Gospel as Product
This morning I was going through my regular routine of bookmarked websites and such and I ran across this article, Writers’ Strike Hits TBN Hard. The article describes the impact of the strike of the Christian Writers Guild (who knew there was such a thing?) on TBN and its fundraising. The article quotes Todd Samuels, president of the Guild, as saying:
How many of those 190 million dollars were the result of Benny Hinn’s healing crusades? How much would [Hinn’s program] This is Your Day generate without CWG members working hard every day to write healing scenarios? We’ll just have to see, won’t we? Those people don’t decide to show up in wheelchairs on their own, you know!”
Maybe I’m just naive, but I grew up in a Christianity when there were no marketing campaigns, no ghostwriters, no slick Powerpoint programs, no direct mail solicitations, etc. There was just a man with a message that drove me to my knees. I miss that.
In my house, you are preaching to the choir. Some of this branding rhetoric bugs me to no end. Has the Gospel “changed” that much that we have to sugar coat and spice it up with every gimmick the media and secularists have to offer, to “entice” the world?
I am not saying we have to live in yesteryear but there is something to be said about a man who is run out of his own church house/system and retreats to the top of a tombstone to preach and then draws a crowd of thousands (John Wesley) to the cemetery. As you said, I want something that will probe my soul, shake my world and throw me to the ground in absolute surrender at Jesus’ feet….”a man with a message!”
AmeriKan,
Personally, I believe that the branding rhetoric is here because of a lack of the preaching of the true Gospel and also a lack of the Spirit. In my early days, we wouldn’t think of driving 300 hundred miles one way to hear a preacher that we knew knew the move of the Spirit. In those days, there was no “branding” or marketing to speak of.
Today, ministry has become commercial and I don’t hear any stories of road trips taken to see preachers.