I’m enjoying some time in upstate New York with my daughter and her husband. I’m pretty busy having fun, but I reached back and pulled an article from some time back that I posted on medium.com. It’s a bit “edgy,” but after all, Church on the Edge is meant to be just that. I hope it stirs your thinking about what it means to be the church . . .
Self-promotion is the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century. From a narcissistic U.S. president gushing about how great he is to the obsession with selfies that fill Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, we live in a world of self-promoters.
I’ve lived long enough to see this self-celebrity culture of ours mature into what it is today. I’ve also lived long enough to see it mainlined in Christianity.
It’s a heady drug.
Very addictive.
And it’s time for Christian churches, pastors, musicians, bookstores, and all the other parachurch organizations out there to JUST SAY NO!
Before his ministry began, Jesus faced three temptations from the Deceiver in the wilderness.
Number One: Turn these stones into bread.
Number Two: Leap from the temple and watch the crowd ewww and ahhh as the angels swoop down to save you.
Number Three: All the kingdoms of the world will be yours if you’ll just do it my way.
Self-promotion, self-promotion, self-promotion.
Jesus said, “No thanks, that’s not the way God’s kingdom operates.”
Over and over he told those he healed to say nothing about who healed them. He held church on mountainsides, grassy plains, and beside large lakes. (Many Bible scholars believe he was eventually banned from the synagogues. Probably.)
He didn’t tell his own twelve disciples he was the promised Messiah until shortly before his final fatal trip to Jerusalem. Even then they were shocked to hear that the only crown he soon would wear would be made of thorns.
Pardon my dark, Edenic humor, but it appears the apple has fallen quite far from the tree.
Christian literally means “little Christ.” That is what we are supposed to be. And yet we seem hell-bent to take Christ by force and make him a worldly king. Which, by the way, when they tried to do that in first-century Israel, Jesus hid in the mountains.
I think it’s time to establish another kind of church. Fight Club Church. And the first rule of Fight Club Church is that you don’t talk about Fight Club Church.1
Oh, I know some people are going to jump on that.
I’ve done everything from “How to share your faith” classes to passing out pamphlets on the street, to well, you name it. For the most part, that stuff just turns people off. I know God uses it in spite of the way Christians have, at times, misused it, but I’m just not into that anymore.
I’m into relationships. Getting to know people just for the joy of knowing them. In time, most of those relationships grow and develop, and religion, spirituality, Christianity is discussed, maybe even debated. But it’s natural, and regardless of what transpires, I’m still in the relationship.
We housed a young thirty-year-old atheist from Long Island in our apartment in Seoul for three months, one year. She told me upfront, “Dan, I’m an atheist and I don’t want to talk about religion.” We never did. She and her husband are now living in Singapore and we consider them some of our best friends.
But imagine my surprise when a family started attending our church and I asked them how they found out about us and they said, “Our atheist friend said you were the best pastor and church in Seoul.” Okay, so she lied.
Someday she may contact Sherri and me with spiritual questions. She may not. But I can tell you right now, she is a lot more likely to contact us based on the relationship we have than if I had pushed my faith down her throat.
Let’s stop promoting ourselves and start promoting genuine, authentic relationships with others. Maybe, just maybe, if the church would do that we would discover that the kindness, grace, love, and spirit of Jesus is all the promotion we need.
In Christ,
Dan
Check out my podcasts from Church on the Edge and my books on Kindle.
I’m not trying to set forth some kind of anti-evangelistic doctrine here, just trying to make us think.
Dan, you do bring up a very good point. In the modern evangelical movement in North America, our efforts to better “market Jesus” for the masses in order to make our attendance numbers increase often leads into self-promotion in addition to watering down the true message to the Word. It’s not wrong to get the word out on what your church is doing, but one has to recognize the dangers it can lead into too much focus on the church programs rather than the gospel message itself.