Sell Your Product
The challenge of selling the product is that within our contemporary capitalist society we try to provide a service or product that adds to a person’s quality of life.
There is a hard way and an easy way to do this:
The Hard Way
Establish the high value of the product through excellent workmanship, cataloging returns, worthy boasting, tests and analysis.
The principle here is that we faithfully show a person how much their quality of life will improve if they purchase this product on the basis of what the product does. This is the hard way. It is also the way St. Paul recommends to those who are faithful – not only to maintain their own dedication to the gospel as a product, but also protect its integrity and its promises. Above all else, St. Paul wants the gospel of Christ to deliver everything that it promises and to do so it needs no improvement – but it does need persistent integrity checks.
Regardless of authority hierarchy, those who retain the strongest evangelical integrity will always be the ones who will help people to achieve their highest potential in Christ – and yet even St. Paul recognizes the distinction between a high integrity and low integrity gospel when he speaks of the difference between a priest and a father.
The difference is the integrity that inspires and educates – it may use methods that are unexpected, but never arbitrary.
The Easy Way
Establish the high value of the product through demeaning the competition, exposing weakness in the consumer, creating false idealisms or compounding inadequacies that a consumer subjects themselves to, exploiting fear and ignorance, feed a physiological or psychological addiction.
This is the easy way. It is also a way that the church has used from time to time to try and sell the gospel. Part of the problem that the church faces is that often the simple impersonal facts of the gospel system can be exploited in attempts to gain conversions or whatnot. This is especially the case when it comes to St. Paul’s warnings about who will not inherit the kingdom of God. There are those who are tempted to read negative marketing campaigns into St. Paul.
I offer the consideration that there are times when it is necessary to be a bad cop in order to maintain the integrity of a system – such statements are not to be used as threats or as arbitrary rules set in place to manipulate the masses. They are not meant to be removed from their place in the greater corpus of Scripture. However, in the wrong hands and taken out of context these passages can become part of someone’s abusive ‘easy way’ of marketing the gospel.
Sidenote:
It is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between tough love and abuse – the line is one of the trainer’s intent: whether someone is trying to give life to someone else or trying to manipulate them to do what they want determines the difference between the two. And it should be noted that the life-giving principle of tough love draws its own boundaries with regard to intensity, duration and focus of attention.
In physical body training, tough love builds strength – abuse causes injuries. Spiritual training is no different, BUT here comes the tricky part. As guides, we often learn the mechanics of technique without the knowledge of appropriate context. Granted, there are some forms of discipline that are textbook and are safe to ‘try’ without too much fear of damage – however, when it comes to spiritual life there are exercises that require significant amount of skill and personal mastery to pass on responsibly. I have never been willing to accept spiritual direction from someone who was not able to tell me what a discipline does or what I was likely to expect. In fact, I have generally found that someone who is unwilling to disclose the purpose of an exercise has no clue what its spiritual benefits or detriments are.
Unlike physical training, you cannot immediately and objectively look to the quality of the person giving you the training as a good example of what they have to offer you. Would you weight train with someone who was physically out of shape? Would you listen to a dietician who was out of shape? Unfortunately, you cannot always make the same assertions with a spiritual “master” because more often than not they reflect the investment of their own master.
For example, a monk who appears peaceful in stressful situations may not appear so out of his own self-discipline – or even understand the root of that peace. As a result, he may provide advice that is untested, or may be tested but benefits may be poorly attributed. Likewise, he may know a method but has an inaccurate understanding of what it does.
It is always important to keep the lineage of a spiritual master in mind when seeking advice. For myself, I take heart in St. Paul’s writings, where he is careful to note that the apostolic method of sharing the gospel has nothing to do with ‘schools of apostles’ or of generational enhancements or interpolation. All apostles are considered ‘partners in Christ,’ where the gospel and witness of Christ itself maintains the integrity of the spiritual discipline which follows.
At the same time, I look to priests and fathers who themselves reiterate the centrality of the scriptures in their daily discipline and practice – in other words, they emulate St. Paul and the apostles, who in turn make it explicit that they are seeking to emulate Christ.
And there are brothers and sisters who I rely on who do the same – we occasionally keep each other accountable and concern ourselves with maintaining the integrity of our faith together. The love of those who will keep me Christ-like is more honest than the ‘love’ of those who are merely willing to tolerate anything I do.
The love of the former draws me closer to Christ, resolves conflicts, encourages humility and makes life worth living. The ‘love’ of the latter is emotionally raw, sporadic, tumultuous and goes ultimately goes nowhere.
Examples of the easy way being taken
First of all, these statements below may be true taken in context, but are often exploited without respect to their sources:
- “Our faith is the true faith – all other faiths are false.” (demeaning the competition)
- “Nothing that any human being does is good.” (exposing weakness in the consumer)
- “Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect – there is not a person alive who has not sinned.” (often accompanied by false idealism of what perfection is. In this case, life-giving agape is the perfect attribute, not legalistic compliance. Idealized dystopia is still false idealism – the irony of being ‘realistic.’ Idealists are often inflexible optimists who ignore the past, while Realists are generally speaking inflexible pessimists who are obsessed with the past. )
- “Outside of the church there is no salvation.” (exploiting fear)
- “The holy mysteries/divinely inspired word of God are beyond human comprehension, yet we preserve them in their integrity here.” (exploitation of consumer ignorance)
- “You must do what your spiritual advisor tells you without question.” (exploitation of consumer ignorance)
- “Only those who are committed to us may receive what we have to offer.” (exploitation of addiction – often unrealized)
Why not take the easy way?
Even if the easy way wins a convert, it opens the door to its own failure. By exploiting a person’s susceptibility, this way of promoting the gospel does not strengthen the person or make them more God-like.
To the contrary, it promotes an internal collapse of ego and non-functioning. It exposes the convert to an endless chain of unsustainable and unrealistic expectations. It also encourages them to stay weak in the face of true diabolic activity.
I liken it to someone who earns a relationship by buying someone a lot of expensive gifts. If this is the basis of the relationship, there will always be someone at some point along the way who will have something more brilliant to offer. And what’s worse, when crisis calls, such a relationship provides no security or safety whatsoever. In fact, the prostitute (which is the scriptural entity who follows favors of any suitor who passes by) is consumed by her suitors in her hour of greatest need.
By extension, a convert who is won over to the church by the easy way will find themselves regretting their choice in a moment of crisis, but may likewise not be able to find a path of integrity out from under the advantages they were seduced with.
A practical example
In seminary life, we all had to go through what barely passed for CPE. The program in general was too short for certification, but it did give everyone the opportunity to explore serving in a hospital setting – being there for ICU patients, talking to patients about their recovery and surgery experiences, asking after their needs in the hospital, etc.
Granted, I was not a cradle orthodox, so it would never have occured to me to think that the ability and need for me to pray with someone – or over someone in illness, regardless of faith – was a need that I could not fill as a conscientious Christian.
For several of our colleagues, this was a foreign thought. “Only the priest can do certain things.” There was a convenient block set in their mind – the priest was the central figure in the life of the church, this was what they had been taught from an early age. In many parishes it is either believed or taught that the priest does all of the Christian things that no one else needs to do. Only the priest can bless food. Only the priest can administer holy oil or give holy water. Only the priest can provide any sort of liturgical function – say a prayer service, etc.
There is a comfort in this for the church – granted it allows people to shirk their own responsibility for manifesting the faith outside of church. I can’t bless the food at meals, so therefore I don’t thank God for my food in restaraunts. I can’t perform any liturgical rituals, so I’ll give names to the priest with my prosfora and forget about it.
I could not believe my ears when I remember people complaining about not knowing what to do when they saw people so destitute. I actual remember hearing people in despair because they saw these loved ones embedded in ICU machinery – they said they felt so helpless because they couldn’t talk to them or give them advice. The best they could think of doing was provide the creature comfort of being there.
Why didn’t they pray for them – right there?
“They weren’t Christian.”
“They weren’t Orthodox Christian.”
“I’m not a priest/deacon.”
These were common excuses that I heard. Just a single practical example of how drawing people into the faith by ‘easy methods’ often disables them and their ability to act out the gospel in a way that is consistent with the witness of Christ and the apostles.
Even as a seminarian, I would often get asked to bless food or say prayers at meetings, simply because no one else felt they were ‘able to’ or else they had never even prayed out loud before on their own.
And while I recite the formulaic prayers that are expected, I know it is the simeon of the name of Jesus that blesses, heals and sanctifies, regardless of my status. The work is Christ’s work, but I must do my part to honor that work regardless of whether I have a collar on or not. Again, the easy way is to buy into helplessness – the hard way is put on the lifestyle of Christ and attempt to honor His work on this earth – to serve the needs in front of me and honor the gifts that I am given with righteous behavior.
A person who has no perception (or an altered perception) of the life, opportunities, authority and responsibility they have been given by God as human beings will never please Him, do His work, or see the fulfillment of any of the promises of the gospel. Strength does not come through weakness – it comes through service to authority. The authority you choose to follow indicates the strength with which you shall act.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
© 2006 Jacob Gorny