Don't sell me what it's not
If I was buying a new SUV (or in my case, minivan) that last thing I'd want to hear about the van is what it's not.
"It's not 4x4"
"It doesn't have a DVD player"
"It has no cool factor whatsoever"
"It doesn't have Sto'N'go seats"
Huh? Why would I buy from a salesman that just told me what the van didn't have and what it wasn't? I want to know why I should buy this van! What is it about this thing that would appeal to me?
Sometimes I think that we are guilty of this as the collective church. I know I'm guilty of it. When we were just in the ground breaking phase of planting TXC, I was thinking about the web domain of the church. We purchased the standard www.thecrosscurrent.com as a back up but we wanted something that we could put on flyers and postcards that caught peoples' attention. The final pick was www.notyourgrandmaschurch.com. I thought it was pretty funny and as I showed the rest of my Christian ghetto friends, they all laughed too! It was a hit! (It's funnier when you imagine it said with the cheesiest salesman voice you can think of)
After previewing it with all of the Christians, I took it to my friend who doesn't go to church and would be classified as our "target". He read it over and without giving it more than a minute worth of thought, he looked up at me and said "Why would I want to know what you're not?"
Like a dagger to the chest! I was guilty! Here we were, basically bragging to people that we weren't like the church down the road with all the grandma's in it and trying to impress the people we wanted to come to our church. The bottom line...it was lame. It was a cheap attempt at getting attention and I got called out by someone who would potentially consider coming.
If we were to take this one step deeper, how many of us try to be different by showing the world what we don't do. We don't drink, dance, smoke, sleep around, party, laugh...etc. And for some reason we think that people are going to want to "sign up". We tell people what they shouldn't do because our assumption is that if they just stop doing the wrong things that they will become a better person. Is it possible that this is upside down?
Yes I do believe that behavior is important but maybe who we are affects what we do and not vice versa. Maybe we don't change what we do until there is something that happens in our hearts and changes who we are.
For instance, we talk about becoming friends with people who don't follow Christ all the time. Part of this is having an agenda but not putting it at the forefront and basing whether or not your friendship with this person will exist or not. For instance, If they don't "get saved", then you drop them. My philosophy is that if the people that I'm friends with can't visibly see something in me that is different, then it could be possible I'm off the mark. If my faith isn't contagious, then where is there a misalignment between my beliefs and my actions?
This is where doing and being come into play. If all my friends see is the things I don't do, then why would they want what I've got. Maybe it goes deeper than what we do and goes down to who we are. Are the fruit of the spirit evident in our lives? Is 1 Cor.13 something that we think is a good idea or is it something that we live out everyday, coming from who we are, not what we do? Are we living out the beatitudes in Matt.5? I think if we were becoming more like Jesus, we would want to stop doing the things that were contrary to what he wanted for us and we would be more focused on what we are for instead of what we are against. Our faith would be more positive than negative. People would start wanting what we've got.
"It's not 4x4"
"It doesn't have a DVD player"
"It has no cool factor whatsoever"
"It doesn't have Sto'N'go seats"
Huh? Why would I buy from a salesman that just told me what the van didn't have and what it wasn't? I want to know why I should buy this van! What is it about this thing that would appeal to me?
Sometimes I think that we are guilty of this as the collective church. I know I'm guilty of it. When we were just in the ground breaking phase of planting TXC, I was thinking about the web domain of the church. We purchased the standard www.thecrosscurrent.com as a back up but we wanted something that we could put on flyers and postcards that caught peoples' attention. The final pick was www.notyourgrandmaschurch.com. I thought it was pretty funny and as I showed the rest of my Christian ghetto friends, they all laughed too! It was a hit! (It's funnier when you imagine it said with the cheesiest salesman voice you can think of)
After previewing it with all of the Christians, I took it to my friend who doesn't go to church and would be classified as our "target". He read it over and without giving it more than a minute worth of thought, he looked up at me and said "Why would I want to know what you're not?"
Like a dagger to the chest! I was guilty! Here we were, basically bragging to people that we weren't like the church down the road with all the grandma's in it and trying to impress the people we wanted to come to our church. The bottom line...it was lame. It was a cheap attempt at getting attention and I got called out by someone who would potentially consider coming.
If we were to take this one step deeper, how many of us try to be different by showing the world what we don't do. We don't drink, dance, smoke, sleep around, party, laugh...etc. And for some reason we think that people are going to want to "sign up". We tell people what they shouldn't do because our assumption is that if they just stop doing the wrong things that they will become a better person. Is it possible that this is upside down?
Yes I do believe that behavior is important but maybe who we are affects what we do and not vice versa. Maybe we don't change what we do until there is something that happens in our hearts and changes who we are.
For instance, we talk about becoming friends with people who don't follow Christ all the time. Part of this is having an agenda but not putting it at the forefront and basing whether or not your friendship with this person will exist or not. For instance, If they don't "get saved", then you drop them. My philosophy is that if the people that I'm friends with can't visibly see something in me that is different, then it could be possible I'm off the mark. If my faith isn't contagious, then where is there a misalignment between my beliefs and my actions?
This is where doing and being come into play. If all my friends see is the things I don't do, then why would they want what I've got. Maybe it goes deeper than what we do and goes down to who we are. Are the fruit of the spirit evident in our lives? Is 1 Cor.13 something that we think is a good idea or is it something that we live out everyday, coming from who we are, not what we do? Are we living out the beatitudes in Matt.5? I think if we were becoming more like Jesus, we would want to stop doing the things that were contrary to what he wanted for us and we would be more focused on what we are for instead of what we are against. Our faith would be more positive than negative. People would start wanting what we've got.
