The No Kool Aid Zone

If I got one promo piece, I got two dozen, all of them selling a promise that the conference could not keep: “This conference will forever change what it means to be a pastor in America.” I wrote to the outfit sponsoring the conference, PromiseKeepers, and told them, effectively, “No, it won’t. And you know it won’t. Stop lying.”

They didn’t like that very much.

I didn’t care. I was right. “What it means to be a pastor in America” hasn’t changed one little smidgen in the intervening couple of years since that overhyped conference. And it was sad that a group like PK allowed some marketing consulting to convince them that that was an appropriate way to pitch the conference.

I hate hype. I hate the fact that we seem to have gotten to the place in our contemporary brand of evangelical Christianity where we have to engage in the same nauseating hyper-marketing that we see so commonly in the world’s way of doing things. Now, the PromiseKeepers piece might have been more over-the-top than most, I’ll grant that; few make such brazen, patently-ridiculous claims as that. Still, it happens all the time; sometimes I get the feeling that I’m listening to WCW promos (is that what they still call that outfit?).

And beyond the hype itself is the sheer volume of money spent on some of these things. I attended the first “Beyond All Limits” pastors’ conference put on by Campus Crusade in Orlando several years back, and it was a nice conference, well-done and worthwhile. Joe Stowell’s message alone was worth the price of the event. Since then, though, this group has put on one other pastors’ conference, as well as a pastors’ wives’ conference, and there for awhile, I was getting a piece in the mail every week, for what had to be months, promoting these things. Is that really necessary? And is that, frankly, a wise expenditure of money?

George Barna put out a controversial book a few years back entitled Marketing the Church. I bought it, and despite the crass-sounding title, it actually makes some pretty good points. There is nothing wrong with finding creative ways, within reason, to inform the public of the work of the church; frankly, every church markets itself in one way or another—it’s really only a question of whether they do so effectively or ineffectively. I’m not against the concept at all—but must we resort to the ridiculous and overblown hype? Where should the line be drawn? Are we really being honest with people when we promise them that this book or that DVD or the other conference will “change their lives“? If my life had really been changed by everything that made that claim, I’d be approaching some sort of perfection by now, one would think…

What think ye, o wise readers of the time blog???

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