and seeker movements and is practically an epidemic today. Almost every evangelical church these days is to some extent thinking in terms of what the audience wants and how churches can provide them with a desirable product. It’s unseemly, to be sure, but it’s just a symptom of the consumerist culture we live in. Presumably, it’s how things must be done. Whatever else you might say about a product you’re trying to sell, the one thing you know for sure is this: the audience is sovereign.

But of course, the question the church must reckon with is this: is Christianity a “product” we must sell? Looking at the language many pastors and Christian leaders use today, it certainly sounds like it. In Pop Goes the Church, Tim Stevens argues that effective churches are those that identify the needs of their audience, speak their language and “scratch where they itch.” In Branding Faith, Phil Cooke says that the church needs to “start thinking in reverse,” by focusing on the audience rather than the message and realizing that “it’s not the message you send, it’s the message that’s received that counts.”

Cooke also says this: “Pastors, Christian leaders and broadcasters always thought they had the answers to what their audience wanted and, more important, the audience would listen. Today the audience is in charge. In a virtually unlimited channel universe, the audience has more choices than ever before, and for us to justify their attention, we need to get on their wavelength.”

Indeed, it may be true that people have more choices than ever before and that Christianity is competing for increasingly depleted pockets of attention, but I hardly think the answer to this dilemma is to start with the conceit that “the audience is in charge.” Especially for Christians, it should be clear that the audience is not and should not be sovereign! The audience consists of broken, depraved, n’er do well sinners. God is sovereign. He comes first, not the audience’s idea of what they want God to be or what they want from religion.

The problem with the “audience is sovereign” approach is that audiences rarely want what is really in their best interest. Giving audiences what they want might make a company money, but it rarely satisfies the audience in the long run. And it hardly ever edifies their soul. Furthermore, in terms of Christianity, what the audience “wants” has very little bearing on what Christianity actually is. In a market economy, consumer needs are those that consumers identify for themselves. But as David Wells points out in The Courage to be Protestant, “the needs sinners have are needs God identifies for us, and the way we see our needs is rather different from the way he sees them… The product we will seek naturally will not be the gospel.”

To “scratch were they itch,” then, seems like a futile pursuit for a church trying to win converts to the Gospel. People are itching for a lot of things, and some of them might actually add up to what the gospel of Christ offers, but at the end of the day the gospel is defined outside of and with little regard to whatever it is people think Christianity is or should be.

The logic of consumerism is that people want what they want and get what they want, for a price. It’s all about ME—the brands I buy, the products I consume, the “gimme more” mindset of never having to wait long to have any desire fulfilled.

I’m not sure there are any circumstances under which Christianity fits comfortably into this paradigm.

To position the Gospel within this consumerist framework is to open the door to all sorts of distortions, mutations, and “to each his own” cockamamie variations. If it’s all about selling a message that scratches a pluralism of itches, how in the world will a cohesive, orthodox, unified gospel survive?

In his article “Jesus is not a Brand” in Christianity Today, Tyler Wigg-Stevenson raises the warning that by adopting a marketing mindset, the church “will subtly contort the gospel into mere personal fulfillment,” focusing only on the benefits of becoming a Christian and presenting a message “not fundamentally different from commercial advertising about the existential benefits of this car or that soap.” And this sort of “what can the church do for me?” mindset is completely contrary to living a God-centered, neighbor-focused life.

To conceive of Christian identity in terms of consumer satisfaction is the wrong way for the church. We cannot let ourselves—or our message—be form-fit to the fickle demands and fluctuating interests of the market.

As Wells puts it: “Relevance is not about incorporating something else as definitive in the life of the church, be it the hottest marketing trend, the latest demographic, the newest study on depression, what a younger generation thinks, Starbucks, or contemporary music. None of these is definitive. None should be allowed a defining role in how the church is strengthened and nourished.”

There are a lot of things that scratch were the average person itches. Things like aspirin, coffee, reality TV, cookies, cigarettes, sleep, sex, and orange juice. To place Christianity in that category of just “one among many” desires that people might have is to do it a monumental injustice. Christianity transcends all that. It is much bigger and above all earthly whims, fads, desires and emotional cravings. If we think we can “sell” it best on the terms of the consumer, we are gravely mistaken.

The Olympics and Sovereignty

Jeff Hopper — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:49:53 -0800

The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong…but time and chance happen to them all. (Ecclesiastes 9:11, NIV)

Don’t know if you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, but let me say this about it: it may be the single greatest argument ever for the sovereignty of God. If you want a shortcut to what I mean, just read the last chapter, where Gladwell describes his own life experience. He’s not a God guy that I can tell, so he attributes things to right-place-at-the-right-time explanations, but layer in what you know about the God of Scripture, and you’ll be blown away (unless you spend lots of time thinking about this stuff already).

Or you can do this: Start watching the Winter Olympics.

If these Olympics are teaching me anything, it’s that the best you can do is give yourself a chance. The rest is, as some still dare to say, “up to God.”

Apolo Ohno, his sport’s most decorated Olympian, rejoices in a silver medal. Why? Because short track speed skating, for all its premium on speed and agility, awards survivors as much as winners. If you can remain on your feet throughout a lightning fast series of dizzying ovals amidst competitive traffic, you’ll likely walk away with medal. How did Ohno get his silver? The two Korean skaters immediately ahead of Ohno and ready to shut him out collided and slid into the wall with less than 30 yards to go.

In the men’s downhill competition, the results were the closest in history, with gold medalist Didier Defago of Switzerland finishing seven-hundredths of a second ahead of Aksel Lund Svindal of Norway and another two hundredths of a second ahead of America’s Bode Miller. Had they been racing together, the spread among the three, over more than two miles at an average exceeding 60 mph, would have been less than 10 feet!

And then, if you can stand it, watch snowboard cross (SBX), where steps and banks and jumps and slush and ice and multiple riders jostling one another serve up the ultimate in go-figure competition. When American Seth Wescott stormed from far behind to repeat as gold medalist, analyst Pat Parnell tried his best to sort out the luck from the bootstraps, saying, “In a sport where the one thing you can count on is absolutely nothing, Seth Wescott controls his moment of Olympic gold.” Wescott’s margin of victory? Less than a boardlength.

Of course, that’s leaving out the greatest of our pain, the accounting of Lindsey Jacobellis, a victim of her own hotdogging in 2006 and now a victim of SBX’s furious fates. Jacobellis missed a gate in her semifinal, disqualifying her from even a finals chance at earning the gold this time around. If it took four years to get to that pain, how many years will it take to soothe it?

Perhaps the reason we remain glued to the Olympics despite their multitudinous commercial interruptions is because they are so much like life, so much like the sun that shines and the rain that falls on the evil and the good. Maybe we are not meant to see God in the moment, but to look for Him there. Maybe the whole point of life’s unpredictability—and let’s say it: its sometimes unjust unpredictability—is not to teach us something but to train us to do something else. Maybe the thrills of victory and the agonies of defeat are not meant to explain to us what God is doing, but to ask of us, those with guts wrenched and hearts bruised, how willing we are to hang with the God who takes us through so many ups and downs.

For when the margin between victory and vanity can be as thin as the sharpened edge of a skater’s blade, if we don’t have God, we are as good as dead. We will burst with pride or rage against futility. Then we have lost not just the game, but forfeited our only shot at true joy, the comfort we have in Christ.

Sovereignty of God

Scratching Where They Itch?

The Olympics and Sovereignty