pat loughery

Well, not directly, but hang in there.

Seth Godin, a very insightful and quick-hitting writer on the topic of modern creative marketing, wrote an entry in his (fantastic) blog yesterday that hits close to home for those of us interested in demonstrating and telling the story of God in our time.

I’ll quote the whole blog entry here, and make some comments below. I highly recommend that you subscribe to Seth’s blog or read some of his books if you’re at all interested in audience perception (whether for the church, your business or art, social dynamics, …).

Seth writes:

I got more mail about this story in the Washington Post than any other non-blog topic ever. I saw it when it first came out, but didn’t blog it because I thought the lesson was pretty obvious to my readers. [World-class violinist plays for hours in a subway station, almost no one stops to listen]. The experiment just proved what we already know about context, permission and worldview. If your worldview is that music in the subway isn’t worth your time, you’re not going to notice when the music is better than usual (or when a famous violinist is playing). It doesn’t match the story you tell yourself, so you ignore it. Without permission to get through to you, the marketer/violinist is invisible.

But why all the mail? (And the Post got plenty too). Answer: I think it’s because people realized that if they had been there, they would have done the same thing. And it bothers us.

It bothers us that we’re so overwhelmed by the din of our lives that we’ve created a worldview that requires us to ignore the outside world, most of the time, even when we suffer because of it. It made me feel a little smaller, knowing that something so beautiful was ignored because the marketers among us have created so much noise and so little trust.

I don’t think the answer is to yell louder. Instead, I think we have an opportunity to create beauty and genius and insight and offer it in ways that train people to maybe, just maybe, loosen up those worldviews and begin the trust.

Check out that story. Just the finish, even. Instead, I think we have an opportunity to create beauty and genius and insight and offer it in ways that train people to maybe, just maybe, loosen up those worldviews and begin the trust.

A friend of mine uses a great term when he’s talking about the challenge to contemporary Christians who want to be disciples of Jesus, and who want to share our story with others: Americans are innoculated against the gospel. They think they know what it is, and they think they’ve checked it off their list, and there’s nothing else to do. Eighty percent of Americans self-identify as Christians; 45% of Americans find it morally acceptable to abort a child. Perhaps these dilemmas aren’t really dilemmas at all; perhaps we see Christianity simply as being innoculated against ‘going to hell when I die’.

I personally believe that the story of God’s involvement in humanity, culminating in the person and life of Jesus, and his life in us here and now, is much like the world-class violinist playing on a multimillion dollar instrument in a rundown subway station. It’s deceptively beautiful and simple; we think we should only expect to find the story of God in the right building on a Sunday (temple or church), and that’s where it belongs.

This brings us to the point of Incarnation – the first biological entry of God into humanity, the enfleshment of God in the person of Jesus, born to a carpenter and a young girl in a backwoods town in a backwoods state. This little data point provides us hints that the story of God isn’t only sung in the concert halls. It’s sung in the ghettoes and the taverns and the farmhouses and the suburban cul-de-sacs, as well as the concert halls. The story plays everywhere.

The story is told, as we’ve been told enough times to inoculate us against hearing it, in our lives. In our everyday interactions; in how we deal with issues of greed and power and sexual identity and workplace interactions. We carry the story of God in our human interactions. We carry, as St. Paul said years ago, a treasure of incomparable worth surrounded by ordinary clay pots. We’re not the point of the treasure; we’re the bearers of the message and its impact in our lives.

I don’t think the answer is to yell louder. Instead, I think we have an opportunity to create beauty and genius and insight and offer it in ways that train people to maybe, just maybe, loosen up those worldviews and begin the trust.

Amen, Seth. As it is for marketing Cheetos, so may it be for the hope of God.