De-spamming the Great Commission 1

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The Great Commission needs an extreme make-over. This thing has been churning, churning over and over inside my bald noggin. The more I think and ponder, the more the Church’s current efforts to “make disciples of all nations” seems like a mass-marketing exercise. Believers “selling” a product. They “sell” salvation, they “sell” the Gospel. Some red flags are showing on the horizon, and we would be foolish to ignore them. Better still, we would be wise to look at marketing and learn some pertinent lessons on how some organizations are “reaching” their target audience and having influence with them. This post kicks-off a short series dealing with the effectiveness of the church in the West at reaching people with the message Jesus Christ.

Traditional Evangelism as SPAM

SPAM can be defined as the abuse of electronic systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages to recipients. With this in mind, SPAM has become a wretched phenomenon in the West. There are three components that make SPAM so annoying, and many of the traditional methods of doing Evangelism look more like SPAM than Kingdom business:

1. The message is unsolicited. In the West, we live in an “on-demand” mode. We hear what we want to hear, when we want to hear it. When some thing is sent my way that I did not ask for it, I find it offensive. I immediately put up a barrier, a defence mechanism designed to shut-off unpleasant interactions. You see, my attention span is valuable - I am offered an estimated 3,000 commercial messages every day. That relates to a weekly 21,000, a monthly 91,250, and a yearly 1,095,000 requests for my attention. In the west, we have become VERY picky when it somes to grtanting an audience to someone.

2. The message is an intrusion into my “space”. This may not happen in all cultures, but in the West we place a high value on “space”. Space can be physical, emotional, intellectual, or moral. In our culture, people are invited into our space - anything else is seen as an intrusion, a trespass, an abuse of privacy.
   
   
3. The message is sent in bulk. Bulk is cheap. You may buy cookies in bulk for your Vacation Bible School, but if someone is going to talk to me about the eternal fate of my precious soul I do not want that important message to come to me via a cheap flyer. You had better talk to me and share, share from your heart.
   

Did Jesus share his teachings in this way? He offered people an encounter with a good God that cared for them, healed them, and gave them a message of hope and a future. He spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven having arrived, and not that the world was going to end. He earned an audience with the people. He met them where they were, and brought a blessing to them in a way that the religious leaders of the day could not do.

Nowadays, in a society so saturated with advertising, people reject the monologue, but welcome the dialogue. They want to open the door to you, if you want to meet them on their own terms, not yours. They welcome the fact that you show concern for them, but disdain blanket canvassing and cheap mass production tactics.

Any presentation of your religious views that violates these principles is a recipe for ineffectiveness at best, outright opposition at worst.

Now in the spirit of dialogue, feel free to join in the conversation in the comments

Technorati Tags: Post-modernism, Culture, Evangelism, SPAM Jesus, Great Commission