A few weeks ago I posted on the willingness of seeker-driven churches to be evangelistically offensive, whenever it helps them to achieve their pragmatic aims. Recently a city newspaper published a protest about another church that we are familiar with, and who was willing to put aside advertising ethics in order to "get results". It's a set of billboards designed to bait people into attending a series of parenting sermons, but once again - the church's advertising methods don't seem to be very well thought-out. In fact, the author of the newspaper article referred to the billboards as offensive. As we've seen before however, this is not the biblical "offense of the cross" that the Apostle Paul talked about, it's just the offense of another bad marketing campaign.
The author of this piece seems to know a thing or two about advertising, being that he's an Associate Professor of Communication at Anderson University. He also lives in the neighborhood of this church, and his family is subjected to seeing these signs on a regular basis. Here's what he had to say in the October 26 edition of the Anderson Independent-Mail Newspaper:
Newspaper Article: Church Billboards Offend Local Resident
Earlier this month, the image of a teenage girl with her shirt pulled provocatively down from her shoulder appeared on a billboard on Clemson Boulevard, offering to tell anyone who would listen about the birds and the bees. Drivers are encouraged to visit a Web site (ParentsAreClueless.com) to find out more, apparently for a salacious teenage version of the facts of life.
Elsewhere in Anderson, another billboard shows a bratty second-grader announcing that she calls the shots at her home. Yet another features an angry-looking mom standing back to back with her adolescent daughter, next to the question, "I put my career on hold for this?"
Who would want to share such a dour view of parenthood with our community? It's not obvious from the billboards, but it's our city's largest church, NewSpring Community Church, pastored by Perry Noble. The publicity campaign is intended to attract people to a six-week series on parenting.
Attracting new customers is usually a good idea, whether you're a church or a business. Most businesses have ethical limits on how they construct their marketing campaigns. There's little evidence the planners at NewSpring were thinking much about ethics when they dreamed up this misfire.
For a church that's about to tell people how to deal with their kids, Pastor Noble and his team demonstrate little understanding of, or maybe just little care for, how children respond to advertising. Consider that the government's continuing regulation of tobacco advertising (Joe Camel, for example) is based on the assumption that children don't read advertising the same way that adults do. Children don't distinguish between fact and fantasy, between truth and irony, the same way adults do. Did anyone at NewSpring think about how children would read those ads?
We're exposed to thousands of advertising messages every day, so it's impossible to act on many of them at all. Almost all of the people who see the anti-family billboards will never visit the associated Website, so they're left with a senseless and depressing assault on parenthood by angry, oversexed and bratty kids.
But that's the good news. If you dare to visit the associated Website, the picture gets even worse. NewSpring offers parents and kids a chance to publish anonymous confessions, which from the outset turned the site into a cesspool of rebellious threats and taunts. Children angrily accuse their fathers of being perverts. Young kids brag about sexual misadventures that their parents don't know about. The content on the site is bad, but don't blame rogue Internet writers for the voyeuristic dirt on display there. Instructions on the site make clear that church staff approve everything before it's posted.
Confession can be good for the soul, but usually only when it's matched with repentance. Anonymous public in-your-face "confessions" are something beneath even Jerry Springer. What would Jesus do? Not this.
Parents remain clueless about their kids' anger and problems. Troubled kids stoke their anger without any resolution. Is confession going to stop these kids from engaging in dangerous romantic liaisons? Very unlikely. Who is going to help them? Probably no one.
So who does this help? Possibly only Mr. Noble.
The whole point of this provocative campaign is to get bodies through the doors of his church. To the extent that that actually works, and that needy families are helped, good for him and good for them.
To the extent that the campaign doesn't work, however, it amounts to child exploitation and neglect in the name of church attendance. Most of the people who leave their confessions on the Web site are unlikely to attend any of Mr. Noble's sermons. There is no positive message on the billboards. There are only scattered positive confessions on the Web site, as well a linked ad that takes visitors to a page announcing the sermon series. The picture of the family that NewSpring has chosen to present to the world is desperately bleak.
Most families who drive past the billboards are offered nothing but pessimism. This campaign is going to create a significant amount of collateral damage that Perry Noble will never see, and is unlikely to have to take responsibility for.
It's selfish. It's arrogant. It's unchristian.
Though that's not a complaint that's likely to bother Mr. Noble, who has repeatedly disowned the term "Christian." He announced on his blog recently that he doesn't want his newborn daughter to grow up to marry a "nice Christian boy." "Christian" was the adjective that so offended this church leader that it made him want to punch said future boy in the throat.
Perry Noble is rapidly becoming a national leader of a powerful contemporary movement that is effectively seeking to redefine traditional Christianity. These churches, variously referred to as seeker-sensitive, purpose-driven and emergent, blend whatever-floats-your-boat postmodernism and modern marketing theories with high-tech, high-energy media presentations. It's the Bible brought to you by MTV and Starbucks.
Mr. Noble's approach has brought results that most churches would envy. His local services routinely draw 7,500 people, and attendance is growing at an annual rate of around 35 percent. A national church magazine recently ranked it in the top 20 fastest-growing churches in the nation. NewSpring just raised more than $13 million in donations for an ambitious program that will, in part, begin to franchise the church around the state, starting with a satellite campus in Greenville.
Undoubtedly, Mr. Noble's church has been a benefit to our community. All the NewSpring members I know have a passion for serving Jesus, helping others and improving our community.
For all the hands-on work that NewSpring and its members excel at, it would be nice if its leadership team could limit their media-induced damage. While a television-based style has helped NewSpring-type churches make their services more exciting, their leaders also have adopted the reality-TV ethic of attracting people by offering more and more outlandish stunts. As happens in television, once they get your attention with one outrage, the next one has to be even bigger to keep it.
Visit the blogs of any of these new-style church pastors (Mr. Noble, Steven Furtick, Gary Lamb, for example), and you'll see repeated examples of this raise-the-stakes mindset. "Wow, can you believe we did that in church today! Wait until you see what we have in store for you next week!!!" One day a pastor is going to get naked (a trajectory that Mr. Noble has implicitly acknowledged on his own blog).
Thankfully, we've not been subjected to naked pastors yet, but these new-style churches are not beyond inflicting nakedness on their communities. NewSpring has yet to do it, but similar churches in Georgia and Tennessee have outraged their communities by posting billboards of naked couples (with strategically placed sheets) engaged in very intimate activities. [See Old Truth post]
If these were ads displayed by a local sex shop, we'd be livid. When a church does it, it's no less problematic. Ethics do matter, especially in church advertising.
What Perry Noble says in his church is largely his business. When he says it on Clemson Boulevard and Mall Road, it becomes my business.
Mr. Noble, I don't like the way you do business. Please take down your billboards and leave my family and me alone.
Be sure to visit the source article and read some of the comments at the bottom of that page; also visit that church's "confession page" to read what the kids and parents are saying about each other. Aside from being yet another example of today's "what God can do for you" therapeutic gospel, this is just one more case of a pragmatic church being willing to put aside acceptable standards of ethics that even the world recognizes.
When churches pull these stunts, they loose credibility with the very same community that they are targeting for evangelism. As we saw in the earlier offensive marketing post on Old Truth, so often the church's response to this kind of criticism is: "so what if we offend a bunch of people, just as long as we get enough of the others through the doors". It's an offense, but not the offense of the Cross.
The author of this piece seems to know a thing or two about advertising, being that he's an Associate Professor of Communication at Anderson University. He also lives in the neighborhood of this church, and his family is subjected to seeing these signs on a regular basis. Here's what he had to say in the October 26 edition of the Anderson Independent-Mail Newspaper:
Newspaper Article: Church Billboards Offend Local Resident
Earlier this month, the image of a teenage girl with her shirt pulled provocatively down from her shoulder appeared on a billboard on Clemson Boulevard, offering to tell anyone who would listen about the birds and the bees. Drivers are encouraged to visit a Web site (ParentsAreClueless.com) to find out more, apparently for a salacious teenage version of the facts of life.
Elsewhere in Anderson, another billboard shows a bratty second-grader announcing that she calls the shots at her home. Yet another features an angry-looking mom standing back to back with her adolescent daughter, next to the question, "I put my career on hold for this?"
Who would want to share such a dour view of parenthood with our community? It's not obvious from the billboards, but it's our city's largest church, NewSpring Community Church, pastored by Perry Noble. The publicity campaign is intended to attract people to a six-week series on parenting.
Attracting new customers is usually a good idea, whether you're a church or a business. Most businesses have ethical limits on how they construct their marketing campaigns. There's little evidence the planners at NewSpring were thinking much about ethics when they dreamed up this misfire.
For a church that's about to tell people how to deal with their kids, Pastor Noble and his team demonstrate little understanding of, or maybe just little care for, how children respond to advertising. Consider that the government's continuing regulation of tobacco advertising (Joe Camel, for example) is based on the assumption that children don't read advertising the same way that adults do. Children don't distinguish between fact and fantasy, between truth and irony, the same way adults do. Did anyone at NewSpring think about how children would read those ads?
We're exposed to thousands of advertising messages every day, so it's impossible to act on many of them at all. Almost all of the people who see the anti-family billboards will never visit the associated Website, so they're left with a senseless and depressing assault on parenthood by angry, oversexed and bratty kids.
But that's the good news. If you dare to visit the associated Website, the picture gets even worse. NewSpring offers parents and kids a chance to publish anonymous confessions, which from the outset turned the site into a cesspool of rebellious threats and taunts. Children angrily accuse their fathers of being perverts. Young kids brag about sexual misadventures that their parents don't know about. The content on the site is bad, but don't blame rogue Internet writers for the voyeuristic dirt on display there. Instructions on the site make clear that church staff approve everything before it's posted.
Confession can be good for the soul, but usually only when it's matched with repentance. Anonymous public in-your-face "confessions" are something beneath even Jerry Springer. What would Jesus do? Not this.
Parents remain clueless about their kids' anger and problems. Troubled kids stoke their anger without any resolution. Is confession going to stop these kids from engaging in dangerous romantic liaisons? Very unlikely. Who is going to help them? Probably no one.
So who does this help? Possibly only Mr. Noble.
The whole point of this provocative campaign is to get bodies through the doors of his church. To the extent that that actually works, and that needy families are helped, good for him and good for them.
To the extent that the campaign doesn't work, however, it amounts to child exploitation and neglect in the name of church attendance. Most of the people who leave their confessions on the Web site are unlikely to attend any of Mr. Noble's sermons. There is no positive message on the billboards. There are only scattered positive confessions on the Web site, as well a linked ad that takes visitors to a page announcing the sermon series. The picture of the family that NewSpring has chosen to present to the world is desperately bleak.
Most families who drive past the billboards are offered nothing but pessimism. This campaign is going to create a significant amount of collateral damage that Perry Noble will never see, and is unlikely to have to take responsibility for.
It's selfish. It's arrogant. It's unchristian.
Though that's not a complaint that's likely to bother Mr. Noble, who has repeatedly disowned the term "Christian." He announced on his blog recently that he doesn't want his newborn daughter to grow up to marry a "nice Christian boy." "Christian" was the adjective that so offended this church leader that it made him want to punch said future boy in the throat.
Perry Noble is rapidly becoming a national leader of a powerful contemporary movement that is effectively seeking to redefine traditional Christianity. These churches, variously referred to as seeker-sensitive, purpose-driven and emergent, blend whatever-floats-your-boat postmodernism and modern marketing theories with high-tech, high-energy media presentations. It's the Bible brought to you by MTV and Starbucks.
Mr. Noble's approach has brought results that most churches would envy. His local services routinely draw 7,500 people, and attendance is growing at an annual rate of around 35 percent. A national church magazine recently ranked it in the top 20 fastest-growing churches in the nation. NewSpring just raised more than $13 million in donations for an ambitious program that will, in part, begin to franchise the church around the state, starting with a satellite campus in Greenville.
Undoubtedly, Mr. Noble's church has been a benefit to our community. All the NewSpring members I know have a passion for serving Jesus, helping others and improving our community.
For all the hands-on work that NewSpring and its members excel at, it would be nice if its leadership team could limit their media-induced damage. While a television-based style has helped NewSpring-type churches make their services more exciting, their leaders also have adopted the reality-TV ethic of attracting people by offering more and more outlandish stunts. As happens in television, once they get your attention with one outrage, the next one has to be even bigger to keep it.
Visit the blogs of any of these new-style church pastors (Mr. Noble, Steven Furtick, Gary Lamb, for example), and you'll see repeated examples of this raise-the-stakes mindset. "Wow, can you believe we did that in church today! Wait until you see what we have in store for you next week!!!" One day a pastor is going to get naked (a trajectory that Mr. Noble has implicitly acknowledged on his own blog).
Thankfully, we've not been subjected to naked pastors yet, but these new-style churches are not beyond inflicting nakedness on their communities. NewSpring has yet to do it, but similar churches in Georgia and Tennessee have outraged their communities by posting billboards of naked couples (with strategically placed sheets) engaged in very intimate activities. [See Old Truth post]
If these were ads displayed by a local sex shop, we'd be livid. When a church does it, it's no less problematic. Ethics do matter, especially in church advertising.
What Perry Noble says in his church is largely his business. When he says it on Clemson Boulevard and Mall Road, it becomes my business.
Mr. Noble, I don't like the way you do business. Please take down your billboards and leave my family and me alone.
Be sure to visit the source article and read some of the comments at the bottom of that page; also visit that church's "confession page" to read what the kids and parents are saying about each other. Aside from being yet another example of today's "what God can do for you" therapeutic gospel, this is just one more case of a pragmatic church being willing to put aside acceptable standards of ethics that even the world recognizes.
When churches pull these stunts, they loose credibility with the very same community that they are targeting for evangelism. As we saw in the earlier offensive marketing post on Old Truth, so often the church's response to this kind of criticism is: "so what if we offend a bunch of people, just as long as we get enough of the others through the doors". It's an offense, but not the offense of the Cross.
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