Church – What are You Looking For? // The Problem with Church Is..., Part 2

<p class="p1">It’s the easiest thing in the world to poke fun at this thing we call church. To reject it as being irrelevant, outdated. So many people though – so many people, the same people who reject church – are looking for something, hungering for something, aching for … something. Hmm.</p> <p> </p> <h4 class="p1"><span class="s1" style="color: #ff9900;">The Book and Its Cover</span></h4> <p class="p2">My favourite definition of marketing is this – that it’s the ultimate triumph of style over substance. Not sure where I first heard that <span class= "Apple-converted-space">–</span> but it’s stuck with me for a good many years now. Marketing – the ultimate triumph of style over substance.</p> <p class="p2">And you see it all the time – big impersonal banks, where the customer is just a number and our needs and problems have to fit into their systems and products, and where increasingly the only way that we can interact with them is through disempowered and sometimes poorly trained, anonymous operators, jammed into their cubicles like battery hens in some call centre – those same banks will run adds on TV with families and happy smiling faces and friendly bank managers.</p> <p class="p2">There’s a complete discontinuity between the substance of who they are and what they provide and the style that they hold out in their advertising and marketing campaigns. But that doesn’t stop them – because after all, marketing is the ultimate triumph of style over substance.</p> <p class="p2">Well – perhaps that’s a little cynical, but you know what I mean. Spin doctors and advertising agencies are paid trillions of dollars each year to put a friendly face on unfriendly corporations, and to put a positive spin on the most awful of realities. And they do such a great job of it that Mr or Mrs Consumer out here in consumer–land – well we struggle to know the difference anymore between style and substance. The two have blurred – reality is a combination not only of the service provided, but of how we feel about the provider – a