Jesus Is Not a Brand

Jesus Is Not a Brand Why it is dangerous to make evangelism another form of marketing. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson/ January 2, 2009 For months after I first moved to Nashville, a billboard by the westbound I-40 advertised an alcohol addiction recovery program. But what caught my eye was the billboard's photograph: the coldest, frothiest, most delicious-looking pint of beer that has ever been poured. I never wanted a beer more than I did when I drove past that billboard. And I am not an alcoholic. I wonder how many of the hundreds of people suffering from addiction passed that spot every day and were perversely tempted— not to enter rehab, but to pull off at the next exit for a tall, cold one. Marketing has problems if it makes the consumer pant for the dead opposite of what you are trying to sell. An Unavoidable Dilemma This is the issue we confront when weighing the merits of the church's public outreach, its evangelistic task, in a Western culture saturated by marketing. By marketing, I refer to all the activities that help organizations identify and shape the wants of target consumers and then try to satisfy those consumers better than competitors do. This usually involves doing market research, analyzing consumer needs, and then making strategic decisions about product design, branding, pricing, promotion, advertising, and distribution. While researching Brand Jesus, I realized that the church faced unavoidable questions as it sought to maintain a public witness and evangelistic task in a consumerist culture. One is this: Should we market the church and the church's message? (In this article, I assume that our evangelistic message is about knowing Christ and being incorporated into his body. Thus, whether we are specifically encouraging people to consider Jesus or some aspect of the gospel message or to attend a particular church, we are practicing key aspects of evangelism.) In particular, can we use marketing techniques such as niche targeting and branding? Can we help but do so? Can we change the medium without affecting the message? Or does the medium of marketing itself taint our message, leaving us only to resist to the last breath any accommodation to our consumer culture? The champions of better church marketing say that withdrawal and resistance are not options for a local church that seeks a public presence. We live in a commercialized culture that accepts that virtually everything is for sale. There is simply no way to be in the public arena without engaging in marketing. Even if you do not intend to market your church, that's how consumers are going to perceive your outreach. They will take it in through market-conditioned filters. If we ignore this fact, we will probably wind up doing bad marketing, and that doesn't do anyone any good. So, unless we completely withdraw from any kind of evangelism, marketing is inevitable. And if marketing is the language of our culture, we might as well be fluent in it, right? After all, if you were a missionary in a foreign country, you would learn the language. Marketing is just the latest incarnation of classic evangelistic models such as persuasion and example. Thus goes the argument. At the popular blog ChurchMarketingSucks.com, Joshua Cody wrote, "It's a privilege that in a world full of broken marketing and blatant lies, we get to sell the truth." From this perspective, the mistake would be to market the church poorly, which would make the church seem less than it is—like an undesirable brand—to an unbelieving audience. Not Values-Neutral The difficulty with the pro-marketing arguments, however, is the failure to recognize that marketing is not a values-neutral language. Marketing unavoidably changes the message—as all media do. Why? Because marketing is the particular vernacular of a consumerist society in which everything has a price tag. To market something is therefore to effectively make it into a branded product to be consumed. The folks at ChurchMarketingSucks.com have no problem with this: "Marketing is the process of promoting, selling, and distributing goods or services. It's a business concept, but something very similar happens in the church. As much as we bristle at comparing evangelism to a sales pitch, there are certain similarities." There are indeed similarities. But evangelism and sales are not the same. And we market the church at our peril if we are blind to the critical and categorical difference between the Truth and a truth you can sell. In a marketing culture, the Truth becomes a product. People will encounter it with the same consumerist worldview with which they encounter every other product in the American marketplace. Thus our dilemma: The product we are selling isn't like every other product—it isn't even a product at all. But if the gospel is not a product, how can we market it? And if we can't avoid marketing it, how can we keep from turning it into the product it isn't? The Harley-Davidson Riders Club Of course, much of our difficulty is that most people know exactly what we have to offer, so we tend to be met with all the success of a door-to-door salesman who's been working the same street every day for 2,000 years. Non-Christians are used to us; they know there is a group out there that wants them to "get saved." Thus, we disguise our evangelism, just as marketers disguise their work to pierce through the filters of ad-weary consumers. And because it's hard to seem new and fresh with a steeple in the background, many models of one-on- one evangelism are churchless. This is why most of the methods we use bear every mark of a guy trying to sell his neighbor on the merits of a particular brand—be it motorcycle, lawnmower, or barbeque sauce—that changed his life. It's not that the church isn't buried somewhere in this kind of evangelistic sales pitch. But Christian community is often relegated to a secondary, altogether optional consideration. It might be desirable, like joining the local Harley-Davidson Riders Club will enhance one's experience as a Harley owner, but it's certainly not necessary to seal the deal. For instance, the Four Spiritual Laws—a modern classic in evangelistic methods—says nothing about becoming a member of Christ's body when we "accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior." The de-churched nature of our theology makes evangelism hard to do without seeming salesy, because churchless evangelism unavoidably promotes a consumerist soteriology. When it's just you and Jesus, you (the consumer) "invite him" (the product) "into your heart" (brand adoption) and "get saved" (consumer gratification). Certainly God has worked and continues to work through these formulae. His doing so testifies to his grace, however, not to the fidelity of such evangelistic formulations, which, in this culture, inadvertently make Jesus out to be a cosmic version of the consumer brands promoted in the thousands of advertisements each of us sees daily. Such brands promise to deliver goods—self-esteem, sex appeal, confidence, coolness—that they have no intrinsic capacity to give. Their power is in consumers' collective willingness to imbue them with that kind of power. In other words, consumerism is impotent to deliver on its promise, and deep down, we know it. Consumerist marketing offers something that just isn't there. So, given this cultural setting, any salvation that needs a sophisticated sales pitch is a salvation that won't really do anything. It will make you holy the same way a new pair of Nikes makes you athletic— which is to say, not at all. It only changes your religious brand. Yet this is the only kind of evangelism possible when we separate salvation from life in the redeemed community, because it's in the redeemed community that God has ordained the enduring demonstration of his power, against which nothing can prevail (Matt. 16:18). Unlike brand identification, the gospel of Jesus is the power of God at work for a real salvation. Consider the centrality of the church in the scheme of salvation as articulated in Ephesians: "Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household" (2:19). The gospel proclaimed constitutes an invitation to repent into the church, to be forgiven into community—switching paths from the broad way of destruction and death to the narrow road leading to life. This way is not walked alone, but with a community of believers who will uphold and encourage the new Christian in a difficult and challenging faith. There's substance there, demonstrated by a faithful church whose life together is a visible testimony to the truth of our claims about the power of the gospel. In a consumerist society, baptism into such a church is about the most subversive thing imaginable. Many Christians practice a church-based evangelism. Certainly Alpha, which invites seekers to participate in church-based small groups to explore the faith, is one example. Some churches encourage seekers to participate in the life of the church—to attend many different functions, even to work on committees and special events—to experience how the Christian faith is lived out in a specific community of faith. I am not knocking one-on-one sharing of the gospel, which is a time-honored (and, more importantly, grace-honored) means of bringing people to discipleship. But it is important to be wary of the fatal flaw that's frequently at the heart of personal evangelism methods that inadvertently peddle an incurably consumerist soteriology.

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