Native Trends
The Popcorn Report by Faith Popcorn, Doubleday, $22.50.
Reviewed by Bruce L. Shelley, preaching team pastor, Bear Valley Church, Denver, Colorado
Popcorn is the hottest name in marketing.
The Popcorn Report is the latest product of consultant Faith Popcorn for her Fortune 500 clients and other market-driven companies. Faith is the prophetess who gave us, in the mid-1970s, the term cocooning for the stay-at-home syndrome. She also predicted the bust of New Coke, the rise of 4-wheel-drives, and the home-delivery rush.
But what is this marketing wizard doing in the pages of LEADERSHIP?
The Popcorn Report may be the best available summary of today’s social tastes and trends. Popcorn calls them “psychographic shifts.”
Some may question the wisdom of church leaders consulting marketing experts. “Isn’t that like consulting a psychic?” Some consider the mere suggestion of marketing ministry as defiling the holy place.
And I am prepared, even eager, to grant that a ministry driven only by market concerns is in trouble up to its wheel covers. But dismissing popular impulses carte blanche is to operate with our eyes closed. We can’t pretend we aren’t affected by our culture.
Even the most anti-marketing churches have a sign in front of their building. Most use church letterhead. Few have shunned the use of the Yellow Pages. How can churches not minister in America’s society of choice without considering the way ideas are dispensed and institutions function in today’s world?
America is a consumer society and, as Popcorn preaches, when we change what we buy and how we buy it, we change who we are. Popcorn’s trends force us, as church leaders, outside our sanctuaries, to what the public “feels” and “wants.” She pushes us to answer the question: “How can I make the gospel ‘good news’ for natives in this culture?”
Ten prevailing preferences
Popcorn identifies ten trends of nineties natives. Church leaders will find these attitudes inhabiting not just the shopping malls but also the pews:
Cocooning in a New Decade. Cocooning describes the impulse to go inside when it gets too tough and scary outside. It is about insulation and avoidance, coziness and control- hyper-nesting. Cocooning today, however, is no longer about a place, the home with its VCR and CD player, but about a state of mind-self-preservation.
Fantasy Adventure. This is a vicarious escape-catharsis through consumption. “It’s a momentary, wild-and-crazy retreat from the world into an exotic flavor, a ‘foreign’ experience.” The safe and familiar is marketed with an exotic twist.
Shopping malls, theme parks, hotels-all are marketing their wares with themes of faraway places. “A chain of hotels in the Midwest offers adventure one night at a time in ‘FantaSuites’-your choice of tropical paradise, jungle adventure-hut, Bedouin tent.”
Small Indulgences. These are material “rewards” we give ourselves-the once-a-month chocolate bar or the once-in-a-lifetime gold necklace. The new element in this self-indulgence is a note of militancy. “I want it. I will have it. And I deserve it.” Crucial to this trend: people choose quality.
Egonomics. For decades we have been hearing about “me-ism.” Egonomics, though, is a nicer narcissism. It is the idea that everybody wants special attention, a little recognition of the no-one’s-quite-like-me self. It’s about individuating and customizing.
Not long ago, the mark of excellence in the modem age was uniformity. Now, egonomics means we prefer individually crafted products.
Customizing is seen not only in consumer goods but in today’s increasingly specialized interest groups. Popcorn writes: “If the wave of special interest groups forming now is any indication of just how subdividable we are, the answer is ‘very.’ We’re bonding together against isolation; in groups that bring us together for reasons from personal to political.”
Cashing Out. This is the recent trend among Americans who leave their jobs to go somewhere else to work at something they want to do, trading in the rewards of traditional success in favor of slower pace and quality of life.
They are asking what is real, what is honest, what is quality, what is really important. And apparently what they want is life to be more folksy and straightforward, plain and explainable.
Vicarious “Cashing Out,” according to Popcorn, is found in the yearning to incorporate small-town values into our lives. Many people are moving to rural areas and commuting to the cities. Others listen to country music or square dance in community centers. And people are going back to church-more than one-third of the baby-boom dropouts have returned.
Down-Aging. This is a redefining down of age-appropriate behavior- older people acting younger. It’s seen when 42 percent of the runners who finished the 1989 New York Marathon were over 40. Fifty-six runners were over 70.
What we are doing, says Popcorn, is chasing after the promise and hope of childhood. “Opportunity is to be found in almost anything that makes you feel better, makes you laugh, makes you have fun, makes you feel like a kid.”
Staying Alive. Disease dread is our culture’s collective phobia. This trend identifies the current American “hyper-quest for health.”
“The driving force behind Staying Alive,” writes Popcorn, “is a collective, somewhat reluctant, realization that we’ve all, in the end, got to take care of ourselves. Nobody else is going to do it.”
We see the “very meaning of life as improving the quality of life itself,” beginning with our own bodies. “We may not yet be ready to admit out loud that our goal is truly to live forever.”
The Vigilante Consumer. The consumer is fighting back.
Consumers are taking up the banner of protest against “marketing immorality.” The Vigilante Consumer is angry, nourishing the wish that companies should somehow be more human.
Popcorn observes that “we’ve had new all our lives. Now new is old. And what makes a Vigilante Consumer buy one product over another in this decade is a feeling of partnership with the seller. We want to buy from a person.”
99 Lives. Yes, we can have it all. “I can live every life I choose.” An attitude fresh from the eighties, 99 Lives wants a customized salvation-what Popcorn calls Streamlining.
“We don’t want more anything any more. What we want now is less. More and more less.” We are pleading to the big clock in the sky: “Give me fewer choices, far fewer choices. Make my life easier. Help me make the most of my most valued commodity-the very minutes of my life.”
S.O.S. (Save Our Society). Surviving has become our primary business. The S.O.S. trend is any effort to make the ’90s the socially responsible decade. Our predicament is too big for one savior to handle, so S.O.S. is our hope for “moral transformation through marketing.”
In assessing S.O.S., Popcorn predicts “a new ethic of self-sacrifice on the part of Americans.” The American marketplace will be transformed by products “that not only work best, but those that offer some ‘just’ benefits.” S.O.S., she says, is “a do-good, be-good trend.”
Bringing Popcorn to church
These trends virtually scream at today’s minister: “Think about me! Didn’t you see me in last Sunday’s congregation?”
I’m now asking myself several questions: How do I shape my sermons to make God’s Word “good sense” to these people? What sort of speakers and sermons do people avoid? Can I hear these attitudes in my small group or the special interest groups in our church?
Popcorn stresses that successful programs may be driven by one trend but supported by at least four. So don’t be quick to change a tradition to follow a single trend. Be a student of the human behavior reflected in several of them and then try something new-or better-try something old in a new and better way.
These Popcorn words are worth remembering: “It’s no longer enough to make and market a good product. You’ve got to have a corporate soul.”
Popcorn touches upon traditional Christian concerns for human nature, integrity, quality, spiritual hunger, personal choice, tradition, and values. And much of it applies to ministry in America today-if we have ears to hear.
Preaching to God’s Quirky People
Peculiar Speech by William H. Willimon, Eerdmans, $10.95
Reviewed by Steven D. Mathewson, pastor, Dry Creek Bible Church, Belgrade, Montana
It’s Saturday night.
You’re polishing your sermon manuscript on Romans 3:21-31. Scanning your work, you pause at words like justified, redemption, and propitiation. No matter how you phrase them, these theological concepts won’t preach well to your fast-food and blue-jean congregation.
How do you relate the gospel to people more at home with the language of USA Today than the Bible?
Communicators warn us about speaking the language of the academy to people whose world is the marketplace. We know we must demonstrate Scripture’s relevance to modern culture.
But can we venture too far?
Yes, suggests a concerned William H. Willimon, professor of Christian ministry at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina.
Instead of trying to make the gospel relevant to the culture, Willimon says, “Our homiletical effort is better spent helping contemporary culture (as it gathers in your church and mine on Sunday) to be relevant to the gospel.”
Peculiar Speech pinpoints a distinctive of Christian (in his terms “baptismal”) preaching: we talk funny.
But Willimon challenges the notion that church talk is “in-house” speech, whereas worldly talk is “public.” He claims all language is “in-house speech.” He claims Christians have as much right to choose the terms they use to describe the spiritual condition as doctors do in diagnosing the medical condition. We needn’t apologize for teaching specialized words and concepts if we’re doing surgery on the soul.
“When a preacher disposes of baptismal speech in favor of psychological speech (Robert Schuller’s ‘Be Happy Attitudes’ or ‘Self-Esteem’), or secular politicized speech (mainline Protestantism’s ‘Peace with Justice’),” he says, “the preacher .. . has merely moved, in speech, from one community to another.”
And so Willimon laments, “Unfortunately, most of the theology I learned in seminary was in the translation mode. Take this biblical image and translate it into something more palatable to people who use Cuisinarts. The modern church has been willing to use everyone’s language but its own.”
Four main chapters, interspersed with three sermon manuscripts, articulate Willimon’s concern.
In the first chapter, “Preaching as Baptismal Speech,” he contends that preaching to the baptized is to enter into a world of odd communication. Willimon’s point: let the text set the agenda, rather than the preacher distorting the text with a self-imposed agenda.
In chapter 2, Willimon delves into the theological implication of baptism. He encourages preachers to “articulate our symptoms [like ecological destruction, domestic violence, and poverty] theologically, through baptismal speech.”
Translation: preachers must attack social evils by communicating what Scripture says about sin, justice, and righteousness.
All this raises a question: what do we do with the language and thought forms of modern culture? Willimon’s answer is found in chapter 3. He points to Luke’s story of Paul on the Areopagus.
“In Acts 17:16-34,” Willimon writes, “Luke has become fully at home within the linguistic world of paganism, facing its questions and using its speech. Luke refuses, however, to fit the good news of Jesus into paganism’s preconceived categories.”
How can a preacher do this in practice?
First, he must speak “in the language of the receptor culture, accepting at least in a provisional way the way of understanding the world that is embodied in that language.”
Second, the preacher “will call radically into question that culture’s understanding of reality, which is both expressed and formed by its language, with an unashamed call for repentance.”
Third, “if the receptors do experience faith, repentance, and conversion, it is nothing less than a miracle, a work of God, not the result of the communicator’s competency.”
I noticed Willimon uses contemporary terminology in this book. For instance, in one of the sermons he paraphrases Jesus’ summons to the rich young ruler: “Strip down, raffle your Porsche, liquidate your portfolio, break free and give it all to the poor.”
I asked him why. “We do talk in contemporary modern idiom,” Willimon admitted. “But the test is, did you proclaim the text to be faithful to the gospel? We don’t begin with Murphy Brown; we begin with baptism.”
In chapter 4, “Preaching as Politics,” Willimon views his concern from yet another angle. He argues for meaningful engagement in politics by being the church. This constitutes “God’s means of confronting the principalities and powers with a new people who are organized around utterly different modes of communion than those offered by the world.”
The implication for a sermon using “shop talk” is this: we impact the “general human condition” by being the people of God. Let’s not abandon the language of our community as its message holds the key to bringing meaningful change.
So then, your sermon on Romans 3:21-31 may end up describing the world’s need with contemporary words. But in presenting the gospel’s solution, we may need to teach them some new words-or actually, the old words of Scripture.
“The homiletical, evangelicaI question for early Christian communicators was not, Should we use Greek? or Should we utilize Hellenistic concepts and to what degree? The question was, How shall we be a sign, signal, and witness to the world that Jesus Christ is Lord?”
-William H. Willimon
Church Around the Clock
The Seven-Day-a-Week Church by Lyle E. Schaller, Abingdon Press, $10.95
Reviewed by John Throop, vicar, St. Francis Episcopal Church, Chillicothe, Illinois
A far-reaching change has swept through American Protestantism in the last half of the twentieth century.
“The Sunday morning church,” Lyle Schaller observes, “has been succeeded by the seven-day-a-week parish.”
The author of many books on effective church leadership, Schaller is not prescribing how the church ought to be. He describes the way things are, predicting church trends in the foreseeable future.
One trend is the seven-day-a-week, need-driven church. These churches begin ministry with the questions: Where are you hurting? What are you lacking?
Schaller likens the seven-day-week church to a community college.
“One parallel, of course, is the widespread use of the word community in the name,” he writes. “Far more important however, is the fact that the program and the schedule are designed for the needs and convenience of the participants rather than the preferences of those in charge.”
Complacency Alert
Danger on the Comfort Zone by Judith M. Bardwick, AMACOM, $19.95
Reviewed by Gary Fenton, pastor, Dawson Memorial Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama
Innovation, someone has said, is just common sense recycled. That would also describe this book on American business.
Judith Bardwick, consultant to blue-chip companies and clinical professor of psychiatry at University of California in San Diego, suggests three psychological states that govern American companies: entitlement, fear, and earning.
The entitlement mentality gets the blame for America’s ailing productivity. America, she believes, was at the top of the economic pile too long. Security without accountability, which can be traced as far back as World War II, is the villain. The entitled worker says, “Who I am, not what I do, is the basis for promotions and raises.”
Fear, the second psychological state, is the result of the economic pendulum’s swing in lean times: layoffs, hostile takeovers, massive corporate restructuring.
“When anxiety is high, cynicism rises and morale sinks,” says Bardwick. “Companies will not get gung ho performances from people who are scared, cynical, resentful, apathetic, and mistrustful.”
Both worker mentalities, of course, cripple productivity.
It’s the earning attitude, then, that characterizes the workers of competitive companies.
“People with a psychology of earning know they’re winners, but they also know they’re always being judged.”
Companies can purge the entitlement mentality, Bardwick says, by making workers learn new jobs and redefining what real work is in the company.
Having management demonstrate compassion to the rank and file and publicizing your company’s achievements are just two of Bardwick’s suggestions to reduce fear in volatile times.
Bardwick’s contribution to ministry, for me, is her diagnosis of our people’s attitudes.
Could it be that some denominational executives, pastors, and post-war, parachurch leaders are guilty of the entitlement malaise? That may explain why newer and leaner religious organizations are doing well.
The chapter on the personal side of entitlement intrigued me most.
She colorfully describes a 40-year-old, well-educated professional who accomplishes nothing: “He putters his way through life. He always looks busy, but he never grapples with what’s real. There are no deadlines. He continually postpones decisions. His goals are big, but vague, and there are no timetables.”
Bardwick’s comment to me-“no one wants to be around when entitlement is over”-is true even for leaders who aren’t used to earning their keep.
Bardwick is no theologian, but she puts a cocklebur under the saddle of all leaders-business or church-who believe the world owes them homage.
Copyright © 1993 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
