What would it be like to walk into Walmart and be able to buy a music CD from a girl wearing a head-covering? Or to have an Anabaptist author publish a NY Times Bestseller?
How do we best serve people?
Think of a restaurant. How does the owner of a restaurant best serve his customers? Does he offer only water because that is healthiest and he wants his customers to be healthy? Maybe he’ll throw in Coke because he knows that if you don’t like water you probably like Coke.
No! There’s a reason every restaurant in the world that is successful offers a fountain of drinks. To truly serve their customers they don’t just offer what they believe is best, but they offer many options of drinks (Water, Coke, Sprite, Pepsi, Mt. Dew, Dr. Pepper, Peach Tea, Lemon Tea, Lemonade, Sparkling Water, Hot Tea, Hot Coffee, Hot Chocolate, Hot Cider—you get the point) because the focus is on meeting the need of the customer, not on proving a point about drinks.
We get that in terms of restaurants and business, but the same is true when it comes to discipleship and teaching people how to follow Christ.
If we want to best serve others, we won’t just offer the worldview that we prescribe to. In fact, doing that is a perfect recipe for them later rejecting our worldview because they won’t know how to process differences in worldviews when they bump into them. No, if we really care about serving others, we’ll offer a variety of worldviews so that they can sort through and develop a personal conviction that is mature.
But let’s flip this around and think about resources that are being offered to the world–books, music, conferences, video series. Is the Anabaptist worldview being offered?
I’m not just talking about in our churches. Is our worldview being served to the world in the most effective way?
If we care about serving others, we will care about sharing what we believe. Not that Anabaptists are superior to other evangelical Christians. They aren’t! Furthermore, if we care about serving people, we’ll share with them other Christian’s worldviews as well. But Anabaptists do have a valuable perspective on following Christ that should be offered to the world. But we’re not doing it. At least not as well as we could be.
We’re not even doing a very good job for our churches.
Most young people go elsewhere for books to read and sermons to watch. Not that it’s wrong. As I said, there is value in learning from other Christian’s worldview. But if we as Anabaptists have a worldview that is Biblical, God-glorifying and centered on Jesus Christ we should want to transfer that on the next generation and to other peoples. But if we don’t do it well through the means of communication, we won’t transfer it on.
Anabaptists aren’t on YouTube in a way that engages the twenty-first century young people. We’re not on RightNowMedia. Most of our books bore people just by looking at them, much less when they begin reading the poor writing and King James Version language. It’s no wonder young people go elsewhere. And it’s not just because they’re rebellious.
In some ways, it seems that Anabaptist’s look down on those who want to design a book cover with style or communicate creatively so that it sticks with people. We’re all about content, content, content and yet fail to realize that if having good, godly content is king to effectively teaching people, and if we have such great content, we should be overflowing with disciples.
But we’re not.
Content isn’t king.
What would it be like if we offered our “content,” or worldview, or Christian perspective—whatever you want to call it—in such a way that resonated with people? Is that not just as much a part of serving others as providing quality business is?
If we believe our worldview is biblical and worth embracing, than we should care about effectively sharing it with others. And if we don’t care about that, we should reevaluate why the world we embrace such a worldview.
By not offering our perspective to the world, they will not only lose service, but our children won’t embrace our worldview because other’s are doing a better job of teaching theirs.
What if we began utilizing our teachers to help produce different DVD series and small group studies that people (Anabaptists and beyond) could use in their churches, along with the other studies they’re doing. What if we enabled our musicians to pursue their passion so that they could produce God-glorifying music to service others? What about our writers? What if we blossomed young writers to write engagingly and communicate truth with attractiveness? What if we offered these resources in such a way that had the potential of being Bestsellers?
Wouldn’t that be awesome?
You see, it’s not that we’re altogether archaic and irrelevant in our beliefs that more people don’t embrace our worldview.
It’s not that we don’t have anything to offer the world at large. We do! We are relevant. We’re just not doing it effectively.
It’s not that we don’t have good preachers and teachers. I have sat under many men who I wish could produce resources that would last beyond their life. Some are starting to do it. But we need more.
We have musicians. Wonderful acapella groups. But even more than that, we have pianists, guitarists, and small bands that could offer the music world tremendous value through their songs.
It’s not that we don’t have good writers—at least in the female arena. We just don’t have very many.
I know several young men in my generation with talent to write and communicate, but something holds them back. Something holds all of us back from producing over-the-top quality resources to offer our world.
Is it that building houses is somehow seen as more manly and godly than writing books? Is writing viewed as luxurious living and carpentry as true man’s work? (Obviously, people haven’t written much.)
Or is it that we believe to market our product is wrong? Is it that we try to do everything for free, as if somehow that keeps the message pure and us from being focused on the money? Problem is, we’re still focused on money abd we still water-down our message at times.
We don’t call it wrong to work fifty or sixty hours doing construction and getting rich. That was a legitimate way of earning money, we say. But is that an actually biblical perspective? Is it ever right to work for getting rich? And just because you’re producing Christian literature for profit, does that always mean it’s wrong?
Something is going to have to change if we’re going to actually serve our world better through resources.
And if we care about serving people and making disciples, we should want to produce these resources. Is that not a worthy cause to change for?
What is it that will have to change? It’s not that we don’t have the people, the talent or the resources. We do! There’s something deeper. A mentality. What about our mentality will have to change?
