Unbecoming Buzz Agents For Christ
Back in the day, businesses could count on word-of-mouth as the most powerful form of organic marketing. By doing a genuinely good job, or offering the best quality products, people enthusiastically recommended them to each other. Relationships of trust are natural networks of growth. Roland Allen understood that well.
But the Web 2.0 world (World 2.0?) has spawned new forms of friendship, and new opportunities for word-of-mouth marketing that big businesses are capitalizing on. The infectious power of facebook and Twitter is their instant ability to connect people across traditional barriers, but that very power and success is being capitalized on (annoyingly) in order to increase the sales noise in the midst of those very connections. Connections of grace and reciprocity are corrupted into connections of self-interest and quid-pro-quo. Even more unusually, some people are being enlisted as volunteers – in the thousands – to serve corporate clients by literally creating a “buzz” about products, one person at a time. In return for their willingness to talk to friends and strangers about the products, these “buzz agents” receive products for free.
NPR did a great story on this a while back, and in it there’s a key moment where one particular “buzz agent” talks about wearing a new brand of perfume and then “cozying up” to people throughout her day with the hopes that someone would remark on the scent, thereby creating a “natural” opening for a conversation about the product.
In the NPR piece a Wharton professor nails the problem on the head by pointing out that though the aforementioned conversation about perfume might have seemed natural, it actually wasn’t natural at all. The buzz agent had manipulated the circumstance to bring about a question! The conversation was opportunistic, not organic. The entire encounter was a lie. She went on to further point out that genuine human interactions could suffer if people begin to wonder, “Is this person trying to sell me something?”
Don’t people already ask that question about Christians?
I think this is what evangelism in america has been for decades. We’re experts at packaging Christ into a product that can be delivered in a matter of seconds (“Let me ask you John, have you ever stolen anything before? Well, what does that make you?”). Entire churches have been systematically trained as “buzz agents” for Christ, intentionally steering even their most precious relationships into sound-byte opportunities to deliver the religious goods – preferably in a “natural” way.
There’s an inherent wariness and mistrust built into the mindset of consumers. We’re trained from an early age to be savvy shoppers, suspicious of commercial claims. We inherently know The Gap doesn’t care about our well-being – despite all the cozy images, and heartfelt displays. We know perfectly well that they just want to sell us as much product as they possibly can, whether we need it or not – whether we can afford it or not.
However, when we want what they’re selling we step through the looking glass and enter the fantasy they’ve conjured, partly because it makes rationalizing our decisions easier, and partly because it’s fun there in Wonderland! But when we don’t happen to want new jeans or cable-knit sweaters all that dripping insincerity can be rather irritating – even infuriating if it’s persistent enough - because we know it’s a lie.
When the church begins to resemble The Gap – with it’s buzz agents, merchandised display racks, tragically hip cafe tables, and atmospherically happy poster-people prancing on the walls – it triggers a consumer response. Either, “This place doesn’t really care about me, they just want my money,” or “What a wonderfull place! I want to spend all my time here sipping latte’s and building custom teddy bears, and accumulating all the wonderful things they have!”
As long as they want what we’re selling, they’ll suspend disbelief and give us their loyalty. But consumer loyalty is fickle. As soon as we no longer offer what they want, or as soon as someone else offers it better or cheaper, off they’ll go.
And that’s what has been happening in American churches for years now. Brand loyalty only lasts as long as the brand fits the fantasy.
But what if the church offered the gospel as an embodied polemic against consumer relationships? What if our message and gatherings offered to cleanse consumer-weary palettes? To do so, we must view each human relationship as an end-in-itself, rather than simply the means to some other evangelistic end. We must love people for the sake of loving them, not for the sake of “saving” them. We must trust God to guide us in every encounter, learning to “Do what the father is doing,” on His mission, for that, after all (in my opinion), is what missional really means – to partner with God in every situation as he goes about His mission. Finally, we must resolve to be who we truly are as people and as the church, honestly representing the gospel in its naked form, not it’s magically marketed form.
Loving people for the sake of loving them I have always believed is possibly the ONLY way to lead people to Christ! I also think that it may be one of the hardest paths to take for the simple reason that we are all too human and broken and unconditional love is always a challenge! I Love this analogy you have given and think that it describes in simple laymen terms (something I can understand) the problem with the church and why your ideas and others of a “missional” church are so brilliant:) I always like to keep it simple, thanks for giving me a great explanation of what it is we are doing on Sunday nights and why:)