What We Won’t
It’s important to decide what you aren’t. If you don’t decide what you aren’t, you’ll cave into ease, peer pressure, or popularity. Your integrity is one thing that you can’t buy, and is easy to lose. I was watching a marketing talk about this, and I think it’s so important for you as an individual, and for your church or ministry to decide what you’re not.
What We Won’t
We won’t sacrifice the truth for relevance.
The truth of the Gospel trumps being relevant to listeners everytime. All people come to hear you with sin in their hearts, and they will be repulsed by the truth of scripture. (Romans 8:7-8) A pastor may look cool, or have a ton of followers, and unknowingly lead a parade straight to hell.
We won’t sacrifice relevance for tradition.
Religion is based on tradition, and the Bible almost never speaks of religion in a positive way (except James 1:27). There is nothing wrong with tradition, but if we care more about tradition than people hearing about Jesus in a way they can understand, we’ve made our traditions an idol—and you know what God does to idols.
We won’t sacrifice tradition for laziness.
Traditions can be a great thing. A way of realizing that the saints before us preached the Gospel of Jesus so that we could hear. They put great thought into making the worship of God meaningful. We aren’t going to write that off out of conviniance, but only if it hinders the spreading of the Gospel.
3 Responses to “What We Won’t”
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I couldn’t agree more
I love that…very well written. I think the common misconception about us creative, media types is that we want to turn church into some sort of flashy production or concert and let the Bible take a back-seat to our lights and videos.
Thankfully there are people like you who do amazing design work and use your gifts and talents to help the church remain on the cutting edge of culture without watering down their message.
I think even churches need to be reminded that media and graphics alone are not the answer. They’re only a tool. After all, didn’t Jesus say something like
…or something like that.
Great post.
Brad Ruggles
http://www.bradruggles.com
Thanks Brad, That common misconception that your talking about- depending on flashy graphics and services actually happens way more than we’d like. And like the Blues Brothers, we are on a mission from God, though ours is to glorify God through art. We want to give churches all over the country a theological and practical framework and example for how to use art and even marketing to praise God.
Mike Anderson