Everyday Disciples

Add-on fees are driving consumers crazy. From restaurants and hotels to concerts and food delivery, we are increasingly shown a low price online, only to click through and find a range of fees that yield a much higher price at checkout.

The term drip pricing was popularized by a 2012 Federal Trade Commission conference. Its spread is associated with the proliferation of airline fees after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Yet an example of the phenomenon that long predates 2001 is stores’ practice of listing goods without the sales tax, which gets added at checkout.

Why not include the sales tax with the sticker price? One study from 2019 showed consumers punish that sort of transparency. A grocery store let the authors tag some products with the familiar pretax price and some with the total price including tax. For example, a hair brush’s price tag showed $5.79 before tax, and beneath that $6.22 with the tax. Sales volume dropped for products with price tags that included the tax than a control group without the tax.

This isn’t because shoppers didn’t know the tax rate or which items were taxable. In fact, 75% of shoppers surveyed knew the sales tax within 0.5 percentage point, and most knew what goods were taxable. So, the tax-inclusive price tag didn’t give them new information; it was just that transparent reminders turned some people off.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Jesus never practiced “drip pricing.” He never hid the total costs for following him. It may turn some people off, but he always put the full cost upfront.

On his website, Craig Larson shares the following story about the power of prayer:

Last night a woman in our church told how God had just given her success on a large, important project at work. She is a website architect working for a big downtown bank. She was hired specifically to upgrade their site's interface for those with disabilities. But everyone with whom she directly worked told her: You can't do this. You will fail. You don't have the necessary intelligence for this. She agreed. She didn't know how to do it.

No one knew how to do what the bank was asking. One technician told her he could not do in a year even part of what the company was asking to be done in six months. These were uncharted waters. She feared what would happen if she failed. That she would lose her job and have to move away.

So she called out to God. All day long, every day, she prayed fervently over every detail, every web page, every line of code. She literally wept and prayed. She felt small and vulnerable, but she also had fierce conviction that God was great enough to help her with an impossible job. She kept crying out to God day after day, planning functionalities, writing code, telling her team of developers what to do. Day after day she received wisdom for one piece of the project after another. Every step and idea was a discovery.

Week after week, one piece, one page, one functionality of the website after another came together. Months passed and the progress continued. The hand of God was upon her, and he blessed her entire team. With the deadline approaching they were ready to release their work. They were ready to go live with approximately eighty new web pages of cutting edge technology. On the day of release they discovered one minor problem, just one easily fixed bug. But everything else worked flawlessly.

Putti Sok told her Christian college friends, "Leave me alone and quit praying for me." Putti described herself as a "Cambodian Buddhist girl," even though she was born in Long Beach, California and grew up in Dallas. "I figured I was Buddhist because my parents told me I was Buddhist," she said. "I thought Christianity was just a religion for Americans." Eventually Putti came to consider herself "an evangelistic atheist," challenging others to prove that God exists.

When Putti started her college education at the University of Texas in 2008, one of her goals was to build deep relationships. She succeeded in that, but some of her new friends were Christians who were active in a student ministry. During her sophomore year, Putti "hit a wall." "I began to see that everything I was doing was becoming meaningless," she said. "If what I was doing didn't have eternal meaning, then it was all in vain." She began to think, "If God is real, he should be able to hear my prayers." Each night she began to pray that he would help her understand what she had been hearing from her friends because it seemed like foolishness to her.

Then one day Putti entered a closet in the student ministry building that had been turned into a prayer room. Inside she found a bowl filled with pieces of paper with the names of students' friends. One after another she looked at the slips of paper and found her own name written on the slips.

She knew how strongly she had urged her friends not to pray for her and yet they had faithfully loved her and prayed for her anyway. She burst into tears that day in the tiny prayer room. "God was softening my heart then," she said. The next night she felt that God was asking her for a specific response, so she finally prayed to receive Christ.

"All of a sudden, I had a desire to go and share with people," she said. "God is real, and he has changed my heart." Putti is currently studying in preparation for full time ministry.

At the age of 36, Rosaria Champagne Butterfield was a recently tenured professor in the Center for Women's Study at Syracuse University. Rosaria and her lesbian partner were members of a Unitarian Universalist Church, where Rosaria was the coordinator of what is called the Welcoming Committee, the gay and lesbian advocacy group.

Up to this point in her life, Rosaria said that the only Christians she knew were "intellectually impaired." They were the kind of "people who sent me hate mail; or people who carried signs at gay pride marches that read 'God Hates Fags.'" But her negative image of Christians would radically change when she met a local pastor named Ken and his wife Floy. Eventually that friendship led to her conversion to Christ, but here's how Rosaria described that first encounter with authentic Christians:

I remember being conscious of my butch haircut and the gay and pro-choice bumper stickers on my car …. I remember awkwardly greeting my hosts at the door and pulling out of my bag two gifts—a bottle of good red wine and a box of strong tea …. I wanted to get to know these people but not at the expense of compromising my moral standards. My lesbian identity and culture and its values mattered a lot to me. I came to my culture and its values through life experience but also through much research and deep thinking. I liked Ken and Floy immediately because they seemed sensitive to that ….

During our meal I remember holding my breath and waiting to be punched in the stomach with something grossly offensive. I believed at this time that God was dead and that if he ever was alive, the fact of poverty, violence, racism, sexism, homophobia, and war was proof that he didn't care about his creation. I believed that religion was, as Marx wrote, the opiate of the masses …. But Ken's God seemed alive, three-dimensional and wise, if firm. And Ken and Floy were anything but intellectually impaired.

Ken and Floy did something at the meal that has a long Christian history ….. [They] invited the stranger in—not to scapegoat me, but to listen and to learn and to dialogue …. We didn't debate worldview …. They were willing to walk the long journey to me in Christian compassion. During our meal, they did not share the gospel with me. After our meal, they did not invite me to church. Because of these glaring omissions to the Christian script as I had come to know it, when the evening ended and Pastor Ken said he wanted to stay in touch, I knew that it was truly safe to accept his open hand.

Since this beginning, the journey on which the Lord has taken me has been a great adventure, and this simple meal in a pastor's home … was the first leg of this journey. Before I ever stepped foot in a church, I spent two years meeting with Ken and Floy and on and off "studying' scripture and my heart …. [Ken] knew at the time that I couldn't come to church—it would have been too threatening, too weird, too much. So, Ken was willing to bring the church to me.

In 2008, Paul Herbert, a municipal court judge from Ohio, was using Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life to disciple his teenage daughters. One night, one of his daughters asked him, "Daddy, what's your purpose in life?"

Herbert gave a vague answer about being "a light on the bench," but that night, he prayed candidly to God: "I realize that being a judge is a very unique position. Not many people get this opportunity. Can you show me some way that I could be significant for you in my work?"

About nine months later, after seeing a typical procession of domestic violence victims, the sheriff brought a prostitute into Herbert's courtroom. Herbert realized that she looked exactly like one of the domestic violence victims he'd been seeing. It shook up his categories.

Herbert began researching the criminology of prostitution and what he learned stunned him. Around 87 percent of prostitutes are sexually abused, typically starting at around age 8. They often start using drugs to deal with that trauma around age 12. The girls run away from home or foster care and are dragged by predatory pimps into the commercial sex trade.

Herbert decided to apply his faith to his work. He launched a new program called CATCH Court, which stands for "Changing Attitudes to Change Habits." Prior to this program, prostitutes simply cycled in and out of jail. But through Herbert's two-year program, women convicted of prostitution receive drug treatment and counseling. Their movements are monitored electronically, they offer support to each other, and they appear before Judge Herbert weekly in the courtroom to report on the progress.

Herbert describes some of the women who have completed the program: "One [woman] was sold when she was a little girl by her mother to older men for crack cocaine. Today she is in Phi Theta Kappa at Columbus State Community College." Another was kidnapped by a motorcycle gang and raped, then transported to other gangs and sold for sex. Now, she is two years sober from heroin.

But Herbert also emphasizes the spiritual transformation that has occurred in his life. He said:

The Holy Spirit continues to reveal how much I've been forgiven, and how similar I am to the individuals that come before me. That's really hard to say! [My] job is to judge. But the farther I go along [in my faith], the more I realize that I'm just like most of them—and that makes me more understanding, more kind, more merciful.

If God does not enter your kitchen, there is something wrong with your kitchen. If you can't take God into your recreation, there is something wrong with your play. We all believe in the God of the heroic. What we need most these days is the God of the humdrum, the commonplace, the everyday.

True faith goes into operation when there are no answers.