Tuesday Two

1-Churchmarketingsucks.com just ran an article on an experiment from the UK where secular marketers were challenged to promote church attendance. While some things were predictable, there is a wealth of insight in their findings and observations. My favorite is this gem:

If a church can get in touch with Jesus' teachings rather than just ritual, so people actually live it out-that would appeal to me. I think people are also looking for a clear message that they could apply to their daily lives," says Wilcock.

To paraphrase, "If a church could act like Jesus, we could sell that."

2-I started reading Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell this weekend (in my spare time, right after that last post ;-)). In the first chapter he uses two analogies to enter a discussion about modernism (bricks) and postmodernism (springs). He does it so gently that defenses don't go up and he never uses the words modern or postmodern. Although the core tenets of postmodernism are antithetical to Christianity, so were many of the beliefs of modernism that we swallowed. Regardless of whether or not we buy into it, our culture has changed. There are good articles on postmodernism here. Notice this summation by Stanley Hauerwas, a prominent Christian ethicist:

I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism. Modernity sought to secure knowledge in the structure of human rationality, and relegated God to the "gaps" or denied Him all together. Modernity said that God is a projection of the ideals and wants of what it means to be human so let us serve and worship the only God that matters-that is, the human. Postmodernists, in the quest to be thorough in their atheism, now deny that the human exists. Postmodernists are thus the atheists that only modernity could produce.