Semantics and the noise of this World

An anonymous comment came in this morning when second service was starting, about one of my posts from Arizona. I listed two of my takeaways from the conference. One was about doing a more effective job of communicating our Christ-inspired message.

Here's the text:

It may be semantics, but something bothered me in the wording of this post. You
mentioned our "christ-inspired message". Isn't the message Christ Himself? You
could make a case for almost anything being 'Christ-inspired'; anything to do
with serving or the Golden Rule - whether it actually has Christ as the center
or not. It seems to me that if we truly believed that Christ was enough, without
all the glitz and the programming, then communicating that would be much simpler
than we've made it. Just an observation.

Sunday, September 10, 2006 11:04:05 AM

The person who posted the comment makes an interesting point that communicating the message of Christ would be easier without all the glitz and programming. Tell me about it.

The challenge now is that we have to compete for people's attention. I did not say we are competing with other churches, the Church has to compete with the shopping mall, youth sports, pro sports, MTV and the constant barrage of information and advertising that is shoved in the face of every child and adult almost every waking hour of every day. The noise that exists in our one-hour photo, multi-tasking world tells us we should do more, do more faster, get more and spend more. Life takes Visa. Coke - it's the real thing. Come and get your love (Alltel).

For the message of Christ to be heard in these times, our noise has to be louder. Our noise has to tell people they matter to God. People need to hear that life takes Jesus, that He is the Real Thing and hey, come to Him and get your love! Whether we achieve that by using blogs and the Web, podcasts or TV commercials, posters and newspaper ads -- all that says is we're trying to reach seekers and doubters where they are and in the era they live with the same technology they use. That's not glitz for the sake of glitz, it's facing reality and staying relevant.

Thanks for starting the discussion. I'm only slightly passionate about this topic.
LMF