Classy

by MW Cook

Talking with a co-worker today who’s into sales and marketing. He’s been doing some courses about it and working out the strategies for promoting whatever product or services you need to promote. He was trying to explain the intricacies of how to get your market to want to buy whatever you’re selling. A lot of it was going over my head. All sorts of stuff about the four Ps of this and the eight Rs of that. Stuff about how all your sales guys need to take this course and that training and read these books. It seemed pretty complicated. He made it sound like if you don’t have eight years of classes and books behind you, you’ll probably not be able to sell anything.

And I was wondering amid it all, what about the product? Wouldn’t it be easier just to have a killer product that everyone would want and tell them about it? I dunno, maybe I’m being overly-simplistic or naive. But do we really need all these courses and conferences to sell stuff? I guess they might come in handy if we’re trying to sell something that’s no good. But I don’t know why I would try selling something that’s no good. Why sell it?

And this brought my thinking around to Jesus. I skim a lot of Christian blogs. I hear about a lot of Christian courses, book and conferences. And sometimes I can’t help but wonder, when does the rubber hit the road?

I have a neat dream. What if, instead of reading missionary books and debating contextualization and community living and stuff like that, what if we just did it. Quietly. Prayerfully. Powerfully.

I ain’t against conferences. Heck, I’m trying to help promote one. Conferences are neat. Bible colleges are neat. If it wasn’t for KLBC I may never have woken up as much as I have. But we can’t stay there. I would have loved to just hang out at Bible college all my life, just spending all my time reading, writing and complaining about how lukewarm the mainstream church is.

But the point of the college and conferences and books and seminars is to get you OUT. Guys, we KNOW this stuff by now, don’t we? And even if we don’t, we should at least know Jesus enough to show people that he’s something they ought to check out.

Our rubber is too often spinning in the garage.