The Poor Selling of Salvation 2

I wrote a piece on my views about how we set our stalls as churches, and drew the parallel between church life and how that translated into a retail experience. My hope was that it represented a poor experience for the visitor, born of far too much presumption. If you fancy a read, here is the link.

In a comment made about the post (to my face), it was said that it closed too early, and I acknowledge that there is more that can be said, and perhaps should be. Thanks for to Stuart over at eChurch Christian Blog for inspiring me today with his article on IKEA and the mean means that they use to get you to buy their buyable bits and bobs! Again, visit him here - it is a good read!

Retailers have a fairly complex science that is designed to get you in, make you stay, buy more and then come back. Terms like 'units per transaction [UPT]', 'average transaction value [ATV]', 'key performance indicators [KPI]', 'loss-leading lines', and so on. Add to that background music that is not at all accidental, and is, in fact geared to mimic the desired heart-beat of the 'desirable' customer, and you have a Palace of Manipulation. That is retail, it always was, do not be upset. 

In short, a retailer's best endeavour is to convince their customer to increase their UPT. They achieve this by arranging their stores in a very specific way (IKEA being a fine example of this done well). You do the work for them - you pick up items you didn't come in to buy. In other establishments, the more sales-orientated ones (furniture, flooring, electrical, vehicle), it is less likely that serendipity will increase their UPT, so a KPI for the sales-staff (and often a way that they are rewarded) is simply to ask you to buy something else as well as the thing to came in to buy. You will not buy a carpet without being asked for your underlay needs. You will not buy a car without being asked about warranties. And so on. In increased UPT will drive up the ATV, and with add-on sales being the more lucrative for the retailer (and what we really want you to buy if we are honest), the margin (profit) increases exponentially. In my retail life, I was the expert at maximising gross-margin - a less than noble claim, perhaps!

If I remove the language of commerce and profit, I believe that there is some mileage in this mindset being applied to the prize on our own stalls: The Lord Jesus Christ, son of God. We are not in the business off selling, of course, but we are in the market (in part) for making disciples and hoping that they stay and become loyal. We are here to enhance the experience, meet needs with the benefits on offer, commend the experience - and we always hope to know if that was a worthy experience and learn from failures. The same as retail in any form.

If we take the 'belong, believe, behave' model of Christian discipleship - there is a direct parellel between discipleship and commercial enterprise. When we open our churches, they should grab people off of the streets - and this can be done in many ways. Darkness, closed doors, no 'staff', emptiness - all these things are barriers. Locked doors can never be entered, if it indeed it needed saying. Many people will come into our churches without a 'master plan' to do so. Life brings them in to our communities and places of worship - so we have to be focussed on what enhances the experience and encourages a lengthier stay. Then the next visit, and then the third. Increasing the quality of the experience will add value to the visit for the person in question (their transaction value,in other words?). We meet their needs, by the way - not tell them what their needs are! If we are blessed, and they identify a reason to stay and not frequent the competition, they will become more and more involved in the life we would then share (doing more, units per transaction, perhaps). 

This is not intended to be a needless contortion of two distinct worlds. I have learned much from retailing, and believe it has much to offer church life. If all Christians paid the same quality of attention to newcomers as sales-staff do in stores (irrespective of motivation), then our churches would be filled to capacity, and then some. I could write more, but this post is ample enough!

Men and the Church Part 1

There have been rumblings on this blog about being a man in the church, and how tough it is at times. This may come as some surprise to those of you won over by the notion that 'discriminating-Church' is a male dominated domain. Yes, it might be male led, but it is a long way from male dominated. Church life, on the ground, is a very matriarchal enterprise believe it or not, and us men are rarer than a rare-beast's Welsh rare bits.

Last weekend I indulged myself with a whine about it all, and quite rightly, someone made the challenge about how I would attend to the shortage of men  in our church life. I am going to meet that challenge over a number of posts. 

As it is all the rage to articulate cogent thought in terms of mnemonic acronyms, I am opting to make DISCIPLES of men in the church. Apart from  the original concern as offered above, I have been grumpy about an offering on this subject that will make its appearance some time in February. For clarity, I think it is a worthy course of work, tackling a tough issue up-front and I wish it every success. I am grumpy because of its labels ('un-churched' and 'de-churched' are pejorative in the extreme and evoke terms like 'unwashed' and 'deloused' - to me) and also because I offered to help with it a long time ago, and am still waiting for the call! Anyway - these are my motivation for writing. 

So, regard this as the contents page to this thread - I will work with it for a few days.

D - dropping labels, differences, distinctions, difficulties

I - involvement and how

S - spiritual dimension of men, stalking targets

C - community and committing, church and children 

I - individuals and image

P - pub and places, problem, what problem? poor-selling of salvation

L - listening for the right reasons

E - enablement, enthusing, exceptions

S - settling down, seeing it through

Naturally, other things will emerge that do not fit my neat pattern here. I will wang them in somewhere, don't you worry. Chief among them would be 'trying too hard', and it is that facet of such efforts mentioned above that I worry about. That is for later. I think that this area of thinking is sparsely populated, and this will, of course, be only my perspective. It will be a perspective born of some difficult facts hidden in my past, a long time in a job that I didn't love so the bills could be paid, a work history in retail and a business skill-set, normal and healthy male appetites and weaknesses, having a young family and caring for their needs, and a simple love for God (not to mention lumpy testicles, being the at dead centre of the target age bracket for target-heathen-geezers, oh, and being male). I believe that this all qualifies me to write on subject. So I will.