Christians in every age have pondered how to reach lost people with the good news of God’s kingdom. They adopted methods as diverse as preaching in marketplaces, visiting door to door, and even carving the figures of great Bible stories on the altarpieces of cathedrals so that the illiterate could see what they couldn’t read. The mandate to disciple and evangelize assumes a wise and creative Christian community that looks for appropriate ways to interest others in the salvation story that focuses on Jesus.
This search for new methods to share the gospel has particularly intensified during the past 50 years as media options for telling the story of Jesus have increased exponentially. In addition to diversity of social media tools, Web sites, and digital platforms, many Christians—and many Adventists—have increasingly turned to the world of advertising to learn the secrets of successful selling. Certainly those who have made millions selling us sports cars and toothpaste and luxury vacations can teach us something about how to package and present the gospel to a media-saturated world.
Or can they? Do the scientific, social analysis tools employed by Madison Avenue to sample our tastes and detect our preferences actually improve our opportunities for soul winning?
Let’s consider a real-life marketing situation in order to assess the value of Madison Avenue techniques for the proclamation of the gospel.
Building a Better Cashew
For many years my wife and I ran a major food company that sold cashews. Our goal, naturally, was to sell as many cashews as possible. We set about to develop products that would match the taste of every conceivable marketing group. We wanted to sell cashews to every nation, kindred, tongue, and people.
Consequently, we set out to re-develop the cashew. We sugar-coated cashews, honey-coated cashews, spiced cashews with cinnamon, flavored cashews with savory seasonings, and finally developed a honey-coated cinnamon-and-amaretto-flavored milk-chocolate-covered cashew!
It didn’t matter from our perspective that this product had very little resemblance to the original cashew. Our goal was sales, to reach as many people as possible, to sell as much as we could. We were looking for a lens through which to see the cashews, a perspective that would create a product that would sell a cashew product acceptable—even desirable—in every market. We wanted the power of the best possible marketing strategy, a designer cashew for every person. In order to do that, we reconstructed the product.
Perhaps you can see where I am heading in this story out of my own business experience.
Sometimes, in what we think of as a righteous enthusiasm to help God out in the proclamation of the gospel, we have been tempted to ask questions about the kind of God our hearers might prefer, as though He were an adaptable commodity whose essentials or features can be adjusted to local tastes. Sometimes, sadly, we have even engineered a “designer god”—a god we can sell, a god who can be marketed.
We say we want to make God “look good,” by which we often mean an attempt to cleanse His image of anything that would embarrass us. We don’t want to have to apologize for Him, or for His deeds or words that may not go down smoothly with our hearers. We want our God to be attractive, upbeat, and appealing, and so we look for the right lens through which to see Him, the right perspective from which to study, justify, and present Him.
When we understand the goal as selling a message that will produce the results that make us feel good, we want a god we can sell, a god that has marketing appeal for each nation, kindred, tongue, and people. The god we then create looks much more like a mirror image of the highest ideals of each society to which we are communicating than the God revealed in the pages of Scripture and in the life of Jesus Christ.
The Age of “Designer Gods”
Marketing strategies—which have become increasingly common in the selling of the gospel—tell us that we should carefully analyze the culture we are trying to reach, study its preferences and tastes, and develop a moral perspective congenial to that culture within which to reinterpret Him.
In a society dominated by platonic thought, we develop a platonic faith in a platonic god.
In an age of rationalism, we fashion a god who conforms to the dictates of human reason.
As idealism wanes, a pragmatic god is required for a pragmatic culture.
In the context of scientific empiricism, we develop a god who is analyzed by critical methods, and restricted to what we can touch, see, hear, or have previously experienced.
The existential god offered to late-twentieth-century society transcends and answers the limits of the structure of human existence.
In a postmodern world we create a god who is in the process of developing, of growing, and is therefore not definitive for anything except the process itself. As with other worldviews, in this postmodern world we feel that we have a right to a god who conforms to our notion of truth, logic, love, freedom, justice, time, the future, and so on. And if that god does not fit, we find another god with a better profile.
Thus we create “designer gods” who are marketable, not just to groups, but to specific individuals. The menu of divinities we offer surely has something to attract the interest of the discriminating potential believer, we say to ourselves. The common denominator of each of these gods is that none of them will embarrass us: these are divinities we can love, admire, respect, worship, and justify in harmony with the dictates of our culture. We now have our honey-coated, cinnamon-and amoretto-flavored milk-chocolate-covered god. And if the culture responds positively, if “sales” are good, we bask in the warm light of popular respect. We can be proud to present these gods on the table of the society in which we proclaim the gospel.
These are the gods of Madison Avenue. Each has been designed and rationalized for a specific culture, and in the right context, each will sell.
The gods of Madison Avenue have always tempted us.
Resisting Deception
The first recorded earthly appearance of one of these divinities was in Eden, animating the serpent who spoke to Eve from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Is God—the God who created and sustains—really who He says He is? Are His laws immutable; is His character unchangeable? Or can I find gods more congenial to this setting? What do these new gods have to say about obedience and disobedience, life and death?
Israel followed the gods of Madison Avenue back into the wilderness for 40 years. In a moment of almost unbelievable apostasy, Moses’ own brother, Aaron, fashioned and shaped the golden calf god from the trinkets his people brought him, substituting a glittering image in the camp for the awesome Deity who encountered Moses on the mountain.
In His second temptation in the wilderness, Jesus also met one of the gods of Madison Avenue atop the pinnacle of the Temple. This god spared no effort to flatter Him, drawing on what he assumed would be Jesus’ natural desire for popular success. “Imagine,” he no doubt urged, “the advertising splash of stepping off the pinnacle and gently floating down to a waiting audience.” Yet Christ resisted by saying, “I will live instead by the Word of God.”
The religious leaders at the time of Jesus didn’t—wouldn’t—recognize Him as the Messiah because He spoke and acted so differently from the god they sought to worship. Blinded by heady dreams of glory and popular success, they rejected the Man of sorrows because they imposed their frame upon the prophecies that told of His coming. Eyes alight with other dreams, they didn’t honor Him when He came.
The church of the Dark and Middle Ages quite naturally desired to make Christianity attractive to the pagan culture in which it had been planted. It argued that contemporary philosophies provided the perfect method of showcasing God so that He could become acceptable to the heathen. The church, as it were, bowed down to the Madison Avenue of its day rather than submitting to the revealed will of God in the Word of God. Taking the gospel into its own hands, it refashioned the good news to appeal to the pagans of the age. That “success” has haunted the Christian church ever since; the errors then introduced have proved nearly ineradicable.
The temptation is always for the clay to take the potter into its own grasp. It is to tell God that He needs counsel in the shaping of His creation, and that if He is just patient, we will determine what will make Him look His best, and coach Him on how to carry out His rulership of the universe.
When our mission and our outreach take the Madison Avenue approach to proclamation of the God of the gospel, they inevitably substitute a worldly wisdom and power for that of the Word of God.
Our Commission
It is not our job to market God. Christ has given us the mission of proclaiming Him, even the role of ambassadors for His kingdom—but not the job of selling Him through clever techniques or well-timed advertising. Unlike the honey-?coated cinnamon-??and-?amaretto-flavored milk-chocolate-covered cashew, this product is not one we create.
It seems superfluous to say that we cannot create God, nor do we have the job of managing His image. My character or behavior as His follower may invalidate my claim to belong to Him, but He is not in any way changed by my efforts or mistakes. God is who He is and has always been, the great I AM. God is the great given of all reality, the one supremely given in the person of Jesus Christ. He presents Himself, and He declares that before Him there can be no other gods.
The gospel, Paul asserted, was foolishness to the Greeks, who wanted to create and contain God by the power of their wisdom, by their philosophy. The gospel was also a stumbling block to the Jews, who wanted to test God incarnate by coercing Him to perform miracles to establish His authenticity. By contrast, Paul placed his faith in the power of the Word of God (1 Cor. 15:1, 2; Rom. 1:16; 1 Thess. 1:5; Heb. 4:12).
The gospel itself is just what we need; and despite our misgivings about how it might be received in this or that market quadrant, it continues to have enormous attractive power simply because it was designed by God Himself. The key elements of His plan are clear:
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Cor. 5:17).
“If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater; for this is the witness of God which He has testified of His Son. He who believes in the Son of God has the witness in himself; he who does not believe God has made Him a liar, because he has not believed the testimony that God has given of His Son. And this is the testimony: that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life” (1 John 5:9-12).
“And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding, that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life” (verse 20).
“Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life” (John 5:24).
Every firm on Madison Avenue would love to have the power and persuasiveness of this message. And we already have it in our hands. There is no reason to apologize to anyone for the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. If we hear His Word, and believe in Him, we and all those who heed our testimony will have eternal life!
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1Texts in this article are from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
2 Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages, p. 176.
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E. Edward Zinke is a member of ASI and serves as senior advisor to Adventist Review magazine. This article was published August 11, 2011.
