Modern Evangelicalism and Painted Elephants~Tony Miano

Modern Evangelicalism and Painted Elephants

What you see in the picture is not the result of a drunk playing with Photo Shop. Those really are painted elephants--painted to look like pandas.

In an effort to woo the Thai people back to their love for the country's Pachyderm ambassadors, the government decided to paint a group of elephants in the color scheme of the Panda, and then march the behemoths in front of school children. According to a published report, the Thai people have gone "Panda Crazy."

My friend, Phil Johnson, posted the enormously ridiculous article on Twitter and stated the obvious. "There's a sermon illustration here somewhere." I don't know what Phil had in mind; but this was my first thought.

While I understand that every analogy breaks down somewhere, seeing those painted elephants reminded me of the state of modern evangelicalism, particularly in the United States. Modern evangelicalism desperately wants the world's attention--not to win the lost to Christ, but to win a popularity contest in which the church is competing with the rest of the world.

The best evidence that this is the case is the way the church continues to paint and model itself after the world. Instead of looking like the Bride of Christ, the church tries to look like the rest of the world.

If the Thai government wanted the Thai people to appreciate elephants, then what they should have done is extol the real value, beauty, and majesty of elephants. By painting the elephants to look like pandas, the government likely only succeeded in causing the people to think even more about pandas. Over time, the people could wind up liking the panda paint scheme so much that they might end up looking upon a natural elephant with disdain, displeasure, and boredom.

The seeker, emergent, and liberal branches of modern evangelicalism are like the Thai government. In their effort to court the world; in their effort to make friends with the world, they have painted Christianity to look like something it's not. The result: "churches" that look as ridiculous as a painted elephant.

Pastors dressing like an American Idol or Fonzie in an attempt to show people how cool and relevant they are; pastors bringing their motorcycles and beds on stage (the area formerly known as a pulpit where pastors used to preach the Word); pastors sharing talks (not sermons) about sex, drugs, rock-n-roll--it all might be entertaining to lost people. But it's a ridiculous and false representation of the Church.

The Bride of Christ--the true Church--is beautiful. Yes, at present, she is imperfect. But she is beautiful. To paint the Church to look like the world is to cover the Church's real beauty--and that real beauty is Christ. To co-mingle the blood Christ shed for His Church with the paint scheme of a fallen, sin-stained world is no different than Pilate's blasphemous profaning of the altar when he co-mingled the blood of a group of murdered Galileans with the blood of their sacrifices.

Modern evangelicalism and painted elephants: sadly, in many ways, they are too much alike.

I wonder how ridiculous it is to the Creator when sinful creatures paint a perfectly created elephant to look like a panda. And I wonder how angry Christ is when sinners paint His Church to look like a harlot. I wonder.

You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. ~ James 4:4

Who Lives, Who Dies? Quality Control ~Chuck Colson

Who Lives, Who Dies?

Quality Control

By Chuck Colson

Maybe the single biggest issue in the debate over health-care reform is cost. By “cost” most people mean how we are going to pay for the president’s and Congress’s proposals.

Enlarge this Image

But there’s a more important question of cost when it comes to health-care reform-that is, the price paid by the most vulnerable among us.

In a recent New York Times magazine article, ethicist Peter Singer explains “why we must ration health care.” Singer, a brilliant writer and a master logician, begins by pooh-poohing the idea that “it’s immoral to apply monetary considerations to saving lives.”

After all, Singer is right when he says that “we already put a dollar value on human life.” Mattresses aren't as fire-resistant as they could be because government officials have decided that it would be too expensive to save those additional lives.

Still, Singer couldn’t resist the temptation to play God. He rejects the idea that the “good achieved by health care is the number of lives saved.” In his utilitarian calculus, the “death of a teenager is a greater tragedy than the death of an 85-year-old, and this should be reflected in our priorities.”

How? Through the use of a “quality-adjusted-life-year,” or QALY. Say, for example, that people prefer living five years disability free to living 10 years with quadriplegia. Then, Singer reasons, when it comes to rationing health care, we ought to treat “life with quadriplegia as half as good as non-disabled life.” Believe me, he is not kidding.

What’s even more telling are the considerations Singer says we should not take into account-for instance, whether a patient is a mom or a dad. Thinking about a patient’s children, he says, “increases the scope for subjective-and prejudiced-judgments.”

As abhorrent as Singer’s ideas are, they are coldly consistent with utilitarian thinking that now dominates medical ethics. As early as the 1990s, Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the president’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, envisioned “not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” Why? Because, he claimed, they are “prevented from being or becoming participating citizens.”

I’m sorry, but this is the same logic the Nazis used to exterminate the physically and mentally handicapped.

The only viable alternative to this horrific utilitarian and materialist vision is the imago Dei: the Christian belief that man is created in the image of God.

Being created in the imago Dei endows every person with dignity-a dignity that is not derived from the majority’s opinion (or a government definition) about the quality of their life or their contribution to society.

In the absence of this belief, every decision about the allocation of health care-and indeed about any area of life-becomes an occasion for the young and strong to impose their will on the old and weak.

The word for this is “tyranny.” And all the hand-wringing and rationalizations about the need to overhaul the health-care system shouldn’t distract us from the very real danger of nationalizing health care and granting government the power to decide whose life is worth living.

I say leave it to the family and the doctors as it is today.

JESUS: BOUGHT AND SOLD(Updated Michael James Stone

JESUS: BOUGHT AND SOLD

Jesus Is Not a Brand

Why it is dangerous to make evangelism another form of marketing.

Tyler Wigg-Stevenson |

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.

The problem with implicitly salesy evangelism is bad theology, not bad technique, and it requires more than a simple change in method.

If you feel like a used-car salesman talking about Jesus, the solution to the perceived lack of authenticity isn't a smoother pitch—it's a renewal of the church. The potency of personal evangelism is, as it has always been, the simple and earnest retelling of what God has done in the lives of his people. Of course, this requires a community to back up our claims.

The Pattern of This World

Unfortunately, most evangelism in a consumerist society will seem like a sales pitch. But when you are marketing a product that isn't, it's important to know the difference between a church-centered mindset and one driven by individualistic market interests.

This requires recognizing the attributes and values of consumerism. The church can then intentionally develop practices of discipleship that cut against them, so that we will not unwittingly bow to the altar of Brand Jesus.In a consumerist society, you are what you buy. Your identity, social location, and self-image are primarily determined by your patterns of consumption, which trump the markers of ethnic background, tribe, religion, and so on that predominate in other societies.

One way to understand consumerist marketing is to look at what may well be its apotheosis: the Macintosh versus PC advertising campaign, which personifies each brand, rendering Mac as a likeable urban hipster and PC as a slightly podgy oaf. The commercials occasionally touch on the legitimate technical reasons to prefer Mac over PC, but the product features are utterly secondary, vanishing behind the personality and style ascribed to the competing brands—and, by extension, their consumers. (Microsoft's counterattack—an ad campaign featuring happy, quirky people proclaiming, "I'm a PC!"—only solidifies the point.)

These commercials only work because viewers are fluent in their marketing language.

Imagine showing the Mac vs. PC commercials to a time traveler from a few centuries back. How would someone to whom the marketing vernacular is unintelligible know that Macintosh is awesome and Microsoft is lame? How would she evaluate the comparative coolness of the clothing, haircuts, body types, and manners of speech demonstrated by the personified Mac and PC?

Marketing is only effective in a society where people are shaped to respond to it. Marketing of any sort makes us respond as consumers, regardless of what the product is, because when we see marketing, we start looking for a brand: Nike, Mercedes, Christianity, Dunkin' Donuts, Juicy Couture, Zen Buddhism, DeWalt, Harley-Davidson, Islam, Carhartt, John Deere, and so on. This is true whether one markets Coors Light or the East Nashville Bible Church. Conflicts with the

Christian Life

In other words, people who respond to church marketing approach Jesus as another consumer option. This is first and foremost a problem because it is blasphemy: We are talking about the incarnate Logos, not a logo. Additionally (in case blasphemy isn't bad enough), this should concern us because of the problems it creates for discipleship. Consumerism isn't just a social phenomenon—it's a spirituality. And it comes with spiritual habits and disciplines that conflict with the particular practices of the Christian life.

There are many such conflicts, but let's look at four key ones. 1. "I am what I buy" vs. the lordship of Christ. In a consumerist society, my identity comes from what I consume.

The main focus of a consumerist society is me—which is the essentially American ideal of self-reliance and responsibility run amok.

Business gurus like Tom Peters have made fortunes writing books—the sort you see sold in airports—on how to package, market, and sell "Brand You" and "Me, Inc."

But the soft version of this phenomenon is even more pernicious: Our advertising culture revolves around the promise of attaining selfhood through consumption. Flip through any glossy magazine. The best advertisements will convince us that the brand on offer will help us express and enhance who we are.

Commercial brands do nothing to upset this fundamental self-centeredness; in fact, they depend on it. We pay for the privilege of associating and adorning ourselves with particular brands because we like what they do for us. The brands, in turn, are happy to take our money. Spiritual consumers, therefore, will approach the church with the same narcissism they bring to other brands. What am I expressing about myself if I buy Brand Jesus? How will Christianity fulfill my vision for me?

The theological implication: I belong to myself. I am my own project, my own product to do with as I will.

This is an enacted rejection of the honor due to God as Creator.

On a psycho-spiritual level, too, this individualism sets up a sort of endless adolescence. The awkward talk of figuring out who we are—once restricted to teen years and midlife crises—becomes a lifelong endeavor.

The danger is that the church will subtly contort the gospel into mere personal fulfillment. Preaching and evangelism that focus on the benefits of becoming a Christian present a message not fundamentally different from commercial advertising about the existential benefits of this car or that soap. This attitude inhibits the disciple's growth into living a God-centered, neighbor-focused life.

Yes, the Christian life brings fulfillment beyond imagination. But such fulfillment will be strangely elusive if it is your main priority as a Christian. Indeed, it comes only when we seek God instead of ourselves. Those who come to the church expecting brand satisfaction, seeking to save their lives, will find neither.

Of course, if we resist the temptation to preach a non-gospel that would keep spiritual consumers coming back, we still face a challenge:

How do we convince people who are dedicated to self-creation that life is really about the grace and power of God?

Perhaps the answer is to be found in the recognition that consumerist self-creation is, in the end, a search for meaning. We therefore have the opportunity to meet consumers where they are by recognizing that the gospel is a doorway into the whole story of God—not simply a ticket to heaven, but the ongoing and enacted recognition, beginning with repentance, that we belong truly to God. 2. Discontent vs. the sufficiency of Christ.

Perversely, though consumerism promises personal fulfillment, the economic cycle depends entirely on continual discontent. After all, consumerism is not about buying new cars—it's about buying new cars to make you feel new. Marketers know this and build planned obsolescence into their product lines so that the next purchase is always just around the corner.

There are many problems with this system. For starters, it's wasteful: The resources required to run our endlessly hungry engine of narcissism are staggering. (Check out the marvelous storyofstuff.com.) And it creates a decadent carelessness about material resources that favors discarding and replacing over recycling and repair—habits that came naturally to our grandparents.

Consumer discontent also carries twin spiritual pitfalls.

First, our perpetual quest for comfort and happiness-inducing products actually kills any chance of satisfying our wants. The pleasure of purchasing a new product or service will last for a short while. Then it wears off, and we hanker for something new. Second—in a perverse corollary—we can't handle discomfort any better. We seek new products at the first hint of irritation. Like clinically identifiable shopping addiction, this is an indicator of an astonishingly decadent culture.

Most people in most places do not have the luxury of striving for pain-free lives.

Of course, having all of our needs met at all times is the precise opposite of what a disciple should expect. Paul expresses an indifference to circumstance that is born of spiritual maturity: "I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength" (Phil. 4:11b-13).

Paul's point is not that every need we perceive will be met—but that we will increasingly need less and less for contentment. Consumerist habits drive us in an endless and endlessly dissatisfying quest for new and different things. But discipleship, pursued in Christian community, is about becoming satisfied with just one thing: the Lord who gives us strength.

Brand relativism vs. the supremacy of Christ.

A good marketer seeks to create the sorts of people who identify so strongly with a certain brand or brand family that another form of consumption is unimaginable. We all know what this looks like: It's the Chevy in front of you sporting a knockoff bumper sticker of Calvin (the comic-strip protagonist, not the theologian) doing something bad to the Ford logo, the guy at the gym adorned head to toe with the Nike swoosh, and your friend who would go back to a typewriter before she'd trade her Mac for a PC.

At face value, this kind of enthusiasm seems to indicate the superiority of given brands. But underlying this brand zealotry is the fundamental relativism inherent in consumerism. That is, the Chevy brand is not inherently better than the Ford brand, or vice versa. One logo might do a better job of capturing hearts and minds; products might have competing technical merits.

But to declare the inherent superiority of one brand over another is as ridiculous as saying that Bostonians are better than Chicagoans.

By what standards? Brands communicate different things, to be sure: Mercedes says luxury where Honda says reliability. But both brands do what they are supposed to, and the superiority of one over the other is entirely in the mind—and preference—of the consumer.

The consumer who buys our marketing may well make Jesus his or her chosen brand, and the resulting zeal will look like passionate faith. Appearances deceive. Genuinely passionate faith is rooted in recognizing who Christ actually is. Brand zealotry, by contrast, is self-centered, because the supposed superiority of one brand over another depends on the brand devotee's enthusiasm.

The zeal of the endorsement masks the inherent arbitrariness of the choice.

But the choice for Christ is not arbitrary. If a disgruntled Chevy man switches to Ford, Chevy loses and Ford gains; if we desert Christ in favor of another god, he is not diminished. Brand superiority is in the mind of the consumer, but Christ's divinity and worth are his own, regardless of what we think of him. He does not need our bumper stickers or T-shirts. These tell the world far more about who we are and what we like than they do about him.

Spiritual shoppers have no reason to think that Christianity is anything but one option among many. But the life of a holy church is a powerful witness to the contrary—perhaps most evidently in our celebration of the Lord's Supper, when we remember that the one we consume has already consumed us.

The church reveals the supremacy of Christ in a world that denies his power when—crediting it all to God—we love the unlovable and forgive the unforgivable, reconcile seemingly intractable hatreds and rejoice even in sorrow, persevere in hardship and serve to the point of sacrifice, and baptize and teach instead of consume and discard. 4. Fragmentation vs. unity in Christ.

The key to successful marketing is niche segmentation: dividing a population into identifiable groups who behave in predictable ways based on consumer preferences. This is demographic analysis on steroids.

A marketer can look at your monthly receipts—and in some cases, merely your Zip Code—and come away with seemingly clairvoyant knowledge about you. Because niche segmentation enables marketers to target their messages to narrower audiences, it is reflected in our advertising. Moreover, it has allowed us to live lives that are increasingly tailor-made to our personal preferences.

We live in neighborhoods of single-family homes populated by people like us, go to church with people like us, consume media targeted at people like us, and shop with people like us. All of this makes us more reluctant to inhabit a world with people who are not like us. And this, of course, is a problem for the church. Christian unity is a paramount biblical value.

Think of Jesus' prayer in John 17, Paul's exhortation to the Philippians to be of one mind in Christ, and the metaphor of the church as Christ's own body, with different members equal in mutual necessity and dignity.

As Paul writes in Galatians 3:28, the unity of Christ trumped all of the principal divisions of Roman society: tribe, class, and gender.

No identity marker matters as much as Christian does.

We must therefore be concerned about market segmentation infiltrating the church. It has resulted in two unacceptable outcomes: utterly homogenous churches representing consumer-based "clusters," and homogenous groupings within larger churches. Both divide us along racial, socioeconomic, and age- and gender-based lines, each of which predicts consumer behavior.

This is certainly a "pattern of this world" (Rom. 12:2).

Division along earthly lines is certainly not unique to Christians who live in consumerist societies. Crypto-tribalism passes for Christianity in nearly every time and place—think Northern Ireland. But recognizing segmentation in our context is the first step toward addressing it. This issue, in whatever culture, cuts to the heart of the church's proclamation about justification: We know that God is no respecter of persons, but how far are we willing to conform our lives to God's grace?

Defying Expectations

Consumerism is here to stay. The habits described above—self-creation, discontent, relativism, fragmentation—will become more dominant, not less, in years to come. That's the way of the globalized economy and ascendant transnational commercial interests.

We cannot defeat our situation; we can only seek to live faithfully in it. In order to do so, it's vital that we remember the true nature of Christ's church. Christians in every age have struggled to define the church, a difficult task because it is, uniquely, a divinely ordained human institution.

So we use necessary similes: The church is like a family, a kingdom, a service organization, a lifeboat, a neighborhood, and—in our day—a business.

But problems begin when we define the church as a whole using a comparison that just describes one of its attributes: i.e., treating the church as a business with a brand to promote. And then, even though there are all sorts of ways the church isn't like a business, we begin to employ all the tools of commercial enterprise as though we were paying the body of Christ some compliment by treating it like a Fortune 500 company, with a bottom line, investor returns, supply chain, CEOS, market share, and so on.

If we treat the gospel like a commodity, can we fault nonbelievers for thinking that the cross is just another logo?But we also need to recognize that no matter what we do, consumerism will unavoidably define the context for how people view the church in our consumerist age. All communication will be perceived as marketing.

All self-presentation, even church advertising, will be perceived as branding.

And all outreach will be viewed as sales.

There is nothing we can do to change this context. All the more reason for us to defy expectations. Spiritual consumers will come to Christianity as do window shoppers at a mall, wanting a spirituality tailor-made to their preferences. They will want this because consumption is the only salvation they have ever known.

They will bring all of their riches and perversely be unable to conceive of grace because they cannot imagine a thing that cannot be bought. They will come before our stained-glass seeking a storefront in exactly the same way that people in Jesus' day came to him, searching for what they expected to find.

Then they were looking for a crazy man, a teacher, a healer, a prophet, a revolutionary—and, at the end, a corpse. Today they are looking for a spiritual brand. In Jesus' time, they found a living Messiah and Lord.

They found the God for whom they had not even been looking. The question for us in our time is whether seekers will find the world-transforming body of the Lord, formed by the Spirit—whether, expecting something new to buy, they will instead be surprised by God.

Tyler Wigg-Stevenson is direct of the Two Futures Project. He is an ordained Baptist preacher and author of Brand Jesus: Christianity in a Consumerist Age (Seabury Press).

Correction: Due to an editing error, the article failed to clarify that it was only the Four Spiritual Laws themselves that do not mention the church. The document does mention church in a separate section.

Who is Innocent of Corruption? EVERYONE IS SELLIING YOU.

Who is Innocent of Corruption?

Selling America's birthright

Posted: August 01, 2009
1:00 am Eastern

© 2009

I got an e-mail from President Obama today. It had a heading at the top:

THE WHITE HOUSE
Washington

I must admit, I had – and still have – mixed feelings about it. Anytime you get a "personal" letter or e-mail from the president of the United States, it naturally seems important.

But since it was obviously a form letter, sent to several million other American voters, you quickly realize that the man whose name is at the end of the letter doesn't know you at all. He couldn't pick you out of a crowd of two. It's a political ploy, only special in the sense that only modern technology makes this kind of mass (though "personal" seeming) communication possible.

It starts out "Dear Friend," and it's signed simply "Barack Obama." I really doubt that Mr. Obama even saw or approved the letter, much less composed it. It was conceived and implemented by his team, very much the same technique he used seeking votes on the Internet. Nice, friendly, bullet-pointed – and completely, almost desperately, political.

Its clear purpose was to convince me to personally support his health care plan, and even "put these core principles of reform in the hands of your friends, your family, and the rest of your social network." This is one of the main ways he got elected, through slick use of the Internet, getting ordinary citizens to literally go to work for him and to campaign for him and his agenda. Teddy Roosevelt could never have done this and even George Bush and his folks never thought of it. Slick as a whistle and maybe effective.

NOTE: WND INSERTED THIS LINK BELOW INTO THE ARTICLE PRACTICING SOME OF THE SAME "SLICK" GIMMICKS PAT BOONE WARNS ABOUT> WHILE IT SEEMS INNOCENT IT IS DECEPTIVE PRACTICES ACCEPTED ON THE INTERNET-MjS

"Speechless: Silencing the Christians," by Don Wildmon, lays out determined strategy of coalition of liberal secularists, homosexual activists and Fortune 500 companies

NOTE WHEN YOU SEE MASSIVE UNDERLINED POSTS IN BLUE<>

But what was he trying to sell me?

He said, "It's time to fix our unsustainable insurance system and create a new foundation for health care security," and then proposed to provide eight specific consumer protections. They sound good and reasonable on the surface. But I'd been studying up on his health care proposal, and had just read at least 50 ways his plan could never work. It would actually devastate our economy and change the fundamental relationship between citizens and government. We'd no longer be freeborn citizens who have a consensual government; our very physical bodies would be the wards of the state.

So it left a bad taste in my mouth.

It vividly brought to mind the Genesis 25 story of Jacob and Esau, sons of Isaac and grandsons of Abraham. Esau was a rugged outdoors guy who loved to hunt and fish, and cook and eat what he killed. His brother Jacob was more a "stay around home" guy, a "mild man, dwelling in tents." He could well afford to take it easy, because Papa Isaac was wealthy. And Jacob's mama was happy to do all the cooking for him. She even taught him how to cook some himself.

One day, while Jacob was practicing his cooking, brother Esau came in from the field, dog-tired. "Hey bro," he asked, "Gimme some of that stew. It smells good, and I'm worn out and hungry." Well, Jacob was something of a conniver, and he saw a chance to make a big, big score. "I'll serve you up some of this delicious stew, my brother — if you'll sell me your birthright, as of this day."

According to the Bible account, Esau didn't even think it over. "Hey, I'm so hungry I could die, and then what good would my ‘birthright' be? You got yourself a deal, little brother. Pass me the stew." So in that moment of temporary need, he gave up his future and all his father intended him to have.

He ate a big meal, filled his belly, and went his way. He didn't realize till later what a complete fool he'd been – and he "cried with an exceedingly great and bitter cry." As the Bible says, "he despised his birthright."

Today, I see Barack Obama as Jacob – and 300 million Americans as Esau! Where in the Constitution, or in any of our Founding Fathers' writings, does it suggest that some Big Brother government shall guarantee health care to each and every citizen? This was never the intention of government, in their view. The purpose of government by consent of the governed was to provide security from invasion, equality under the law, domestic tranquility and a structure in which people could work out their own futures, live their own lives, make their own decisions about how to support their families and maybe help their neighbors.

Government was meant to be lean, sparse and non-intrusive. The various amendments to the Constitution guaranteed various individual liberties, not collective obligations to meet all the personal needs of every citizen.

Somewhere along the way, especially in the last 60 years or so, the idea has grown in some quarters that government was humanely obligated to provide health care, education through college, insurance and retirement benefits – in short, a totally worry-free life – to all citizens, from cradle to grave. Sounds great to some, if you don't analyze where the money will come from to do all that.

But that's not a picture of a democratic, free society. That's a blueprint for socialism, a government-run and controlled society, in which individual freedoms are sacrificed and "nobody has too much and nobody has too little." It's called communism.

"Hillary care" was rejected out of hand by the American people. So was "immigration reform" as proposed by the Bush administration. While Congress can be cajoled, tempted and threatened by presidential teams, if the citizens are given the right information and enough time to think it through, we still can get it right.

We can see through the rhetoric, the glib, attractive promises. And we can look for the bill. We know who has to pay it. Us!

The Congressional Budget Office has looked at all the numbers and projected the Obama plan will cost already-hamstrung taxpayers another trillion plus dollars. Even Mr. Obama admits the best he can "promise" is to find savings in Medicare and Social Security (reducing benefits already in place) and come up with a "revenue neutral" outcome by 2019. That means he'd be back to the situation we're in right now, which he says himself is "unsustainable!"

But he's hungry … and we're weary. He's hoping we'll sell him our birthright for a "quick fix." Let's do what Esau should have done. Tell friend Barack "Keep your stew, brother. We can cook up something a lot better than this. We'll keep our birthright, thank you."

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