One of the issues plagu­ing the local tourism indus­try in the time I’ve been work­ing in Townsville has been con­vinc­ing peo­ple that the best way to grow their indi­vid­ual oper­a­tion is to grow the pie for their “com­peti­tor” at the same time.

It’s as true in cof­fee as it is in tourism… and it’s prob­a­bly true in min­istry too.

In tourism your goal is to develop first an appre­ci­a­tion of a des­ti­na­tion and then com­pete for the atten­tion of the peo­ple who hol­i­day in the region.

In cof­fee your goal is to develop first an appre­ci­a­tion of great cof­fee (com­pared to the aver­age cof­fee served in the aver­age cafe/diner/McDonalds).

This “dis­loy­alty card” that has been pro­duced by the cur­rent World Barista cham­pion is a sen­sa­tional idea.

The cof­fee guys are onto some­thing with their focus on coop­er­a­tion rather than com­pe­ti­tion. Strong com­pe­ti­tion and an edu­cated mar­ket is a great thing for every­body com­pet­ing — it’s not great for those left behind with a shoddy product.

The min­istry appli­ca­tion is prob­a­bly tan­gen­tial — but impor­tant… obvi­ously there’s a Bib­li­cal com­pul­sion to stay with a par­tic­u­lar body of Christ (local church) — it’s not a mat­ter of con­tin­u­ous shop­ping around while you look for the church that best suits you.

Izaac wrote about God­cast­ing the other day — the act of down­load­ing and lis­ten­ing to ser­mons from qual­ity preachers.

He envis­aged a day where we will be warned off lis­ten­ing to ser­mons from gifted men by preach­ers jeal­ous for the admi­ra­tion of their flocks (or per­haps, more char­i­ta­bly, sen­si­tive to the pos­si­bil­ity that lis­ten­ing to excep­tional preach­ing will cause discontent).

I think we should be encour­ag­ing Chris­tians to lis­ten to, read, and con­sume as much great teach­ing as pos­si­ble. Chances are that those Chris­tians keen enough to seek out great teach­ing will be the ones who are keen­est to serve their church — rather than cri­tique. And the idea of learn­ing every­thing from one flawed ves­sel is scary. I’ll be encour­ag­ing every­body who comes to any church I preach at to seek a sec­ond opin­ion on whether my teach­ing is faith­ful to scrip­ture. That’s the model we encour­age when we’re train­ing preach­ers and teach­ers at col­lege isn’t it? Who wants to go to an insti­tu­tion with one lecturer.

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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