The Jesus All About Life cam­paign is on in earnest — though it’s unlikely it’ll get much atten­tion as far north as Townsville. Steve Kryger from Com­mu­ni­cate Jesus had some insight­ful cri­tiques of the campaign’s method­ol­ogy. He copped a bit of flack for dar­ing to stick his head up and say what any­body who thinks a bit about mar­ket­ing (or works in the field) was already thinking.

My prob­lem isn’t so much with the style of the cam­paign — I’ve got a prob­lem with the substance.

I think we’re cre­at­ing a gen­er­a­tion of apa­thetic nom­i­nal Chris­tians whose only knowl­edge of the Bible is John 3:16, and whose only knowl­edge of God is that he is lov­ing. And all they have to do is “believe”.

I believe in lots of things that I don’t really care about, and if I use that under­stand­ing of the word and apply it to God, with­out read­ing the rest of the Bible then I can com­fort­ably, and apa­thet­i­cally, rest assured that God and me are mates. And God is lov­ing. So he’ll do right by me…

I don’t think there are many peo­ple stop­ping to think about what this lov­ing God wants them to do with him past belief. And I don’t think “thank you Jesus for birds that look like they’re wear­ing pants” is the way to move peo­ple past that nom­i­nal point and into active Chris­t­ian “belief” — that where thought is out­worked, and where Jesus’ right­eous place as Lord of our lives is realised.

Yes, God is lov­ing. Yes, we do need to believe in him (as he actu­ally is, not just that he is). But we need to move past that in our mar­ket­ing cam­paigns — every mar­ket­ing cam­paign needs a call to action. The call shouldn’t be “be thank­ful for…(whatever makes a nice post­card)” it should be some­thing that enhances the under­stand­ing of what it means to be a Christian.

In our mar­ket­ing at work part of what we’re aim­ing to do is “sell the siz­zle, not the sausage” — which is what you do in a crowded mar­ket­place like tourism where every cus­tomer already knows they’re look­ing for a hol­i­day but haven’t nec­es­sar­ily cho­sen where. You can’t do this with Chris­tian­ity. Peo­ple need to bet­ter under­stand what goes in our sausage before we even try sell­ing it.

UPDATE: Steve Kryger has posted some research that led the cam­paign in the direc­tion it went in. It makes for inter­est­ing read­ing — basi­cally the peo­ple behind the cam­paign found that peo­ple have neg­a­tive thoughts about Chris­tian­ity (par­tic­u­larly sec­u­lar human­ists) and they wanted to move away from “tra­di­tional” advertising…

“At a more fun­da­men­tal level, non-Christians tend to reject the idea of ‘one truth’ as a divi­sive con­cept that is to blame for much of the con­flict in the world today, and that clashes with the sec­u­lar human­ist ideal of tak­ing per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity for lifestyle choices and inter­per­sonal values.”

I don’t get it. The gospel is no good because we can’t sell it?

I main­tain my hypoth­e­sis that the gospel is less effec­tive because we’ve spent so long sell­ing it so badly. And pulling out the impor­tant bits in a bid to not be offen­sive (I guess react­ing against the “turn or burn” fire and brim­stone preach­ers of the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion) doesn’t seem to be a greatly effec­tive strategy.

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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