What is a brand?
A. An intensely heated piece of iron which has some type of design that ranchers use
to burn the hide and mark their cattle
B. A logo identity or design
C. The image that you communicate through your marketing or promotional materials
D. The thoughts, feelings, experiences, or image that others think about you
What’s your answer? OK, this is a trick question because they are all valid and correct answers; they all tie into branding. I know, all you people from th country picked “A” and that’s alright…after all you’re from the country!
Branding is about experience! It is about how others feel about you and what their experience is involving you (if any). It is about their perception of who you are and what you are about, whether it is true or false.
You can develop a sizzlin’ logo, tell people your new church rocks and that you are ultra cool, design slick as snot advertising, have a tight sounding band, and even have a launch day with thousands of people present – but if the people don’t buy into you and define you the way that you define you, all of
your branding efforts are for nothing! Their two cents count and what they emotionally feel and experience is the final word. So whatever you say through your branding or communication tools, you better live it as well.
SMAS The Evening Service of St Matt's Anglican Church Wanniassa
Gateway church A congregation in Austin Texas lead by John Burke
Vintage Faith Church Congregation headed up by Dan Kimbal
Emerging Leadership Initiative a great church planters training program
Scum of the earth Church Mike Sares heads up this church, they have done some amazing work with the "left outs and right brained"
Colorado Ridge I respect Eric Bain who has just become their lead pastor
Mosaic they do some good ministry especially for their audience in L.A
Mars Hill Church I appreciate Rob Bell's historical and contextual analysis he is a great communicator
Mars Hill Seattle Mark is a great leader, good at reading society and culture
Redeemer Presbyterian Tim Keller, what more do i need to say?
Renew Still waiting for it to go live
Soul Revival These Guys kept me sane while i was at bible college
Jesus Wants to Save Christians, by Rob Bell and Don Golden, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), $19.99 (224 pages) Due out in October.
I thoroughly enjoy the creative material that comes out of Rob Bell’s grace-filled and artistic brain. Even when I disagree with him, there is no denying he is tapping into a deep well of truth and riding the wave of a new movement of the Holy Spirit which the church, especially in America, so desperately needs. Rob Bell, and until recently, Don Golden have been doing this together at Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, and undoubtedly this book comes out of some of their ministry together. This third of the Bell books, this time with collaboration from a partner in ministry has the same bite and passion as the first two, but mostly missing are the personal stories and anecdotes which peppered Velvet Elvis, and Sex God. This book is all business, and it is God’s business the writers are about. Whether the Evangelical world wants to hear this or not, these authors feel it needs to do so desperately. This book deserves a thorough review.
It is thus with some excitement that I recently discovered that my friends at Zondervan had sent me a pre-pub copy of Jesus Wants to Save Christians (and boy do many of them need it!), which as it turns out, is a good faith attempt to articulate a specific theology for our post-modern situation, articulating what the author’s call a New Exodus perspective. New Exodus theology is of course not totally new, though it will be new to many in the blogosphere, and in the Introduction our authors acknowledge right off the bat an indebtedness especially to the work of Professor Tom Holland who teaches Biblical Theology at Wales Evangelical School of Theology, and has focused in his writings on the Pauline corpus (e.g see his Contours of Pauline Theology). Thus we could say that Bell and Golden are attempting to turn some of that Welsh grape juice into vintage wine in this little book, or perhaps we should envisage the process the other way around, since Holland’s is the more technical scholarly work, and this book more the distillation and clarification. But let the buyer beware--- anyone brave enough to take on and milk the All American sacred cows of greed and sex are bound to get to some other nice little non-controversial golden calves like ‘Christians and politics, or Christians and war’, or Christians and social justice, or Christians and the oppressed and the poor-- right? Right.
One of the things I immediately resonate with about this book is its attempt to do theology out of the Grand Narrative or meta-narrative of the Bible. This is precisely what I have been arguing for, for a long time even when it comes to more didactic material such as Paul’s letters (see e.g. my Paul’s Narrative Thought World). What we discover pretty quickly in the first chapter is that this book is more than just a theological exercise by young theologians (to borrow a phrase from Helmut Thielicke’s classic little guide), it is something of a social manifesto, a probing of the necessary socio-political implications of the Gospel. Writing this is of course either a brave or a foolhardy thing to do in schizophrenic America which actually thinks you can keep religion and politics (and church and state) in hermetically sealed off comports in one’s brain, ones town, and one’s nation, and never the twain should meet. In short, this book comes at precisely the right time (due out October) in the latest political cycle of things.
The book begins with a retelling of the tragic tale of Cain and Abel which gives the authors the opportunity to suggest that this story is about all of us—somewhere East of Eden, trying to build a city and a civilization outside of Paradise and in a fallen world. Ain’t it the truth. But this book is especially about the indigenization of human falleness in America particularly, and how our behavior as an Empire, in some ways much like the Roman Empire, is a particular manifestation of what is deeply wrong with human society, something which is more like the behavior of Cain, than Abel.
One of the roots of the problem in America is pointed out at the very outset of the book is put in these terms—“A Christian should get very nervous when the flag and the cross start holding hands. This is not a romance we want to encourage”(p. 18). Indeed, if pushed far enough it becomes a form of idolatry, the ultimate fallen behavior. And of course Bell and Golden are right. When you are spending a trillion dollars in Iraq and untold billions here in America for Homeland In-Security, and invest 50 billion in one plane with helicopter features as a ‘better weapon of mass destruction’ and of course it still is not making us safe, indeed it makes us feel less secure in many cases not more, isn’t it time to ask—Is fear or faith dictating our dominant national behavior in such matters? What’s wrong with this picture from a Christian point of view? At least Bell and Golden are brave enough to ask the right questions about all of this, even though doubtless they are going to be slammed as unpatriotic, rather like Jews were by the Roman Empire when they refused to worship at the altars of the Emperor cult.
And interestingly, quoting Colin Powell no less they put their finger on it early on: “The only thing that can destroy us is us. We shouldn’t do it to ourselves, and we shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex”
(Colin Powell in interview in GQ October 2007 http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_5900).
I knew I liked that Colin Powell. With this opening salvo, Bell and Golden turn to a retelling of our story, our meta-narrative, the story of salvation history.
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