Meeting people in Bulgaria and Estonia the past few days has brought me new understanding of the strength of faith and the invincibility of hope. The human spirit yearns for freedom and voice, and it does not easily accept containment and control.

In Bulgaria we heard how people conducted worship and prayer meetings underground. Some were effective administrators within the existing government system, so effective that the government could not do without them even if they were identified as Christians. This is not to say that they had it easy, or that they were free to worship or study the faith. They weren’t. They were just in-expendable.

Those who were expendable, or who were strongly confrontational, or otherwise represented a threat to Soviet administration were imprisoned or sent to work camps. Generally, people were unable to travel. Many were separated from families.

Hearing the limitations on freedom and the concessions granted by the system is to hear both tragedy and tragicomedy. Sometimes they were allowed to come together to sing, but not to pray. Sometimes they were allowed to worship in private homes, but not in former church buildings. At the root of the policies, of course, was control. It was imposed brutally and without concern for humanitarian consideration.

In Estonia many of these leaders are remembered for their martyrdom, for they were exiled to Siberia and some were either killed or died in captivity. It has taken many years for the story of their lives to emerge from secret files. Some disappeared and were never heard from again but no confirmation of their death was provided. As secret files were opened their fate is now known. Documentation has been discovered in the past two years for some who disappeared as long ago as 1948, for example. A book of Estonian Christian martyrs is being written based on this recent knowledge.

As one from outside the region I have not heard before the deeply human, individual drama of life in what the Estonians call “Soviet time” in direct conversation. There are heroic, but quiet, stories of resistance and survival. We in the west who have not experienced the imposition of social and political control from the end of a gun may not be able to fully comprehend how this intimidation and long-term oppression was sustained.

But we can understand the blunt, unadorned use of power. It is a constant threat. The loss of freedom can come like a thief in the night, and it can come not only at the end of a gun but through the surrender of rights and accommodation to authoritarianism. The challenge this lays before us is how to preserve freedom and individual rights even when we face external threats and harm.

This is the learning that I am gleaning from these living witnesses.

The Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors training and media initiative of The United Methodist Church has been revealing as a mainline denomination took upon itself to reach out to a broader audience.

The people of The United Methodist Church showed generosity and wisdom that is quite remarkable by funding this campaign for two successive four-year periods, and sticking with it. That’s an unprecedented commitment for a mainline denomination.

The effort includes training to develop welcoming and hospitality skills in local congregations and a media component that includes national cable television buys, local broadcast, theater ads, radio, print and outdoor billboards plus collateral material such as door hangers, post cards and worship graphics.

It also includes an online experience with a “seeker” website as a front door to the church’s denominational website. Several things are notable about the campaign, with which I am involved, just so you know I’m not an unbiased observer. One is that the people of the church have stood behind the campaign even as it does not target them. It targets unaffiliated individuals seeking a deeper relationship with God within a community that cares for each other, seeks to make a difference in the world and provides support for families to explore faith together.

I find it fascinating that the campaign does not serve any interest group in the church and a noted theologian said it is so vapid it serves no one. In a polarized environment I wonder if this or any other promise can survive. The United Church of Christ has taken a strategy in its television advertising that satirizes rejection but it’s unclear to me if this strategy is actually bringing together people of disparate opinions, or not.

One thing is clear. It is much easier for mainline folks to be critical of any media effort than it is to come up with a creative message that communicates to a mass audience. This pattern of critical media disengagement is part of what has put the mainline where it is today–on the outside watching while others with the gumption to try are actually engaging people.

However, when local congregations in my denomination have implemented the welcoming skills they receive in training events in conjunction with a communications strategy, worship attendance has increased for first-time attenders by 17% and sustained attendance increased by 7%. Moreover, the denomination has seen a decrease in its downward slide. If we were a commercial enterprise we would be celebrating figures as respectable as these.

But there is an even more important story behind these figures. In addition to the nasty email we receive, and some of it is atrocious, we also receive powerfully moving first-person stories of messages reaching individuals at critical moments in their lives, life-saving moments. More than one person has written to say they were contemplating ending their lives and saw a message that gave them hope and they sought out spiritual guidance. This is what the messages are designed to do, reach individuals who are searching for spiritual growth and development and extending an invitation to them to seek out a local United Methodist congregation. Therefore, the messages are not for everyone, and they are not delivered across all media.

We conducted research that identified a significant number of people in the United States who yearn for a community in which they can explore questions of faith compatible with the United Methodist tradition. And we are attempting to reach them in a familiar environment.

One person told us, “I feel as if I have a hole in my soul.” The church is reaching out to people who feel they have a hole in their soul and inviting them to be part of a community in which they can stitch together a life that closes this hole. This is what I mean when I write that we must attempt to do theology through media.

The recovery of a mainline voice in the current media environment will require much more than returning to traditional broadcast media. In fact, audiences are moving from traditional media to alternative media in numbers that are worrisome to executives and editors in traditional media from television to newspapers to mass circulation magazines.

The explosion of new media doesn’t necessarily mean that the mainline should abandon traditional media. When I talked about this with Jeffrey Buntin, Sr. of the Buntin Group, a large ad agency in Nashville, he made an insightful observation. Perhaps it’s not traditional media that is dead, but the traditional uses of media that need to change. I think this is a helpful insight, not only for U.S. but also for global audiences.

We need a more flexible and multi-faceted attitude. The Internet is becoming the medium of choice for information, experience and entertainment.

The Barna Group, a research organization with particular skill in sampling evangelical faith groups, has identified the growth of micro-audiences, those niche audiences based on affinity that are now able to communicate through digital media in ways unknown until now.

Some of the key issues are:

• 
  The power of media and content has radically shifted from content providers to content users (audiences). This will mean messages can’t be pushed, they must pull the audience through engagement and dialogue with the audience.
• Going forward there will be high intolerance for irrelevant messages. The spaghetti won’t stick to the wall.
• To break through the clutter messages will need to be relevant to the interests and concerns of the audience and must be delivered in a context friendly to the audience. That friendly setting might mean a screen on a computer, television, cellphone or iPod. It might mean audio on radio (satellite, AM, FM, streamed on the web), Podcast, DVD, or cellphone. It might mean text messages, email, keywords on search engines. The list expands almost daily.
• And it will also surely mean appearing in the programming preferred by the audience, or with appropriate keywords so the user can find the message sender. It could mean print publications, direct mail, or op eds in newspapers.

The media environment is immensely more competitive, fragmented, and saturated with messages. It is requiring a style change as well as adaptation to new technologies.

Participation in the media requires us to listen to the audience and address its concerns, and not just focus on ours. It requires learning to translate our issues into language that is understandable and inviting to the audience. It’s hard work, hard theological work. And we have not stepped up to the challenge.

It takes strategic communications skills. It’s not a simple, easy thing to do. Some critics of mainline communications have likened it to throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping it sticks. A quality programming relationship, as effective communication, is built on listening, trust, credibility, and listening some more.

The experience I related with a national staff person in a seminary class on media and culture is revealing of the arrogance that a few individuals in the mainline held in the 1970s and 1980s. These few believed they knew what the audience needed to hear and the words in which they needed to hear it delivered. And, if the audience didn’t listen, it was the audience, not the communication that was at fault. Audiences were just too unsophisticated, inadequate or prejudiced.

Turning away from audiences left the mainline denominations without the ability and capacity to communicate with people at a level that meets their needs in daily life. In this absence all kinds of end-time, off-the-wall religious fervor and fundamentalism filled the gap. Whether the middle ground of reason and informed, passionate faith can revive is still unclear.

By the year
2000…advertising
and public
relations will
no longer
be dirty words
for mainline
churches.
General Secretary
Roger L. Burgess
United Methodist
Communications
1990

Unfortunately, Roger, they still are. And so is marketing, and branding. The lack of strategic planning for integrated messaging takes shape in many ways. Research and strategic planning are sometimes denigrated as catering to the lowest common denominator, betraying a prophetic mission, or simply caving in to the whims of the audience.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding of marketing afoot inside mainline groups. Marketing and branding are viewed as manipulative tools of commerce lacking theological integrity. We have the gospel, I was told recently, we don’t need marketing or branding. However, marketing can be informed by the gospel. When conducted properly, marketing is a relationship built on listening, identification of needs and problem-solving.

David Wolfe (Ageless Marketing) says that the vision of marketers must change from being hucksters to healers. He tells marketers that the future will be disorder.

I would add that we are experiencing disorder as institutions don’t serve us well; government is unresponsive; politicians don’t lead; some religious folks behave scandalously; and some corporate executives are greedy beyond belief.

Wolfe says enlightened marketers today describe their role as “healers.” Rather than pitching unwanted goods or services they listen to their customers and offer solutions to the problems they identify. Sometimes, however, I think it’s futile to press this explanation on some mainline folks.

The use of the word “marketing” continues to be unacceptable to many because they identify it with manipulation and commercial exploitation. which are antithetical to the gospel. Too often, this results in messages that are not as relevant as they might be and not delivered in a focused, integrated way to greatest impact. This mutes the voice of the mainline.
I wish, for example, that instead of turning away from the country music audience the mainline denominations had addressed addictions, healthy family relationships, money management and civics for the common good from within the culture of the music instead of merely critiquing it and diminishing those who seek some relief in it and through it.

This is written from Varna, Bulgaria where I’m attending a meeting of the Connectional Table, a coordinating body of the global United Methodist Church. We just concluded an evening of remarkable music and storytelling about the church in Bulgaria.

For centuries Bulgarians have experienced occupation and oppression for more than a score of years. From 1948 to 1990 Bulgaria suffered under the yoke of communist rule and Bulgarian Christians had to go underground to survive. Building were confiscated and property appropriated. Worship and public Bible study put people at great risk. Individual Christians were imprisoned, and no doubt, some were killed.

There were so many moving stories and musical performances tonight in The United Methodist Church building in Varna that I must to think about them before writing in order to do them justice.

But one small moment stood out for me. Our host Bedros Altinun explained that during the cold, hard winter of 2006, the church in downtown Varna offered warm shelter and hot food for the city’s poor in a land that knows poverty. (I was told unemployment runs as high as forty percent in some places.) Throughout the cold winter the church provided hot food and warm shelter for those who had neither.

“We are a church for others,” Bedros said.

These people who have themselves known what it’s like to be set aside, abused and punished for their faith are now expressing their faith by reaching out to those set aside, abused and suffering in the land that so recently abused them.

And then he said, “We are a people of open hearts and open doors.”

For those readers who don’t know this promise, it is the promise of the people of The United Methodist Church made through a media initiative about how newcomers are welcomed in local congregations in the United States. A promise. Not a catchy slogan, nor a tagline, nor a media gimmick. It’s a church going into the world and inviting those who are hungry to come and eat, and those who are cold to come and warm themselves. It’s the way we should welcome every person as an inclusive community.

The profound theological content of this promise was never more clear to me than on this night.

My experience as a communications officer at an international agency in this era (1980-1990) led me to conclude that turf issues also undermined effectiveness. An organization in decline moves into a regulatory and control phase that is more than stultifying, it is self-defeating.

Communications policies in the organization where I worked were not about externalizing information for the good of the audience. They were designed to control and restrict the flow of information, primarily because this was perceived as necessary for survival.

In the absence of an integrated, strategic plan, turf battles occurred over who could release information and about what could be released. This was essentially a defensive, reactive posture to the media and internally it was about control.

But even then new media were breaking down the gatekeeping function. Others, using various media quite effectively addressed our core audiences, often describing us inaccurately and misleadingly. We lost control of our own messaging. If you don’t tell your own story, someone else will, and you may not like the telling.

Secondly, the tendency has been to see the media primarily as a means for advocacy. Advocacy is a critical function but it deserves a more considered and careful approach than it gets, especially in the present environment. To advocate for the poor and disenfranchised, as in the recent immigration demonstrations, is essential and appropriate. It deserves a proactive, strategic approach.

As we seek to understand the teachings of Jesus and follow in the Way of those teachings, the mainline can frame ideas and support important interpretations of faith–the earth is created of God and we are commended to tend it with care, the people of the earth are a global community challenged to overcome mortal enmity, each person is a child of God and everyone should get a fair shake in the global economy, we should care for all children and provide them with education and health care to grow in mind and body.
We believe that followers of Jesus are called to live compassionately, for justice and in service. We believe the world is God’s Creation and, therefore, a good place, and that life is given to us as a gift to be lived with meaning and purpose. We believe that science and theology are complementary rather than mutually incompatible (The Book of Discipline, The United Methodist Church, para. 160. E) and, therefore, we don’t have to check our minds at the door of the church.

These are but a few, and they aren’t radical and limiting, they are inclusive and expansive. That’s the strength of mainline religious communities, they call us to stand with each other, and for each other. They teach us that there is a common good. They have much that is appealing when they articulate these propositions in a way that makes them understandable and inviting. But unless we all want to go down together, we can’t continue to say internally or externally, “It’s my turf, get off of it!”

The article in The Nation by Dan Wakefield notes a lack of consistent, integrated communications planning among mainline groups.

Stewart Hoover writes that denominations are structurally and institutionally bound by constraints that inhibit media production.

1. Production is a creative process, it cannot be done by committee, but this is precisely how denominations make, or defer, decisions.

2.
Production requires money. Denominations have looked at communications as optional. Production expenses often are considered excessive. Hoover says when they do move forward, it’s common for mainline denominations to load expectations “far beyond the wildest fantasies of commercial advertisers and producers,” and experience great disappointment when they are not met. It’s a set-up for demoralization and defeat.

3. He also contends that in the 1980s the mainline denominations lacked a clear purpose for their broadcasting activities. Was it to create awareness? Evangelism? Advocacy?

4. Equally problematic, they lacked clarity about the audience. Should they try to please their current constituency who pay the bills, and those leaders who make the decisions, or attempt to reach those uncommitted and unaffiliated?

Why can’t the mainline rock and roll? We don’t want lead singers in the band. We want everyone to sing backup harmony. When was the last time you bought a music CD to listen to the backup parts?
For these and other reasons, it’s a challenge to get the mainline voice into the public dialogue through media. It’s easier to produce bulletin inserts.