So, how should churches promote themselves? How can they let people know about their church without breaking their budget? Radio ads, TV spots, print ads?
First, being from the low-church tradition, I have to think how the church attracted followers in the first century. It was based mostly on talk, whether public speeches of the likes that Paul gave, or his speeches in Synagogues, or through personal dialog (we see that more in the gospels than in Acts, but I think it safe to say it still went on plenty during the tmie period represented in Acts). It was also aided significantly by actions, such as Jesus healings' and believers' prophecies (miracles never hurt) which generated lots of the attention that generated the talk, though as time went on miracles appear to become a less significant feature of apostolic ministry.
Of course, there was no television or even radio then, so it was not an option to be considered. We have to evaluate in our context what methods are most appropriate - i.e. effective and consistent with other spiritual and Biblical principles. It may be of some use to examine what other organizational entities do to promote themselves, though in general I am wary of relying too much on such comparisons. Most comparisons will be to corporations who are mostly interested in profit - and in my experience are generally clueless about promotion. Just as much of modern education appears to be an on-going experiment in educational theory, so does much of corporate advertising. However, in the technology sector, a new idea has been growing, and seems to be undisputable in its value as an advertising tool - as well as a money making tool. Robert Scoble of Microsoft (whose job title is "Technical Evangelist," ironically) is famous for promoting this approach, as he did again recently in a post on his blog. The technique?
"So, the trick is to build better products and services. In my view." And, "Jeff Bezos [of Amazon.com] says he doesn't do advertising. Instead he pours that money back into making a better service."
And I think that approach is one that we in the church can agree with without compromising our principles. In fact we would be better fulfilling our mandate.
Want to let people know about your church? Be first a better church. Want to grow (as opposed to making money like Amazon)? First be a better church.
I know we all fall into the trap of thinking of image first. I fall into this trap. But when even money-loving corporations like Microsoft are starting to get it, what is our excuse?
An opinion piece by David Klinghoffer appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Januray 28th detailing the travails of one Dr. Richard Sternberg, supposed employee of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History [02.24.2005, edit: actually, Klinghoffer never said that], and former editor of The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Under Sternberg's tenure, an article ("The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories") by intelligent design advocate and Discovery Institute senior fellow Stephen Meyer had been approved and published. Predictably, this caused no minor stir. I am actually more interested, though, in Klinghoffer's essay and the response.
[Remainder of article]In this forum I do not always write every piece to the standards of a newspaper. Actually, I almost never do. But when the story is largely factual - or relies heavily on factual data - I do try to fact check to a level competetive in spirit if not substance with that practiced by real journalists (my writing and editing is a different story). (By the way, short posts with only one link have usually not been thoroughly fact checked, though they usually have been checked against a few sources, sometimes hostile, sometimes not. Large pieces sometimes have been checked, though, and especially when I am critiquing the original coverage by a real journalist.)
What I have learned is that maintaining standards that I feel a news or analysis source should practice is much harder than I suspected. It is easy to see how in the rush to get stories written in a timely manner, mistakes - serious mistakes - are made. So, while I will continue to not hold back on professional journalists and even some bloggers and others for not fact checking well, I must be constantly aware of the dangers presented to me as well. And, I think it fairly inevitable, I will mess up. Especially since this is only at the moment a hobby. I take it seriously (though perhaps nto seriously enough), but there are time constraints, and again, sometimes timliness dictates limitations. After all, sometimes finding the absolute truth takes literally forever. So, read on, but beware. And never assume just because Justin or I said it that it is correct.
[The following is a paper I wrote for a sociology class five years ago. Yes, I was an undergrad. No, I was not a sociologist. I liked it anyway, but then what did I know? This is almost certainly dated in some respects, and it may be downright wrong. I present it in its original, unedited form, for better or for worse, for your reading pleasure.]
[Remainder of article]There are, of course, several vegan products that can be substituted for meat in almost all recipes. (I mean substitute here as a substitute for taste and texture, though nutritionally all of these are fairly comparable.) Besides being marginally healthier, a more efficient use of natural resources, and, for lack of a better way to put it, better for one's karma, these substitutes are typically cheaper as well (if purchased in the least processed form). Whether or not they fit one's taste is a separate issue; personally, I find them good enough most of the time, but then aas an ethical vegeatarian, I have no choice.
[Remainder of article]Solaris 10 is out, and available for free download. Even bigger news is that while Sun still hasn't released the source code, they have already created a web site for releasing code and released a small part of the code, a component called DTrace. They claim they are planning on getting the rest of the source out by the second quarter of this year.
The license DTrace is released under is called the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) 1.0. Groklaw did an analysis of a propsed version of the license in December. More recently, they expressed some doubts about the patent-licensing in the license. The license seems to be okay, with some problems. It requries source release, so it is more GPL-like than BSD-like. Most notably, it is still - as are many open-source licenses - not GPL-compatible, which will limit the amount of code feedback between the soon-to-be Solaris community and the Linux and GNU community. This is unfortunate, but, I suppose, to be expected.
So in the near future, we will have Linux (or GNU/Linux, whatever), FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris, plus Darwin - which is also a significant part of OS X. That leaves part of OS X and Windows as the only major proprietary OSes. The world is changing. (Of course, Sun can by with this since the are primarily a hardware company, unlike Microsoft, which will probably resist to the end since if Windows becomes free they lose a significant portion of their value. Would that I could convinve them they should shift from a software company to something more generally useful...)
(And, by the way, after having done some reading about it, that DTrace thing sounds kind of cool on its own, though I am not a systems administrator, so what do I know. One sample use of it is a neat little thing called psio that uses DTrace to break down I/O by process so you can see what process is abusing the disks - sort of like top for I/O. Wish I had that on the Mac... I am sure there must be some sort of way to do this without having to use Sun-only tricks, but I don't know what it is.)
