Father, Son and Holy Spirit - buy two, get one free

Recent perusal of a list of Britain’s top supermarket brands made for interesting reading. No surprise to find Coke – as in Coca-Cola – at the top; 2 and 4 were both bread, Warburtons and Hovis respectively. Some of the other high flyers were both surprising and fascinating, however: Whiskas at 14 ( and, yes, this does mean that we spend more on cat food than many people in the world are able to spend on food for themselves ), Muller Corner at 16, Cathedral City at 21, Red Bull drinks at 27, Danone Activa at 28…I could go on! What struck me forcibly was the evident link between the success of a product and vigorous advertising campaigns. I have always been reasonably skeptical about the power of advertising, but this list has made me rethink my position.

This begs the question of the ways in which churches and other communities of faith could / should be advertising themselves. A few Sundays ago, I mentioned the ‘God is still speaking’ campaign, organized by the United Church of Christ in the US. ‘Never place a full-stop where God has placed a comma’ became one of the strap-lines (quoted here in an anglicized form! ), and the campaign’s ‘Bouncer’ and ‘Ejector’ ads on TV became known nationally for their edgy, youthful appeal. Were they successful? Well, the fact that I am writing about them here is indicative of a degree of success, and the URC nationally is looking carefully at the material and its underlying philosophies.

So…is such an approach necessarily dangerous and compromising, an ‘American-ism’ that we can do without – or is such visibility the logical consequence of our belief that we have ‘good news’ to share, the consequence of confidence renewed?