Your hidden problem — Christians are too busy to care.
More and more, Christians are just too busy to care. They are too busy to become passionate about practically anything anymore. They’re too busy to read emails. They’re too busy to read the mail. They’re too busy to Sabbath or get dressed to go to church when they can just tune in online. They’re too busy to watch a video that is more than 30 seconds long (but strangely not busy enough to binge-watch 6 hours of trashy TV on the weekend).
They’re definitely too busy for God.
And why is this a problem for us?
Put in the words of one of my favorite authors, John Mark Comer,
“hurry and love are incompatible. Because love is incredibly time-consuming.”
Make no mistake, “we” are all in the business of LOVING the broken and serving the downtrodden. And why are fewer and fewer Christians giving charitably? Because love is incredibly time-consuming. You actually need to read a letter for it to break your heart. And you actually need to be quiet enough to hear the Holy Spirit to respond to His promptings. And quite frankly, our world is ripping that capacity out of our hands.
In 2007, Dr. Michael Zigarelli who served as a Professor and Dean of Regent University School of Business and who now is a Professor of Leadership and Strategy at Messiah University released a 5-year study in early 2007 that collected data from over 20,000 Christians with ages ranging from 15 to 88 across 139 countries, predominantly in the United States. In this study, they found that Busyness and Hurry were the greatest obstacles to Spiritual growth and the biggest distraction from God and others. Among the worst offenders? PASTORS. Which Zigarelli states,
"Is tragic. And ironic. That the very people [pastors] who could best help us escape the bondage of busyness are themselves in chains,"
But this list also includes lawyers, managers, nurses, teachers, and stay-at-home moms.
And here is the most tragic part of all of this. 2007 was the year the iPhone was released and Facebook opened to the public. So in 2007, we had a busyness problem. Has it gotten better since smartphones and social media have invaded our lives? I don’t think so.
If you want to talk about distraction, the average person, as in middle-aged adult, actually touches their phones up to 2,617 a day.
According to the findings of the Obstacles for Growth Survey,
“the accelerated pace and activity level of the modern-day distracts us from God and separates us from the abundant, joyful, victorious life He desires for us. Ultimately it separates us from seeing God and seeing the needs of others.”
Dr Zigarelli, after publishing this survey postulated what he called the “vicious cycle of busyness”.
And put forth that it may be the case that
Christians are assimilating to a culture of busyness, hurry, and overload, which leads to
God becoming more marginalized in Christians' lives, which leads to
a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to
Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how to live, which leads to
more conformity to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload. And then the cycle begins again.
If this cycle is true, then not only are we experiencing a collective deterioration of Christian relationships with God, but a more marginalized God in our society and an increased vulnerability to adopting secular worldviews.
So going back to Brand Passion: this cycle and our current environment is literally the worst environment to stir up Brand Passion possible. To get Passionate Christians to care passionately about your cause requires them to slow down enough to Love the Lord with all their hearts, souls, minds, and strength, and to love their neighbors as themselves.
As John Mark Comer points out,
“Corrie ten Boom once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy.”
Her logic is sound: both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off our connection to God, to other people, and even to our own soul.
And now the Secular show dops even further:
If Hurry marginalizes God and secular assumptions about how to live begin to replace God, then more and more Christians will become susceptible to having their core identities shaped more by the brands they wear, the sides they choose, and the media they consume, than by Christ and God’s word. And this is what Secular Brands WANT. Brands want you to be busier. They want you to become more addicted to your screen, and the commercial pursuit of happiness.
And the more we, as Christ-led brands, lean into the same tactics they use to capitalize on this state of hurry-based vulnerability, the more we shape Christians into the thin Virtues of Jesus, rather than Christ himself. Here’s what we mean:
Alan Noble, author of Disruptive Witness, argues that the biggest danger of our secular anthropology is that Christianity merely becomes a personal preference, an option among many accepted options. Even Christians, who believe their identity rests in Christ, can fall into this frame of logic. Charles Taylor introduced the concept that we live in a “secular age” which is very much supported by Zigarelli’s Vicious Cycle of Busyness. By this he doesn’t mean that most people are atheists, but instead that religious beliefs, including Christianity, are no longer the default position, but are actively contended and have to be chosen.
One of the consequences of this shift is that when Christians witness non-believers, they aren’t simply appealing to logic and reason, but instead, non-believers are asking where or if this belief aligns with who they are and if it will help them flourish. And if Christianity does not align with “who they are” or instantly leads to flourishing, ie: Christianity often leads to SUFFERING, then non-believers can rightly say that it simply doesn’t work for them and leave it at that.
This is also why arguments against Christianity that look at the negative effects of how Christians behave or the negative effects of being raised in a Christian home are so persuasive. The secular age has led us to believe that the chief criteria for evaluating a belief system is if it’s beneficial to us personally.
What is worse is that this same secular mindset and pattern is happening within Christianity itself where Denominations, preaching styles, causes, or “Christian Brand preferences” are also being evaluated first by whether they are beneficial to us personally. Just look at the trend over the last 5 years within sustainer programs putting more emphasis on donor benefits and virtue signalling than missional benefits and you can see the trend-line. This is very much part of the “vicious cycle of busyness” that makes us more and more vulnerable to these secular assumptions on how to live and be happy, the busier we get.
You follow brands you like because they add to your system of “my truth” beliefs. This isn’t just a “woke” thing. Conservatives are doing the same things by stitching together identities made up of brands, politicians, influencers, news publications, etc, all based primarily on what it is beneficial to them personally — this is human nature or what Jesus calls “The Flesh” — a prioritization of personal security and safety, what in it for me and my family, love my neighbor who looks like me, etc etc etc.
Another consequence of our secular age Noble explores is the phenomena of “thin belief”. By this, he means strong beliefs that many people hold about the world that lack robust explanatory power. He explores how in our digital age we are pressured by our peers and even strangers on the internet to take positions on issues that are way more complex than many of us realize and that we don’t have strong justifications for if one were to ask a simple set of questions. This can range from immigration and refugee policy to criminal justice reform and global warming, to homelessness, and the state of Israel, and to imperialist evangelism. What’s important is not how well we understand these issues, but that we are taking a stand and aligning ourselves with a particular group on a particular issue to express our identities. And those identities often become louder than our identities in Christ as they often share common ground with secular voices.
For many Christians today (just ask any Pastor anywhere), it is more important to be [insert political opinion] than it is to be Loving, Non-Violent, Humbly Charitable [insert any attribute commanded by Jesus on the sermon on the mount].
Noble is not suggesting that this rise in thin beliefs is a consequence of atheism or that other religious communities don’t have thin beliefs. Instead, his argument is that modernity and technology more broadly have pushed us towards these thin beliefs, by making the importance of self-expression more important. What happens then is those issues become our identity and our expression of Christianity rather than Christ himself because technology and algorithms have backed us into a corner of enemy and ally. Often, that cheapens Christ when those issues conflict with Christ’s own life and teaching, but we don’t really know any better.
So now, as Christ-led brands, we have to live in this world, where more and more, our audiences are first going to ask “What’s in it for me?” and “Is this “my flavor” of Christianity?”, and “what “side” does this put me on?”.
So what’s the solution?
Alan Noble challenges us, to build transcendent truths or what he calls “Cross Pressures.” (I like to think about this as Brand Passion.)
To show up in ways that remind us, as Christians, that we are not the center of the universe and that creating and expressing our individual identity is not our greatest purpose. That Good and Love is not a preference, but is embodied by God which is not a matter of interpretation, but revelation.
If you want to build Passion and do it in a way that is Christ-like, it requires powerful relevance that cuts through the noise of the world, and unbelievable Christ-like resonance to get us to slow down enough to care.
This is what we mean by not outmarketing God.
This isn’t just making sure God gets the Glory, this means that we cautiously wade into the way the world markets their goods and services to leverage the redeemable and steer clear of the lies and downward spirals of the flesh. Read John Mark Comer’s “Live No Lies” book. It will show you just how sneaky this is. And often this takes Faith and Trust to leave easy money on the table and avoid the slippery slopes of “the ends justifying the means”. Not outmarketing God puts morality and his Black and White rules first.
I have seen too many wrong things done in the name of good Stewardship. I have done them. The use of ungodly fear to manipulate emotions, the use of undignified humanity to create extremes, the use of progressive disclosure to trick people into thinking they’re giving to one thing when really, they’re not. But where I get convicted the most as a Marketer is that God never asked us for results, he asked us for our faithfulness and obedience. He gets the results.
Feeling a bit hopeless? Here’s the light at the end of the tunnel. Brand Passion is not only possible, it is essential. But if you are going to succeed, you must be distinctive in a way that is relevant in today’s world, and you must be Disruptive in a way that resonates with God’s world.
Every big church movement throughout time, from the explosion of the early Church to the Reformation to the end of the Slave Trade in England, was started by voices that took it upon themselves to challenge their peers to turn back to Christ. The unfortunate reality is that the majority of Christianity time and time again has always just gone with the flow. Pre-reformation, most Christians were fine with buying indulgences to pay off time in purgatory because they didn’t know any better. Most Christians owned slaves when they didn’t know any better. And today, most Christians are fully sucked into a digitally addicted, distracted, and my-truth twisted worldview because they don’t know any better.
But this is why I am in the Branding business — it’s why we created Salt & Wine — because, in today’s digital world, brands have more power than ever to form people. As John-Mark Comer puts it in his latest book Practicing the Way Everything is Spiritual Formation, from what we buy to what we watch, to what we read and hear, everything forms our spirit our core identity.
Brands are MASSIVE spiritual formers because they represent the culmination of influence, product, experiences, philosophy, translation, and solutions to life’s everyday problems. It is no coincidence that the government spends more time asking brands like Meta, Google, TikTok, and X to solve digital problems than they do themselves because the power is in the hands of the platforms and the brands on them. The United States right now is trying to force TikTok to sell its company for fear of the power it has to subtly form US citizens in the image of communist China. That is literally what they are saying. That is a real thing that is happening right now. That is the power of a Brand.
Anxiety, loneliness, polarization, depression, gender crises, and the dissolution of absolute truth, are all at extreme levels why? Because of problems created by, and manipulated by brands & technology for the sake of Profit, for the sake of the FLESH.
So, as a brand, as the Parachurch, you are in the most influential place to influence Christians back toward the cross, back to the capital C church. Because history has told us time and time again, the majority is not going to do it themselves. This is why even prominent voices like John-Mark Comer who is doing an excellent job at rallying young Christians back to the way of Jesus in partnership with the local Church, is doing it through a Brand. It’s not John Mark anymore, its a Nonprofit called Practicing the Way. And his method is all about helping people slow down enough to Love Deeply.
We need more Resonant & Relevant parachurch Brands like Practicing the Way to help people slow down enough to love deeply.
