April 28, 2009
Reinventing
According to the Associated Press Promise Keepers is making another attempt to reinvent itself. The organization filled stadiums in the 1990’s, but changes in leadership and ministry focus caused a drastic slump in attendance. Their leaders began waiving conference fees and bringing in stand-up comics…and now they want to open up the event to women. Promise Keepers must have found the same change-with-the-culture playbook used by many of today’s churches. From a worldly perspective you can’t fault them. Going from a $117 million budget in the 1990’s to a $7.5 million budget in 2009 would drive anyone to the latest membership building methods. Too bad someone didn’t recommend going back to the basics of the Scriptural Playbook.
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Organizations, projects, and even centers of cultural awareness should grow and change just like people do. Everyone was a child at one point in time, and as a child certain issues were new frontiers that later in life became natural habits. The most apparent example, and maybe the least tasteful to mention, is potty training. It was a pretty big project for the child, and when he achieved the objective, for a while it was a mighty honorable accomplishment. But not long after, it becomes old hat enough for mommy and child to focus attention on the next issue of learning, say, table manners. Each objective having been mastered frees attention for focus on the next objective. And so, on through life the child and mommy’s teaching relationship grow and change.
-----Promise Keepers was interjected into a society that was loosing touch with the father’s God given responsibilities. In the early nineties even Christian men were being hammered by a variety of pressures into becoming wall flowers and gutless sheep on the one hand, or were being made into selfish, egocentric, masters, on the other, by their own efforts to resist the pressures to do the former. Promise Keeper’s message was very relevant and God given for what was becoming a serious cultural drift. The response of Christian men was enormous and grew into a new awareness for the basics of what God needs in His men.
-----Although this awareness has not become a monolithic nature among men, the basic objective of Promise Keepers was fulfilled. It reached a tipping point within the population of Christian men that, even though not all men had bought the ideology, enough had in order to make it a natural topic of discussion amongst men and a measure of cultural expectation for them. So to speak, the child was potty trained. But rather than becoming the mommy who then could refocus her training attention upon the next issue, Promise Keepers expected the child to keep his attention upon the diaper he no longer needed. Of course the child’s attention was going to move on!
-----I am not advocating that Promise Keeper’s original message needs to be abandoned. Its audience has simply matured and its message needs to mature, too. It has an established platform to bear another message for the next issue facing Christian men, maybe integrity. It is a shame to see that platform become a mere stage for entertaining a unisex mass.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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