I saw this ad today as I was doing my daily rounds reading blogs and such. It caught my eye because, frankly, the statistic wasn’t impressive to begin with, and even more so, neglects what is probably some important information.

“More than one in every ten victims knew the person who stole their identity.”

One in ten? Okay. Knew the person, how? Like, they were the teller at the bank they went to? Or they were the salesman they bought their car from? It’s really unclear. Maybe LifeLock delivers a great service. I don’t know. And I’m sure this kind of marketing will bring in some bucks. But only at the cost of decaying trust between family members and friends.

Lame. Seriously lame.

Here’s something I will absolutely never understand: personifying the things we eat. What makes people think that if they give a personality to the food, we’ll be more likely to eat it? I think it’s the failed first attempt at social marketing. Maybe if we make people connect to the food emotionally, then they’ll be more likely to want to devour it!

I can’t really speak for anyone else here, but as for me, getting to know someone doesn’t make me want to eat them. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, if I really though celery had a personality, I probably wouldn’t want to tear it limb from limb with my teeth.

I was truly impressed last night with the power careful marketing has on my mind. On my way home from a wedding consultation I found myself very, very hungry. Needing gas and still nearly an hour away from home, my first instinct was to pick up a Snickers bar.

A Snickers bar. What? I’m not even that crazy about Snickers. I mean, they’re good, but not great. The peanuts always get stuck in my teeth and they make you really, really thirsty. But, I wasn’t “going anywhere for a while”, so, of course, I needed to “grab a snickers”.

Then, when I got home, I looked at the extra bar I’d bought from the gas station. I hadn’t even noticed. But their marketing worked exactly as intended.

You win this time Mars Corporation.

Before I go on, I would like to say outright that I don’t intend to cast judgment on anyone, but I will share my opinions on this matter. If you are one of the people I know involved in this, then please don’t take offense. If your conscience allows you to do it, then I don’t mean to criticize you in particular.

So, continuing on this little miniseries of thoughts on things that have been ‘stupidly Christianized’, I come today to this growing little doozy of Christiany weirdness.

Relationship Marketing

If that term doesn’t ring a bell for you, the companies that it classifies probably will. Companies like Mary Kay, Pampered Chef and others like them are known for using an ‘relationship’ model of marketing. No billboards, no Google ads. Just one person talking to another person they trust and being convinced to buy a product or service. In the case of Mary Kay or Pampered Chef, it often comes in the way of home show parties.

But growing are a few companies using a similar marketing model that also (albeit unofficially) represent themselves as Christian companies. Or Christian run companies, as I believe they describe themselves.

The most popular of these seems to be Quickstar. The gist of Quickstar is that people are to start buying their regular, day-to-day items (i.e., soap, dish detergent, toilet paper, shaving cream, etc etc) directly from Quickstar. When they agree to do this, they become a ‘business owner’ who can then either just use to service, or get other people to sign up ‘under’ them. A small commission is earned on all of their purchases, and likewise whoever signed up the business owner gets some commission on their purchases too.

It’s more complicated than that, but for the sake of time, that’s probably a sufficient description.

The point is though, that when I sign up I make money for someone else. And when I sign someone else up, they make money for me. Although it sounds like a pyramid scheme, technically it’s not.

In order to help support all the business owners in their endeavors, regular local meetings are held. Usually with a speaker or something to help motivate and inspire. A friend shared a story from one of these meetings with me just tonight. He described the speaker as persuading his audience that for any great thing to succeed sacrifices would have to be made. After going through a list of examples where sacrifice was necessary for big success, he landed on Jesus. Likening Jesus’ sacrifice and bearing of all of his Father’s wrath to the sacrifice these ‘business owners’ would have to make in selling their product.

My friend said that up until that moment he was just about ready to join, then threw up a little in his mouth and had to leave. It was obviously a cheap exploit aimed at his primarily Christian audience.

But besides isolated incidents like that, you might be asking, what’s so bad about this being a Christian thing? Well, I’ll tell you what I see from my perspective.

Relationship marketing takes two almost opposing concepts and pits them against each other. For the Christian, human relationships are where we have received one of our most profound charges from God: to preach and spread the Gospel; to make disciples of all the nations.

While on the other hand, we have this concept of marketing. Which when broken down is basically the commercial practice of convincing someone they need or want your product or service in order that they would buy it and generate income for you.

When relationships and marketing are connected in such an inorganic fashion, there’s an impossible tension there. Let me give you an example.

A few years ago when one of these Christian companies started to grow in local popularity, it spread pretty rapidly through the few local churches that I was involved with. I had ties with lots of people through various ministries. All of a sudden, I started getting really friendly sounding phone calls from brothers and sisters in Christ who I’d not spoken to in months. Or, didn’t have a close enough relationship with to really make sense of these phone calls.

Yet here they were, calling me. Inviting me to have coffee, or lunch. I must have gotten half a dozen or more of these phone calls. Every one of them turned out to be an attempt to sign me up for this service.

What was their motivation in those phone calls? It wasn’t to connect in a meaningful way over our mutual love for God. It was over the prospect of income and professional success in the context of this relationship marketing model.

This seems to me to be an impossible combination. All of a sudden, money has taken over the Gospel in relationships between brothers and sisters and non-Christians as well. Where before Christians may be motivated to engage in relationship to see God work in the hearts and minds of fellow believers and unbelievers, it’s been convoluted with engaging the person so that they might join the company. Ultimately paying their salary.

in Conclusion 

Although I am sure there are people who can handle this with grace and wisdom, it seems that the majority cannot and instead it could be a massive stumbling block to the Church. Dare I say even a dangerous infection. With some people as carriers unaffected by the disease, but the majority suffering deeply from it.

For Christians, it seems like it should be a pretty big logical problem. Further than that, it seems like something our churches should be taking concerned notice of.

Pastor Hoye, is going to trial on Thursday for handing out pamphlets to pregnant women walking into abortion clinics. According to the testimony of witnesses, including the abortion center escorts, Hoye’s efforts were always peaceful. In fact, it’s difficult to find anything that resembles harassment in what he was doing. None the less, he was arrested back in December and is being threatened with four years in prison.

You can read the story here:
http://www.lifenews.com/state3708.html

Now, I might be wrong, but doesn’t this seem a little bit whacko to anyone else?

I’m not speaking necessarily as a pro-lifer here. Although I am one. I’m speaking as an American. One who values competition in the market place.

Now, let’s say I owned a Burger King. Business was booming. Then, one day, across the street, or 100 feet away, next door, some one came and opened a McDonalds. Suddenly, people were torn in their decisions to purchase a Whopper and were now thinking about the Big Mac instead.

Do I really have any grounds to take my new competitor to court? Of course not. Because that’s how business works. If someone comes along and makes a better burger than me, the solution isn’t to destroy them by brute force. The solution is to either make an even better burger, or else make the burger I already have more attractive. It’s in this way that businesses improve themselves and society benefits.

As much as they’d like to hide it, abortion clinics are not charity organizations. They usually hide underneath cushy names, like "Women’s Wellness Center," or "Women’s Health Care Center" or "Family Planning Centers". But underneath, they’re a business. They profit like a business. They market like a business. But unfortunately, they compete more like the mob.

Trouble is, the burger they’re selling has a bitter after taste and for the sake of their business it’s important that the competition not get it’s marketing message out.

Pastor Hoye, in many ways represents the competing McDonalds across the street. Peacefully he offered customers another option. Granted, this is threatening to the competition. But shouldn’t they thrive on competition like businesses are supposed to?

You see, here’s the skinny, the abortion industry makes an incredible amount of money. Not only that, the social ramifications of the abortion industry are far reaching and extremely lucrative. If the primary concern of the abortion industry were the well being of women and pregnant mothers, then just how women got help would matter little; whether it be an abortion or a crisis pregnancy center. But, in aggressive behavior like that toward Pastor Hoye, the industry proves that it is indeed a for profit operation and money is the primary concern.

I am upset at the action against Pastor Hoye because of this critical issue at hand,  But I am also very upset at the underlying threat to basic freedoms.

Just as Pastor Hoye should have the freedom to stand peacefully near an abortion clinic and offer another option, the abortion escorts should have the freedom to stand near a crisis pregnancy center and offer another option. But that would never happen. You know why?

Because when a woman goes to a crisis pregnancy center, she’s already considered abortion and decided against it. But when a woman goes to an abortion clinic, 9 times out of 10, she has no idea that other options exist. And that is why Pastor Hoye is such a threat to business. Because the abortion industry thrives on supressing the competition by force.

The fact of the matter is, when you get right down to it and look at the cold hard scientific facts, the Pro-Life argument is hard to beat. It’s simply a better burger and Burger King is scared people might find out.

Pastor Hoye will go for sentancing this Thursday. Please join me in prayer, not for the man necessarily–I’m quite confident he would gladly go to prison for the sake of this cause. Rather, pray for the upholding of constitutional law and the principals this country runs on. The same that, hopefully one day, the Lord will use to bring an end to these crimes against the innocent.

Very shortly after I became a Christian I was given a job at a local Christian Bookshop. I had just begun training at Circuit City, but was thrilled to be offered a job in a wholesome, spiritually challenging environment. So, of course I immediately quit Circuit City in a ironically un-Christian manner.

It was at that Christian bookshop that I think I developed a great deal of my opinions that would prove prevalent throughout my walk, even now.

What happened? I was jaded. Seriously jaded.

I was a young Christian and reading the bible a lot, trying to play catch-up with my new friends who’d been reading the thing their whole lives. But in the midst of that was this blazing inconsistency between what was read and where I went to work each day.

Now, please don’t get me wrong, many of my co-workers and even the owner of the store were quite honorable people and folks that I do not mean for a moment to criticize personally. But the industry is another story.

I was responsible for stocking shelves and checking things into the inventory. I would come across fifteen different children’s books, all paraphrasing the bible into cute little pictures, all without a hint of judgement and all promising to be the best.

I would bring in loads and loads of plaques all bringing their own special warm, fuzzy, out of context, piece of scripture.

I found bible based ways to lose weight and “look your best,” I found about a dozen different ways to recite Jabez’s magic prayer, and accessories to go with each. I found trading cards, index cards, greeting cards, and Christian-editions of nearly every other kind of card you could think of.

I found a number of bibles, then I found a section of bible covers that eclipsed the bibles both in inventory and price.

I found music, endless amounts of music. Or at least that’s what they were calling it. Christian music. Of course, to this day, I’m unsure of how tones and notes and melodies become children of God, or how they manage to keep all those non-Christians from listening to it.

I found knick nacks, trinkets, paper weights and a lifetime’s worth of other crap that’s sure to end up in boxes in the attic.

I found lotion. Christian lotion. If I remember right, 4 ounces was somewhere in the neighborhood of $9.95 (on sale). Apparently, the extra ink used to print the bible verses on the bottle was particularly expensive.

It was about a year into my employment that I had an anxiety attack about it and quit. Although this time I did it a more reputable manner.

But make no mistake, no qualms were left unannounced.

Since then, the Christian industry has been an object of scorn in my own mind. Unfortunately I’ve not always been so good at tempering that distaste and have often bashed the industry and even people at times. The latter regretfully so.

But tonight, John Piper presented me with a set of verses that brings some clarity to my distaste for the Christian industry and why I would usually rather give my money to Borders than my local Christian retailer.

1 Timothy 6:4-10 reads:

“he is conceited and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions and constant friction between men of corrupt mind, who have been robbed of the truth and who think that godliness is a means to financial gain.

But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”

“Men of corrupt mind”? That’s right, they’re the one’s who think of godliness as a means for financial gain. That’s not to be confused with the contented gain of godliness, but the discontented gain.

If I understand this correctly, godliness is not a means to financial gain. If we treat it as such, we would risk piercing ourselves with many “griefs”.

So what exactly is the Christian industry? Carefully researched marketing and product deployment by men who have been robbed of the truth.