From Agape Press:
(AgapePress) - A conservative United Methodist activist is skeptical about the impact of the latest installments in a series of television advertisements the United Methodist Church (UMC) is running, which tout its slogan "Open hearts, Open minds, Open Doors." A new two million-dollar extension of the church's ad campaign will begin airing today (August 29) and will run through September 18.
According to the United Methodist Communications office, the new series of ads called "The Journey" features various "people following different paths until, ultimately, they join together with an invitation to visit a United Methodist Church." But Mark Tooley, who heads the United Methodist Action Committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy, feels many UMC "elites" are overly preoccupied with diversity, and this latest church public relations campaign may be a rather disingenuous example of that preoccupation.
"In some sense you could argue the ads have been a little bit deceptive in that they tend to emphasize racial diversity," Tooley points out, "but the United Methodist Church, unfortunately, in the U.S. is over 90 percent white. We are not very racially diverse, and we have not been successful in reaching out, especially to the growing Hispanic population."
According to the UMC conservative, it is simply false advertising to portray the denomination as being "racially diverse," as he feels the "Journey" promotions do. Even so, he questions the effectiveness of the church's media campaign and has doubts as to whether this latest string of inoffensive but "languid" ads will make have the effect UMC leaders are hoping to create.
I saw one of the ads today. It was hard to describe, but I found it creepy -- or better expressed, it flipped all of my ideological switches. The wrong way. One person on the ad said (quoting from memory) "Once you have embraced diversity, you have embraced God." Well, it's true that our racial monolithic makeup simply sucks. Ditto for ethnic diversity. It's just...the ad gave me the impression that the UMC was very ideologically flexible. One woman in the ad said (again, quoting from memory) "United Methodists disagree about a lot of different things." Well, that's true -- we fight all the time like a giant disfunctional family. I just don't think that it's a selling point.
Responses to advertizing are emotive as well as intellectual, and this one really turned me off. If I were not in the UMC but some other evangelical denomination or non-denominational church, this ad would make me less inclined to visit a UMC church.
Maybe if they had talked about Jesus and stuff....
Monday, August 29, 2005
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3 comments:
The problem is that when it is no longer clear that we even believe in the "same" Jesus, using Jesus as a selling point isn't easy.
Yes.
As for the diversity claim, it seems to me the point is our position and ideals on diversity, not whether we've achieved it. If it is where we are as opposed to where we hope to be, it would only be a limited Christ we could offer, only a limited faith to share, etc., and that's without regard to being conservative or liberal.
Well, yes. There is merit to having access to ideas other than your own. For example, it is very handy to us conservatives to have liberal Christians yammering on all the time about helping the poor. Why? Because Jesus commanded us to do so and didn't make that optional. And those of us on the right are frequently dismissive of such issues. So we need the Left to remind us from the time to time the homeless, the hungry, and the downtrodden.
But I get really worried when I hear Methodists saying that all religions are equally true or that everyone goes to heaven. That's when diversity has gone too far.
I don't necessarily have a problem with these ads; I haven't seen any yet. I do wonder if it's the best way to spend our money.
Maybe a series of ads consisting of quotes from, say, the sermon on the mount would be useful. At the end they could say, "Hear more at the United Methodist Church." Maybe ads like this wouldn't increase our denominational diversity; Maybe they wouldn't even increase our denomination's membership.
But after all, membership in the United Methodist Church is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Right?
Hey, if we stated to the world that Jesus was "the way, the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except through Him," we might offend someone and not appear to embrace diversity. We want to distance ourselves as far away from Jesus as possible.
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