Don't you just love it when strangers
hand you stuff on the street? That great, cheap, Christian tradition
of making more trash by giving away pieces of paper that will be tossed
away as quickly as we can hand them out. There is a story of a guy who
was handing out literature to passerby, only to watch them wad up the
papers and chuck them into the gutter. Frustrated, he decided he'd save
them the trouble: he began to crumple up the flyers himself before handing
them out. As the story goes, people were suddenly intrigued by the man's
message and carefully uncrumpled the pages before reading them with interest
....
The lesson here is not about guerrilla marketing and how much more
effective a crumpled flyer is. It’s that people are tired of
being bombarded with impersonal, unimpressive, seemingly impotent
information. We sympathize.
Christian marketing can be pretty strange.
But there is no question that people who have had an authentic encounter
with God are compelled by that experience to share their story
with others. God has changed some pretty awful people (some we
know intimately,
if
you know what we mean) into people on the way to a kind of glory.
Strange that it is so hard to communicate that change. What would
it be like
to really put into words the experience and the effect of meeting
God? But we try, and people run for their lives. This is also strange.
After
all, you can doubt the authenticity of a story, but doubt doesn't
really explain why some people so passionately avoid exploring
the claims of
Christians.
And we Christians can't get away from the fact that we want to
propagate our faith: we're guilty as charged. We want to infect
the world with
the Good Disease. No question. You are not safe from our desire
to see you saved from a life without God. We may try to be respectful,
not invade
your space, you know ... let you be. But we really don't want
to let you be. Sorry. You have every right to wad this up and chuck
it in the
gutter, but we want you to get that it is worth the humiliation
for
us to hand it to you, because we believe what we're saying. Strange
but
true.