I worked, as you may know by now, for a Singaporean magazine in the early 1990s. Its target market was the Christian community and as the only inter-denominational show in town, so far as magazines were concerned, that meant we were the target market for lots of press releases. All the quotes in the article, which I’ve anonymized to save blushes, were real. And dispiriting. This article will be a chapter in my forthcoming book The Sandwich about living sandwiched in the interstices between God’s promises and the mysterious life of our home planet.
(1995)
Sometimes you wonder.
We get lots of mail in the Impact office. Some of it is promotional. Here are some quotes from material lying around the office:
Pastor X is one of the strongest church leaders in the world today.
A man with a strong apostolic and prophetic mantle, Pastor Y is impacting the world.
Dr Z is one of the most anointed Bible teachers in the world.
Here’s a longer one describing someone’s ministry in Japan and inviting funds for the school that trained him:
At first they came by the dozens.
Then, they came by the hundreds
And finally, they came by the thousands.
And they stream across the playing field of a 60,000 seat baseball stadium to commit their lives to Jesus Christ.
It gets better:
This is happening in the inscrutable orient — in Japan, the country some have called the ‘missionary graveyard’.
The report goes on:
Closed. Until now. What has changed?
Who is God using to lead thousands of Japanese to publicly turn their faces to the cross — and their backs on centuries of religious tradition?
Aw, you guessed. A Japanese evangelist trained by the school.
The report fails to mention that responses like that were the normal pattern in Japan after World War II, and they were mostly for cultural reasons rather than spiritual ones. Japan’s churches have remained small, less than 1% of the population, despite hundreds of thousands of responses in large evangelistic meetings. It is astonishing that the school didn’t train its evangelists to understand this, and even more astonishing that they should be boasting about their ignorance of both history and culture.
Hype. A late-twentieth century disease, entirely absent from the ministry of Jesus and the apostles. (Can you imagine it? ‘Let’s put our hands together and welcome Paul, acclaimed author of Romans, one today’s most anointed missionaries…’) Chillingly present among the rag-tag-and-bobtail heretics who so damaged the Early Church.
Hype. There must be better ways for honest leaders with genuine ministries to promote what they’re doing. Let us pray:
‘From good people, doing good things, badly, Good Lord, deliver us.’