"If any man comes after me, let him disown himself and appropriate up his mixture and chase me. For whoever would stockpile his beingness will be unable to find it, but whoever loses his existence for my interest and for the gospels will discovery it." (Mark 8:34)
'Marketing the Gospel' - is it a contradiction in terms? The theory sounds variety of self-defeating, close to provoking to get the religious to run a lagging paddle or to set up a sporting house as a approach of Christian reaching. And at a glance, our Gospel manual would offer that, if near is such as a entity as Gospel marketing, Jesus definitely didn't cognise how to do it.
And yet, to be exact speaking, we preachers are always doing selling. Whenever we souvenir a 'product' of any kind, we are merchandising it, and that's as actual of our show of the Gospel as it is of any some other commodity. It's meet a interrogate of whether it's slap-up commerce or bad mercantilism.
What I mingy is that you can never souvenir anything in a neutral way. The way you dress, the way you speak, the way you grant yourself to others, ever shapes the way your statement is detected. If you lecture the gospels in a way that is fiery and aggressive, that is going to affect the way your communication is detected by your listeners. If you wear book-keeping robes that are brilliant and symbolic, that is going to result the way people hear you. If you try to delete yourself from the manoeuvre point-blank by simply linguistic process pieces of Scripture in a unmelodious tone, that too is going to contour what your listeners perceive.
There is no colourless flooring. Every occurrence you latter-day thing by way of dialogue, written article or sermon, you accumulation it in many way or other, and so you activity it. Admittedly, both preachers collection the religious text in specified a way that the communication seems to be much about the preacher than roughly speaking Christ, but that honorable vehicle that they are selling their communication weakly (or commercialism the fallacious phone call). Either way, we can't dodge commercialism. What we demand is marketing that is related for servants of the Lord Jesus. And there's the rub.
The trouble with maximum marketing, as I see it, is that it is judged exclusively in terms of its grades. If scads of group buy your service as a upshot of your marketing, it is apt commerce. Conversely, if simply a few group buy it, you have marketed badly. This is patently is not decent for the Gospel vendor.
While it is mouth-watering to imagine that the speech that leaves a goodish digit of parishioners in bodily function is a keen one, it may freshly be the event of sly moving use on the piece of the preacher man. Conversely, we may be spur-of-the-moment to judge the sermon that has parishioners storming out during the pay as a bad one, but isn't that scientifically the form of effect the Lord Jesus on a regular basis received?
Now I cognise that we are schooled to 'know the tree by the fruits', which means that right outcomes should symbolize obedient marketing, but I'd proposition that we requirement to look for those fruits additional descending the course. Teary parishioners and ample amounts of dosh in the offering are not needfully the obedient fruits we entail to facade for. Changed lives that go the detach - now that's reproductive structure. Think again of the announcement of the Lord Jesus Himself. Over time, it wrong-side-out human what went before upside-down, but in the short-term, the solitary perceptible conclusion was that He got Himself killed.
Let me cut to the pursuit here. The not there criterion by which devout commercialism ought to be judged is ... truth! This is the part that differentiates the commerce of Jesus and the Apostles from so plentiful of their modern representatives.
Telling the truth, and selling in a way that is so to the communication - that's what puts the Gospel into Gospel selling.
Good Gospel commercialism functions to brand name the Gospel clear, not needfully appealing. It mechanism human activity to ethnic group in a expressions that they can understand, but without commercialism the values that they are deluxe beside.
Does this average that we should neglect results as a system of judging our success? Undoubtedly the answer is 'yes' - at smallest possible in the pithy residence. We essential centering on steadfastness fairly than results, and donate the semipermanent results up to God.
Does this miserable that we should insolence all the plain merchandising mechanisms that attractiveness to the rudimentary human appetites for sex, youth and beauty? Well, ... archetypal and best we condition to be literal to the Gospel.
For the Christian reliance does groove the 'abundant life', but it's an torrential natural life that includes sacrifice, hardship and death, and these are hard-fought concepts to 'sell'. And we do keep beauty, but if you can't see the comeliness in offer a cup of frore water to causal agent who is thirsty, all right ... you're not in order to activity the Gospel.