God's work. Our brands.

The ELCA is rolling out a series of ads to be aired during television’s sweeps month in May. We don’t know how much developing the marketing campaign cost, but the church’s website does tell us about “our brand” and its tagline “God’s work. Our hands.” Apart from wondering why the verbs haven’t shown up for the tagline party, we should ask what exactly is being sold here. We ought to consider what the ads reveal about the church’s core outcomes.

I currently sit on a faculty committee established to design a revised core curriculum for my school. We have spent the better part of the school year sitting around a table discussing research, best practices, trends in hiring and the like. The committee defined and the faculty as a whole approved four core outcomes for all we do at the University: critical inquiry, communication, global awareness and vocation. Our next task is to design a course of study for all students in all majors that will produce competence in each of those outcomes.

When they walk across the stage at commencement, we should be able to say that we have used the tools of our curriculum to create graduates who are able to demonstrate the outcomes in their personal lives, in work, in community and in church. We ought to be able to show to any accreditation team how the curriculum advances students toward those goals. And the outcomes should be self-evident in the very structure of our primary tool, the curriculum. Surely the leaders of the ELCA and its marketing team must have similarly considered what the church’s outcomes are and the tools of the ad campaign must self-evidently reflect those outcomes.

In the March 16 New Yorker, movie director and screenwriter Tony Gilroy speaks of the reversal as a useful trope. A good script will lead the audience on and then flout expectations by reversing the plot. It’s a trope used in the ELCA’s ads. In the first ad on the church’s website, a nice clean table is set with sparkling dinnerware and white linens. A waiter beckons to the diners and we see a crowd of dingy, ragged people. We learn it’s not really a restaurant but Trinity Lutheran Church feeding the homeless and providing them with “dignity” as their first course. In the second ad, a West African woman walks to a school with a child. We imagine she is dropping the child off for a day of learning, but are surprised to discover that the woman is the student. She is learning to start her own business, and the first lesson is “hope.” It’s all beautifully shot and the reversals are clever. It’s all so very nice and self-congratulatory. Who wouldn’t want to connect with such a cool, caring organization?

One of my homiletics professors in seminary used to ask about our attempts at proclamation, “Did Jesus have to die for this sermon to be preached?” It’s a good question to ask about these ads. The crucified and risen Jesus has always been the center of our faith, from the women at the tomb to the boys walking home to Emmaus, from Paul heading to Rome to Luther standing there doing no other at Worms. Yet in these ads our Lord is given what could charitably be called only a cameo role, if that. A cross floating in a bowl of soup in the first spot and a couple crossed pencils on top of a book in the second are the only allusion to the crucified and risen one.

Jesus simply did not have to die for us to air these ads. The cross in each spot is no different from Josephus’ report in Antiquities of the Jews: The token crosses in the ads report tangentially that a crucifixion happened, but don’t proclaim what our Lord’s death does for either the fictional the sinners in the ad or the real ones watching it. Because the ad campaign the ELCA is flogging on its website and will air does not extend the proclamation of God’s mercy in Christ to the godless and sinful (to me), it is not evangelism. Instead it is marketing. In the web site’s own words, it is branding. It comes across as an effort whose goal is the salvation not of people, but of the denomination – a salvation from the ravages of ongoing membership losses and diminishing benevolence. Intentional or not, the ads seek to further the ELCA’s self-continuity by recruiting from the ranks of suburban do-gooders who want to feel good about being connected to important causes.

It’s not as if do-gooding is a bad thing. Melanchthon, after all, dedicated Article VI of the Augsburg Confession to the topic of the new obedience. But if the ELCA’s public witness sent through our digital television sets begins with good works, we’ve done the potential viewers of these ads a grave disservice – as in, we’ve left them in the grave of unfaith. Like any number of well-meaning preachers, the ads assume that we have all the faith we ever need. All that’s needed is a religious version of the US Army’s “Be all you can be,” or Nike’s “Just do it.” These spots are a glimpse into the job description of successful suburban living and meaningful, relevant engagement with the world that the church holds out for us as our telos.

What’s missed are the first five articles of the Augustana. We can’t begin our public proclamation with a pleasant charity’s proposal you can respond to by hitching up your free will and getting on board the justice train. Instead, gospel preaching begins with an understanding of sin and God’s work in Christ to remedy it. If Article IV on justification is truly the article by which the church falls or stands, you wouldn’t know it by these ads. It’s because they are not what Article V calls the office of preaching, the delivery of the law and gospel described in Articles II and III.

Thus, while our branding and tagline, “God’s work. Our hands,” may produce the outcome of more adherents to the work of the social service agency the ELCA seems to present itself as in its coming marketing efforts, they cannot bring a commensurate increase in the numbers of what Luther, in his sermon in Castle Pleissenburg (LW 51:311-312), called the Heufflein Christi, the little band of Christ. We’ve turned our backs on what Melanchthon declared the church to be: the place where the word and sacraments are present in such a way that sinners like me have come to believe.

I’ve begun to wonder whether my not taking a stand for the sake of the gospel in my church hasn't moved God in his great displeasure to withhold true preaching from this church, from this world and from this sinner.