I went to Burger King with some friends today. They, as well as a handful of other fast-food chains are participating in some ambiguous charity involving kids and shamrocks. I looked around the restaurant. There wasn’t much explanation.

This little information flyer was sitting on each table. Unfortunately it didn’t explain much. It also didn’t make me want to give money. I mean, you’d think they’d have some people look over something like this and point out things that might be better reworded or omitted altogether.

$30 – Flu Shot. Okay, I’m down with that. Kids need flu shots.

$80 – One Minute of Research. Wait, really? Okay, I get that research can be expensive (never mind the fact that I really have no idea what they’re researching), but this really isn’t going to make anyone feel like they can help. $80 for a minute of research? I think we could omit that one.

$100 – Support Group Session. Maybe I’m missing something. I thought support groups were just a bunch of people in similar circumstances helping to support each other.

$150 – Physical, Occupational, Respiratory and Speech Therapy Consultations. Okay, so at 150 bones, the kids get to figure out what’s wrong with them and maybe even how to fix it. But with research costing $4,800 an hour, good luck affording whatever it is.

$300 – Initial Diagnostic Workup at an MDA Clinic. Okay.

$500 – Annual Repairs of Durable Medical Equipment. Ahem. “Annual Repairs” doesn’t seem to go so well with “Durable Equipment”. Just saying. How about “Preventative Maintenance”?

$800 – Week at MDA Summer Camp. Sounds like a blast.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure whatever this schizophrenic organization is doing is great. But I’m sensing there is a pretty crucial staff member missing—the guy who actually reads print material before it’s sent to press.

When Jesus calls Zacchaeus down from the tree and comes to his home and dines with him, Zachaeus is thrilled, yet convicted. Jesus is gracious and it drives Zacchaeus to repentance. He vows to give money to the poor and return the money he’s wrongfully taken from everyone else four fold.

This is in response to Jesus’ grace, not to attain Jesus’ grace. And, it’s a near perfect picture of grace-based tithing.

Tim Keller describes it like this:

If salvation had been something earned through obedience to the moral code, then Zacchaeus’s question would have been “how much must I give?” however, these promises were responses to lavish, generous grace, so his question was “How much can I give?”

We’re accustomed to thinking of tithing as giving our 10%. But, new-testament tithing is a grace-based institution. We’ve been given grace and we give in response to it.

I could learn from Zacchaeus’s tender heart in giving abundantly out of his abundant receiving.

In the chapter of Tim Keller’s book Counterfeit Gods, Keller argues that money is among the most dangerous idols. This is a sentiment that I’ve agreed with for a long time. Something that often sends waves of potent distasted through me when I see it in the church at large. But, I have always had difficulty articulating the real problem. But I think Keller hits it on the head—or at least comes close.

“It is because greed and avarice are especially hard to see in ourselves.”

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. As Keller rightly points out, everyone seems to agree that the world is a flagrantly greedy place. It’s virtually everywhere we look. But, regardless of its prevalence, virtually no one sees themselves as ‘greedy’. So, the problem spins out of control, but no one can tell.

Keller, later, continues to explain in more detail what’s really going on.

“Once you are able to afford to live in a particular neighborhood, send your children to its schools, and participate in its social life, you will find yourself surrounded by quite a number of people who have more money than you.”

We live with all-things-relative. Greed is less about how much you spend, but the heart you have when you spend it. There’s almost always someone who’s spent more then you have and this leaves us feeling justified in our actions. Whether they are objectively right or not. In effect, it makes our own greed invisible to us.

On a corporate level, greed would seem to be on the elder’s board of many churches. Certainly our new building is bigger than we need it to be, but have you seen the cathedral down the street? Sure, we could have easily gotten by without buying that bus for our church, but at least we didn’t buy a fleet of busses like that church over there! Simply because the church culture in a given geographic area spends money in a certain way doesn’t make it right or okay.

Here in Annapolis, people are very wealthy. Simply because some church members drive $60,000 vehicles, doesn’t mean the pastors are justified in purchasing $40,000 vehicles.

I personally have never felt that I was a greedy person. But, Keller’s analysis of the problem is wrought with logic and demands that I reconsider myself and my heart. Even some basic reflections on myself reveal that there is greed hiding that I justify by the more privileged around me.

I pray that can and will change.

I am an occasional poster at a Christian site that will remain anonymous. I joined years ago then only recently began posting again. Upon my return, I’ve discovered something unsettling.

The ads. Here’s a few I’ve come by in one visit.

Now, I’m not one to to call out websites for no reason. In fact, this could even be construed as gossip. But I’m not so much talking about the website where I encountered these ads. I’m talking about the church that accepts them.

If the church is wherever believers meet, then displaying ads on a community website for Christians is, in effect, like putting these ads up in your church sanctuary.

Where is the church that she is okay with this?

The puritan, Ralph Venning (also the author of one of my all-time favorite books, The Sinfulness of Sin) wrote about the grandness of even the smallest sins committed by our leaders. I thought his phrasing was poignant and worth sharing tonight.

“We may occasion other man’s sins by example, and the more eminent the example, the more infectious it is. Great men cannot sin at a low rate because they are examples; the sins of commanders are commanding sins; the sins of rulers are ruling sins; the sins of teachers are teaching sins.”

I gather that Venning’s thought here is also, in part, why “not many” of us should “presume” to be teachers.

But for us in America, I don’t think the most obvious sins are the ones that are transmitted from leaders to congregations. No, those sins we recognize and usually scorn. It’s the more subtle, insidious ones that make it through. Failure to love. Failure to forgive. Failure to steward wisely, and others.

When our church leaders fail to uphold the ultimate worth of Jesus by their lifestyles and their public and private choices, they expand their guilt by permitting their congregations to do the same. Our elders approve the installation of a $10,000 decorative fountain in the atrium of the new church building; the congregation learns that there is no shame in a $40,000 mid-sized sedan, when a $12,000 used sedan would be more than sufficient.

I find a certain joy in poking fun at our American culture of over doing, well, pretty much everything. Too much eating. Too much spending. Too much playing. Too much working. Really, very little is done in moderation here in America.

We have this habit of taking a good thing to destructive excess. We become obese from too much eating. Families are estranged from too much working. Financial security and opportunity is destroyed by too much spending. Responsibility is forgotten with too much playing.

While these things in and of themselves are (usually) not expressly condemned, they seem to become our disaster.

Again, from Thomas Watson’s insight and wisdom:

More are hurt by lawful things than unlawful, as more are killed with wine than poison. Gross sins are affright, but how many take a surfeit the state (of being more than full) and die, in using lawful things inordinately. Recreation is lawful, eating and drinking are lawful, but many offend by excess and their table is a snare. Relations are lawful, but how often does Satan tempt to overlove! How often is the wife and child laid in God’s room! Excess makes things lawful become sinful.

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.