March Madness reflection (final one)

Part III: Theology & Marketing

I think this is my last post on March Madness reflection. You might want to see post 1 and 2 for some context.

The idea for our March Madness campaign started small. What if our church raised some money and gave it away in nearly random places in our community? It was a guerilla-style plan, with little planning. There was little strategy. Our tactic could be summed up as "let's do something cool."

I'm not ashamed of that. Cool things are fun. Cool things provide some fantastic teaching moments. Cool things get people involved that would never otherwise be involved.

Now - any idea that gets just a little bit of publicity will have some criticism.

Here's a summary of some of the darts:
* is it biblical to pay for gasoline?
* weren't there people who needed our money more than rich West Chester residents?
* doesn't the fact that we were on TV make it extremely self-serving?
* aren't we just trolling for new church members?

Here's the deal. On a rainy Wednesday night we were paying forty cents for every gallon of gas. The gas station wouldn't let us change their light board signs, so we had people by the curb with quickly hand-drawn poster-board signs: "Cheap Gas!" It's the cheapest advertising ever. And the intersection was jammed. People were lined up to get gas.

And then a TV truck showed up. And then a second.

We did not ask for media attention. A local reporter happened to drive by and buy some cheap gas. She talked to one of our volunteers and then called for a video-truck saying “we have to share this.” We don’t know how the second truck got there (I’d guess that Channel 5 just monitors Channel 9’s CB and then follows them around – but that cannot be proven). Tom was brilliant. I was long-winded and got edited down to ten seconds. And humiliated by my name being butchered - but anything for the cause...

Anyway, the Wednesday night coverage brought some attention to us that we never anticipated. One local news station did a follow-up feature on our Thursday night Chipotle event - even broadcasting live to open their newscast. We had people calling the church telephone line asking how they could stakeout our upcoming giveaways. It was weird.

And it creates a dilemma. Because as I've said, our goal was pretty simple:
1) Simply tell a whole bunch of people that God loves them with some simple gifts. Like a random act of gracefulness kind of thing, and...
2) Give our volunteers an opportunity to learn some practical lessons about faith and love and neighbor and all that.

That's it. And then we're on TV trying to explain what we were raising money for (we weren't, we were giving it away).

And then we're justifying why we're not giving money to Over the Rhine, or Africa .

So let me run through a few ideas. These aren't official " Journey Church " ideas, these are just mine. Very humble ideas, these:

Asking who is the absolute, most neediest seems a dangerous question. I don't see that in the bible. I don't see Jesus being sure to call out that the woman who was bleeding had bled longer than anyone else, or that the victims of leprosy had suffered the worst, or that the hungriest listeners on the hillside got the biggest hunks of fish and bread. Jesus went around helping and talking to and healing whoever he was around.

Now - this begs us to ask who we're around and if maybe we shouldn't broaden our horizons just a bit. And yes, yes we should broaden our horizons. But the great commission challenges the disciples to work from the inside out, locally and then globally ( Jerusalem , Judea and beyond). Likewise we're starting locally.

Did we just enrich the gas station - or the petroleum companies? Well - I doubt the number of gallons that we discounted will make OPEC blink. And truthfully, people's gasoline purchases are fairly inelastic - we Midwestern Americans tend to drive the same number of miles whether gas is $1/gallon or $4/gallon. We saved some people a few dollars and maybe they filled up a couple days before necessary, but in the grand scheme that gasoline was getting bought one way or another. We didn't change the gas station's profit margins - we just provided a steady stream of customers for a few hours. Of course, we probably leeched their sales for the next day or so - so I imagine that it's a wash.

But I'm done with grad school and don't want to think about the economic impact of this very deeply.

Is it Biblical to give away gasoline?

Perhaps I'm simplistic, but I don't understand this line of questioning. Is it biblical to drive a car? Is it biblical to own a computer? Is it biblical to tell people that God loves them? Is it Biblical to give gifts? Is it biblical to try and foster a spirit of generosity and compassion? I'm not sure that I like the implication that if it isn't explicitly called out in scripture then it isn't a "biblical" idea. Just because the gospels don't mention Chevrolet doesn't make my car "unbiblical".

When it comes to media coverage things get dicey quickly. As I mentioned in my last post, some cycles are hard to deconstruct. I have no intention of having a faith that I hide in the corner. Nor do I want to participate in a church that hides in the corner of my city. Additionally, I think that those attitudes are likely attractive. Might people come check us out because of a business card that they received or from seeing us on TV? Of course. Is that the point of our efforts in March? Absolutely not.

I saw a comment somewhere saying something mean along the lines of "Vineyard did servant evangelism and got huge and now every church thinks that if they do servant evangelism they'll get huge."

Maybe. I can't speak for every other church. But you've got to be careful with these things. Churches get huge for all kinds of reasons - and some of the factors aren't causal. There are some mega-churches with great bands. We like music and want to have a great band. But I'm sure that there are many small churches with great bands. I'm sure there are big churches with relatively modest music. It's all over the map.

Journey Church growing is clearly important to us. If we believe that sharing gospel truth is important (we do) and that people desperately need Christian community (we do) then of course we hope that we provide opportunities for people to connect who aren't currently connected to a church. But that should be a natural by-product - that should be fruit - from our own manifestations of faith and love. It's real easy. If all we cared about were having 1000 people in our auditorium then we'd just pay people to come.

But church attendance (or growth, or whatever) by itself isn't the point. The point is allowing people to experience grace, allowing people to pursue holiness, allowing people to learn and experience discipleship, allowing people to internalize and own and live out their faith and their doubts. The point is pursuing genuine experiences with the power of Gospel and the person of Jesus.

And, yes, we think that sounds attractive.

We're not going to trumpet that and beg for people to come. That wasn't the point of March Madness.

But yet, we get asked all the time where we meet...

Lakota East High School . Sundays. 10:30 am

:-)