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Why Everything You Know…Is Obsolete!
well….not really!
I keep an article from Inc. magazine online dated February 29, 2016 open in a pane of my Safari web browser. The title is slightly different than the one above, “Why Everything You Know About Marketing Is Obsolete.”
This article is important to much of what we do with the missions network and sharing the God Stories of world missions. Not long ago, billboards and TV ads were among the predominant means of marketing a brand. With people using their smartphones for virtually everything, we need to design things a bit more personally. Five years ago, email was one of the predominant ways of contacting someone. Today, email does not fall into the top 25 means of communication! If we do not “keep up,” we will lose touch with how people want to receive information.
Did you notice the very slight difference in the title of the article on my computer screen and the title off this post? I omitted two words in this post, “About Marketing.” I did so because it is easy to take the truth the article and create a false principle for life. We MUST be careful that we do not begin to believe that “EVERYTHING we know is obsolete.
It is true that much of how we once “packaged” a church service is obsolete. The manner in which preaching is taught has changed many times through the years. At one time, topical preaching was the predominant theory. When I was in college, we learned a deductive expository method of sermon preparation. Others have learned inductive preaching and narrative sermon structures. One seminary in the USA now touts that it teaches “text-driven” preaching.
With all of the changes and new methods we should learn, we can be assured that the Word of God remains unchanged! We can trust it’s truth to be the foundation of faith and practice for all our life. We should never allow others to gently call out to us, “You know ‘that’ won’t work today!” As Paul wrote, we must continue, “in the faith firmly established and steadfast, and not moved away from the hope of the gospel.” (Col 1:23)
As an example, there are many who claim Jesus never spoke about homosexual relationships, thus Scripture does not prohibit them. This is patently false. When Jesus was asked about divorce (Mark 10:2ff), he said, “God made them male and female from the beginning of creation. This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are made one.” If Jesus wanted to condone homosexual relationships or marriage, he could have done so. No, he told us that God has a number of people to be in the marriage (two) and the genders involved (male and female).
Everything we once knew has not changed. We can always trust God’s word, because it does not change and will not! You think about that!
Praying for more to be His,
Reggie Hundley
Executive Director
Mission Services Association, Inc.
the missions network
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