Marketing the Gospel
The Gospel can’t be marketed. Over the last 20 years or so, we’ve seen churches attempt to do just that, studying what people like and trying to give it to them, making church less like church and more like a coffee bar. Somewhere along the way, though, you gotta ask, “How do you sell the cross?” A coffee bar won’t do it because coffee, much as I like it, much as I think I have to have it, isn’t a matter of life and death. It really isn’t serious. The gospel is serious, as serious as a heart attack, as spikes being hammered through a human being’s hands and feet. The gospel is about the one perfect man, the one innocent man, dying for our sins. The corollary, which I think more people understand than we think, is that it’s also about us dying to our sins. You can’t sell that. You can’t make it palatable. It won’t play on Entertainment Tonight. That’s why Paul asks, “Who is equal to such a task?” But we keep thinking we are equal to the task! That’s why we keep trying to build a better mouse-trap!
Now here’s where I have to be careful–and where you have to pray for me. I don’t have to get up and preach coffee or the Contemporary to be a marketer. All I have to do is water down the message, sweeten it up; preach about those rotten sinners out there and what they’re doing to the country. All I have to do, and it’s so easy to do, is give people what you want and scratch their itching ears.
Can we talk? I like people to like me. So I want to please people. Please pray I won’t do that. I have few flashes of cleverness in my pulpit. I usually get them as I’m writing my sermon. I want to keep them in the manuscript, spout them off like those beautiful fountains in old movie musicals, put them on display for people to admire. Please pray I won’t do that. Please pray this preacher is not a good entertainer. If I do that, I’m a peddler, a huckster, a mere vendor doing what he thinks he needs to do to make a living. God have mercy on both me and my hearers.
