Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.

Fun times in Batmania

I can’t be the only person in the world who thinks that while Melbourne is a cool city, it would be cooler if the name Batmania had stuck…

We’ve been here since Friday. It has been cold. We’re staying with my friend Mika, which has been fun. We’ve been to a bunch of cafes (stay tuned for reviews on thebeanstalker.com). We’ve been to a wedding (the real reason we came down here), a wedding that featured a surprise opera performance during the toasts. We’ve caught trams. We’ve been to City on a Hill (the church run by Guy Mason, the guy who did that Sunrise interview)… and despite all that fun stuff, and the amazing coffees, probably my favourite part was meeting Arthur and Tamie of Cyberpunk + Blue Twin fame. First off, Tamie makes possibly the most amazing Baklava I’ve ever tasted (and I spend two weeks in Greece and Turkey trying to find amazing Baklava), secondly, the meeting of the minds and the warm and engaging conversations we shared yesterday are a reminder of the beauty of being part of the kingdom of God, and one of the tangible benefits of doing this blogging thing. People who read and participate in conversations online are real people, and it was nice to be reminded of that – it’s also nice when you meet people and the real life version of the person is pretty much what they display online only in three dimensions. So that was fun.

The League of Honest Coffee – our first Cafe stop

City on a Hill was interesting. I’ve never seen a church with such amazing branding and design, they meet in a cinema which offers the most comfortable church seats I’ve ever been in, they had a video Bible reading featuring cool shots from around the city with key parts of the text written in chalk. It was a really hip and happening deal. The two criticisms I have, and I’m not really in the business of taking shots at other people’s models of ministries (unless they don’t talk about Jesus) were that the cinema setting made conversation difficult – nobody really said hello to us until the end of the service, even though we were about five minutes early, and the music, while tight and enjoyable, featured the occasional repetition of line/verse that wasn’t indicated by the powerpoint, which made singing a long a little bit disjointed.

I loved how “on message” people were in up front stuff, it was clear that if you were new at the church your next step is to become part of a “connect group” (via a newcomers information evening), and it was clear that this is a church where the expectation is that you role up your sleeves and be on mission. So that was pretty cool too, in that it seemed to recognise the limitations of doing welcoming/connecting with new people in the venue that they’re in, while conveying the church’s desire to incorporate new people into the flock, and move people into the process of serving one another.

The sermon was on 1 Corinthians 14, on Spiritual gifts, tongues and prophecy – so there was plenty of interesting mental fodder. Guy managed to hold and nicely articulate the tension between skeptical cessassionists and tongues-loving reformed charismatics nicely, while pointing out that spiritual gifts are only spiritual gifts if they point people towards Jesus. So that was nice.

September 25, 2011

Four Years

I have been married to my wonderful and talented wife for four years today.

That makes me happy, the prospect of seventy odd more years, and the impending birth of our first baby (in December, this is the first time I’ve mentioned it here) makes me even more happy.

Here she is showing off her talents with firearms at the Townsville army base.

Our jet setting lifestyle means blogging will be a little irregular here until next week some time. We came back from mission in Townsville, spent a week at college, hit the road to Byron Bay for our anniversary, and tomorrow we’re in Melbourne for a wedding – stay tuned for some cafe reviews on thebeanstalker.com.

I’d like to point out that I resisted the urge to refer to Robyn as “my smokin’ hot wife”… I do still think we’re cut out for church planting.

September 22, 2011

Some handy fashion tips from Put This On

I’m pretty horrible when it comes to fashion, unless I’m really dressing up for something. The other day I spent about an hour and a half trying to tie a full Windsor knot while driving to a wedding (and while stopped at a beach near the venue – see Mitch’s photo blog for proof), without a mirror. I kept retying it because dammit. My tie will be equilateral not isosceles.

So, if you’re bad with fashion, like I am, these (basic) tips from fashion tumblog “Put This On” will set you straight.

A random sampling:

  1. Your tie should reach your belt line – it shouldn’t end above your belt or below it.
  2. Your tie knot should have a dimple.
  3. Only wear a tie if you’re also wearing a suit or sportcoat (or, very casually, a sweater). Shirt, tie and no jacket is the wedding uniform of a nine-year-old.
  4. The only men who should wear black suits during the day are priests, undertakers, secret agents, funerals attendees and yokels.

September 21, 2011

Disney movies titled descriptively

Once upon a time Disney changed the name of a movie. From something obscure to something descriptive. What started as ‘Basil of Baker Street’ became ‘The Great Mouse Detective.’

A staffer at Disney didn’t like this much. He wrote a little protest letter, in the form of a memo announcing new names for Disney’s back catalogue. Letters of Note has a copy of the memo.

September 20, 2011

How to be a Christian Hipster

In case you were wondering…

September 19, 2011

Some inspirational Monday Morning Music

If ever any female lead singer deserved a Madonna Mic – it’s this lady.

The little mid song interlude is pretty special.

September 19, 2011

I’m a carnivore. Just in case you were thinking about inviting us to dinner…

Slight language warning here…

Thanks to my littlest sister for the link…

September 18, 2011

Saturday night music: Such Great Heights

I went to a wedding today, it’s number two out of three wedding weekends in a row. They had Iron and Wine’s cover of the Postal Service’s Such Great Heights as one of the songs in the ceremony. It was pretty cool. I like the original too.

Also, YouTube is doing something cool with music videos… Here’s a profile page for songs from The Postal Service.

September 17, 2011

A day in the life of a Lego Man

There were two moments that I smiled in this video, and one that I chuckled. It’s a nice little ad though…

September 17, 2011

Mario says happy Friday to St. Eutychus readers…

Dear readers,

Here’s a little video from Mario courtesy of Fiverr.

Thanks for reading.

September 16, 2011

Being on message for Jesus: What is good PR?

The result of good PR isn’t always a good story (though sometimes it is). That’s one of the foundational points of Public Relations that I probably haven’t made clearly enough in my posts on PR for Jesus. There’s that stupid maxim that “all publicity is good publicity”… if that was the case then more companies would be out committing crimes for the benefit the media coverage brings.

In the comments of my “being on message or Jesus” post – Daniel made the following point regarding Peter Costello’s warning about the idol of positive media coverage:

“His warning to “beware the false idol of positive media coverage” seems at odds with some of what you seem to be saying about public relations.”

It’s not. But this is mostly because I probably haven’t been clear about what the goal of PR is, in terms of media coverage. Positive media coverage is up to the whim of journalists and editors, and largely shaped by the expectations of the readers/viewers of the particular outlet. It’s pretty unlikely, in Australia, for Christians talking about the gospel to be handed positive media coverage on a platter. We get it pretty easily if we criticise the establishment or say something a bit controversial, but that’s not really what I’ve been talking about.

Most situations where prominent Christians are being interviewed in the media are situations where the media is expecting a particular response from a Christian voice on moral issues, or on controversial issues, in which case it would be easy to bang on about morality (ala the ACL), it’s hard to bang on about the gospel – and the gospel is our key message.

One of the other comments on the previous post, from Aaran, said:

“I think there is a fine line between taking the opportunity to talk about Jesus and sounding like a politician on QandA.”

This might be true, and nobody likes those sound bite fests where people fail to engage in an issue because they keep repeating the same mantra like eight second summary of their key message. But at least they’re on message, and you know what the politicians on Q&A stand for – (“not the other guys)… because they’re on message. Good PR finds a balance. Good PR engages with an issue so that you get invited back to talk on another issue. But good PR means gaining a good airing for your message, not necessarily gaining a good story.

So while I’m pretty blithely dismissive of the apparently axiomatic “all publicity is good publicity”… there’s something in it. All publicity that presents and engages with your key message is good publicity. That’s a better summary. If we’re selling a message, which we are as Christians, then we should celebrate when that message gets out with clarity. Our job is to be messengers, to faithfully point people towards the Lord Jesus. That’s not the job of a journalist. We want to make sure that while the journalist does their job putting together a story, we’re doing our job – getting out our message. This means understanding the medium/media a little too – being on message in an interview for the TV news means finding an 8 second summary statement, you’re not going to get much more of an opportunity than that, being on message on Q&A means finding a way to tie the topic to the gospel, to show how the Lord Jesus leads us to a particular response to an issue. It doesn’t matter if the rest of the news story is negative, or if the other panelists shout you down – we’re in the marketplace of ideas, and while it’d be nice to convince the journalist and the panelists, our target audience is really the viewers.

So, back when I was a PR man, we used to measure our media coverage using a bit of a matrix. This was how we decided what dollar value to put on media coverage. Media coverage as editorial is inherently more persuasive than media coverage where you’ve paid for advertising. It’s somebody else blowing your trumpet v you blowing your trumpet. So we started by multiplying the rack rate advertising value by three. This is a pretty arbitrary number, and it’s a pretty arbitrary process. Next we look at the story to see if it featured our key messages, then to see if it featured a “call to action” (similar to the key message but usually, in tourism, details on how to book a holiday etc), then we assessed whether it was a positive story or a negative story. Each of these factors had a multiplier effect on the initial value, of a similar scale. We saw a bad story with a call to action as just as valuable as a good story with our key messages and no call to action (and any combination of the options). But if a story you’ve been involved in doesn’t present your key message/aptly represent your views – then that’s bad PR. That’s where you fail. And that’s where Christians fail if they fail to mention Jesus.

September 15, 2011

Manipulation and the fine art of persuasion…

Right. I’ve been meaning to put some thoughts into writing for a few weeks. Doing so now was prompted by a possibly throw away line in the Q&A at the Moore College School of Theology as collated by my friend Kutz. I wasn’t there. But this line resonates with a position I’ve been trying to articulate lately (the line is from Peter Bolt):

“Manipulation can be positive. If you’re doing it to align people to the word of God then it’s a good thing.”

Manipulation and persuasion are essentially seeking to do the same thing – move a person from point a to point b. So what’s the difference? I’ve settled on this distinction…

Persuasion is the transparent act where two parties enter a dialogue with one hoping to move the other from point a to point b.

Manipulation is less transparent and involves one party trying to shift another party from point a to point b, probably without their knowledge.

I’ve settled on this because in my experience if you catch somebody trying to shift your position when they haven’t told you that’s what they’re doing you feel annoyed and accuse them of “manipulating” you, where manipulating is a pejorative. There are heaps of ways to manipulate, and most of them fall outside the classical tools of persuasion – pathos (emotions), logos (facts and words), and ethos (how you act/live). Tools of manipulation tend to involve tugging really hard on one of those threads, where persuasion is a more subtle movement, kind of like a puppeteer with a marionette.

I reckon manipulation is fine. I know we hate it. But it’s a great art, until you get caught. Like pickpocketing, not Oliver Twist style, but like the TV guy who takes your watch while you’re talking to you and then gives it to you later. Manipulation, honest manipulation, probably involves pointing out what you’ve achieved to the person after the fact, so they recognise they’ve moved from point a to point b, but during the process your mark should be a bit like the proverbial frog in a gradually heating pot of water…

This all came up, for me, when I was told I needed to engage a little more with the emotions when I preach (because I’m a pretty rational/stoic type of thinker). So the summaries of the Moore College Lectures on Kutz’s blog have been interesting. I react against this suggestion, not because I think tugging on the emotions is “manipulation” as though that’s a bad thing, but because I think I’m more likely to get caught out if I’m doing something that isn’t within my normal character. I’m all for subtle chord changes, a little bit of emotive muzak in a movie, and all the other little “manipulative” tools – I’m also for putting a bit of emotion into a sermon, like a tear jerking illustration, I’m just against doing it in a way that means I’m likely to get caught.

Persuasion is pretty safe ground, but doing both is potentially more effective, I’m just not sure what that looks like. Most people in the pews are there hoping to be persuaded (or taught), so there’s implied consent there for being “manipulated,” providing your end point is something you’ve implicitly agreed to (essentially the ends identified by Peter Bolt in his quote). It’s a little murkier when it comes to PR and marketing, but manipulation is where the fun is. It’s making ads that are more than just a boring presentation of a product, it’s also harder to do thanks to the Gruen Transfer and market awareness about the tools advertisers employ. Anyway. Those are my thoughts. What are yours?

September 15, 2011

Barry Duncan: Master palindromist

This is a pretty fascinating piece about a guy who thinks palindromically.

“People who write palindromes are not the kind of people who are going to call attention to themselves. I think they’re very much people who are comfortable being behind the scenes, practicing the invisible craft.”

Turns out that palindrome writing is a relationship killer…

“In order to share some of his writing, he produced a small collection, which he titled Assorted Palindromes and One Song. It wasn’t long before a close friend dubbed it “The Relationship Killer.”

Duncan would send the collection to people he knew and simply never hear from them again. So he began warning people. “I tell people before I give it to them, ‘I give this to people, I never hear from them again.’ And they say, ‘Ha ha ha, that won’t happen.’ And it happens. People think it’s freakish, and don’t even know what to say about it.” And the thing is, he wasn’t looking for affirmation. “I didn’t expect people to say, ‘Oh, I was dazzled!’ All I wanted them to say was ‘I got it in the mail.’They can’t even write and say, ‘Oh, thanks for the thing you sent me.’ I mean, just… nothing. And I think a normal person would’ve thought, you know, this palindrome-writing is not the way to win friends and influence people.”

September 15, 2011

A Ninja demonstrates his awesome capabilities for St. Eutychus Readers

This guy spins a stick fast, he’s not so great at reading instructions though… I told him to say hello to readers of St. Eutychus.

This video comes courtesy of Fiverr.com, and cost me $5.

I asked him if he’d do a cooking demo for us (because I want to make a TV show called Ninja Chef), but he declined.

September 13, 2011