The Easiest Way to Kill a Story

Stories at their heart are relatively simple things. All good stories involve a very basic progression with innumerable variations:

1. There is an initial state or situation
2. There is a challenge or problem or struggle
3. There is engagement with that challenge, problem or struggle
4. There is a degree of resolution to that challenge, problem or struggle.

This is news to no one. No one bothers to read, watch or listen to a story like this:

• There was once a happy family, they lived happily ever after
• There was once a drunk, he drank himself to death

In truth the story of the drunk would probably be more interesting.

The Offense of Promotion

In our market vision of the world there is one type story that resists this basic formula of story, it is the promotion. Much advertising tries to promote whatever it is they are “selling” by turning it into an interesting story.

• Most of the best advertising of all time manage to turn a product into a story usually by turning it into a solution.
• Even more effective advertising turn a brand into a story (I’m looking at you Apple) by turning it into either an implicit hero or helping to cast the consumer as the hero. Check out this Apple ad gone viral.

While people (as with this Apple ad) will willingly pursue promotion that is a story, and in fact take such things into their identity (“I’m a Mac user because Apple gets me…”) most of us avoid promotion. I’m personally not excited by Apple but I love Tivo. Why? Because it helps me watch TV by limiting the amount of advertising I’m subjected to.

Generation Cynical

There is nothing like promotion done poorly to turn us against the ambition-market-share-seeker. Our pervasive market economy, and the way we as a culture have turned everything into a consumer good, even God and the church, has turned an entire generation cynical against promotion, institutions and those who are “just trying to share a good thing”.

“Yeah right’ is our catchphrase.

Promotion as Church: The Seeker Service

In the 1980s and 90s the merging of business practices with the church was supposed to help the church “create a safe space to hear a dangerous message”. After Willow Creek declared it had cracked the code on the boomer generation is then set its ministry sites on “Generation X”. News flash, it failed.

I knew this when I began encountering more and more of that generation in the wild who ran away from churches like Willow like I use Tivo to skip over bad commercials. These churches were “inauthentic”.

Now there are innumerable ways that Generation Cynical (not limited to Xers or Millenials by any means) succumb to promotions of various stripes and their “authenticity” can be just as fabricated and institutional as boomer professional earnestness but the point here is that promotion as usual will generally illicit poor results.

“Mailing All That Paper is Wasteful”

Before The Banner was free-mail-to-every-CRC-household publication is was a regular subscription magazine. A number of factors were involved in the Synodical decision in its transformation to what it is today.

• The subscription model for The Banner like that of just about every other print magazine was failing.
• The CRC was feeling and fearing the loss of denominational loyalty
• CRC agencies were increasingly doing their own individual “development” (fund raising) via mailings and promotions. CRC agency givers within the CRC are often segmented. Some people are passionate about World Renew, others CRWM, others CRHM, BTGH, etc. Few people passionately give to multiple agencies above and beyond ministry share giving. This lead to a lot of promotional materials being mailed to CRC households from the individual agencies. This lead to the predictable sub-culture stewardship complaint “How much does it cost them to mail me this “slick”, glossy material!” The subtext was “their wasting money” more strikingly felt as “their wasting MY donated money” via ministry shares, whether the person gave or not, especially when they received promotional material from an agency they weren’t enthusiastic about or were going to support anyway.
• The bright idea was hatched to use the Banner as a promotional piece. To save the magazine that was dying (with a whole generation of magazines) in the subscription model the CRC would kill two birds with one stone. Save The Banner, freeing it from the subscription model by wedding it with the promotional model. The Banner would regularly promote the work of denominational agencies and ministries. The implementation of this promotion is more subtle than it was before this decision, but it is information sharing with the intent of eliciting support and promotion nevertheless.

My question is, was this a good idea given our highly developed emotive promotion filters and triggers?

The Kitchen Table

In last summer’s brouhaha over The Banner one of the images that is continually promoted is The Banner as denominational “kitchen table”. This is the place that we as a community discuss vital issues to us. It’s not hard to see that there will be tension with this vision if The Banner is at the same time a promotional vehicle for denominational agencies. A showcase and a kitchen table serve very different functions.

For a number of years now I have participated in a small online community dedicated to discussing CRC issues called CRC-Voices. Voices has its own reputation especially among older CRC pastors who tried it out in the early days of the Internet when listserves were one of the first tools for interaction. It was a space then where people were figuring out for the first time the strengths and perils of this new openness that the Internet affords. Today in some ways Voices is like a small community that was once a large community, a few regulars who know each other though constant contact and at this point have enough tradition and trust between each other to speak freely. One of the things I’ve learned from that community is that if you’re going to have interesting and productive conversation (what the kitchen table metaphor intends to point towards I think) you need a few elements

• Real diversity of opinion: You need difference, struggle and challenge to create a compelling story
• Trust: you need to believe that the other who opposes you might have something worth listening to and engaging with seriously
• Hope and Love: something needs to keep you at the table or in the room even when emotions are running high, you feel the other is a danger and a threat, but you can’t or don’t want to divorce yourself from the conversation or community
• Light: the conversation or even fight is productive enough that you believe it is worth engaging in not only in terms of convincing your rival but in giving you valued insight of the other or the situation for the future.

The Internet is a space for interaction more than promotion and the where space is created for these healthy tensions good things can happen. Often the don’t. In my experience Internet treatment of religion (as well as politics and brand competition) usually boil down to three things: outrage, insight and tribalism.

Figuring Out Extended Community in the Internet Age

The Internet “disrupted” the magazine and newspaper worlds. The crisis of The Banner is partially due to that reality. The Internet is also a tool that can help an extended community but we are, as the CRC leadership has be reiterating numerous times, in a period of adaptive change, this means that we are feeling our way forward rather than mapping it because there is no map.

In discussing “What should The Banner Be” on Voices  (you have to subscribe to the group to read the discussion thread) a number of people suggested that the Banner should be a tool for the CRC to put its best foot forward. I think the way that most CRC people imagine this is done will be interpreted by many, especially the young, as simple, offensive, inauthentic promotion. If generation cynicism gets just a whiff of this they will avoid it like I avoid TV advertising. While the wedding of The Banner with agency promotion may have made economic sense in an effort to save a magazine in an age when magazines were going extinct, it may kill it anyway.

Communities need Space for Story

The CRC for its own health and future needs a space to tell its own story, to experience its own story, and to write its own story. There will be multiple spaces in which that story will be experienced, told and written. Will a “magazine” be part of that? Maybe. But one thing is clear, we’re going to have to feel our way forward rather than map it.

On my cell phone in my pocket I now have instant access to

• News in text format: blogs, NYTimes, RSS reader,
• Podcasts
• Audiobooks
• Video on Youtube or Netflix or Hulu
• Kindle books
• Social media: Twitter, Facebook, CRC-Voices
• Logos Bible Software, commentaries, texts in Greek and Hebrew, theology

The Banner competes with almost everything else in the world. Why should I spend any time reading it at all? Why would I? Can its writing compete with the great classics? What draws me to care enough to read, write or speak? It will probably be my tribe that is part of my own story.

Does The Banner have a part to play in this? Part of what The Banner has is a part in our larger, communal story. The Banner has consequence (enough still to elicit a fight at Synod 2014) in terms of our historical story and that brand could be leveraged into the future if we figure out how that might work. To do so, however, we’re going to have to come to terms with promotion, how it can be done, its shape, where it can’t or shouldn’t be done.

• Promotion cannot feel inauthentic. We’re going to need a space for honesty about our brokenness and failures
• We are going to have to engage our disagreements in a healthy enough way that is both honest and combative.
• There will need to be space for outrage, insight and tribalism even for combative sub-tribes among us
• We’re going to have to create and strengthen identity among us despite and through conflict.

What role The Banner may play in this is yet to be seen. If there is a role it will be found more by feel than by institutional imposition. It must feel authentic. It must create or strengthen identity probably through conflict in a healthy way. It must help find us as it also creates an us to be found.