WKRP's Illustration of the Absurdity of Gross Commercialism & Materialism
When I was a kid one of the most popular television shows on TV was WKRP in Cincinnati, and the most beloved episode was one that lampooned the gross commercialism of the holidays by secular institutions such as radio stations for publicity reasons. In the episode they dropped a hundred live turkeys out of helicopter to the people below.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!!!" -- Arthur Carlson, WKRP in Cincinnati
The TV "Drop"
Unfortunately, this turned out to be a serious miscalculation. The poor birds plunged to earth, never even having a chance. Their tragic "last flight" was relayed to WKRP listeners by reporter Les Nessman:
"It's a helicopter, and it's coming this way. It's flying something behind it, I can't quite make it out, it's a large banner and it says, uh - Happy... Thaaaaanksss... giving! ... From ... W ... K ... R... P!! No parachutes yet. Can't be skydivers... I can't tell just yet what they are, but - Oh my God, Johnny, they're turkeys!! Johnny, can you get this? Oh, they're plunging to the earth right in front of our eyes! One just went through the windshield of a parked car! Oh, the humanity! The turkeys are hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement! Not since the Hindenburg tragedy has there been anything like this!"
The idea was to create an over the top scenario, that was so ridiculous that people would react to the critique with laughter and think WOW, how society has gone over the top in it's crazy attention grabbing materialism and consumerism.
A Cringe Worthy Article
This week, somewhere in America, there was an article written about new church plants and their attempt to establish Easter traditions. This is an excerpt from the article, all names have been removed to protect the not-so-innocent.
The church threw a huge Easter festival with a helicopter egg drop...
The pastor,,,said he doesn't want to set any traditions, because he thinks he'll always want to out-do whatever he did the year before. While this year's Easter festival had 50,000 eggs dropped from the sky, next year he hopes to have 200,000 eggs and fireworks.
"We're always going to go bigger,"..."Our tradition is to break tradition."...
Today's services will open with a light show and a rock band playing the song "Roar" by pop star Katy Perry. It will be followed by a video and a performance by a spoken-word artist.
Maybe I'm just getting old and out of touch; that is definitely a possibility, but as I read this article there were a few things that struck me, first, this could have been me 15 years ago. For a critique to work we have to see ourselves in it. This young (I'm assuming because I don't know him) leader is doing this because it draws a crowd. It is what people want and if you want to be thought of as successful as a pastor there are a few things you need. You need numbers, you need big buildings, and you need money, but what you want most of all, is you want numbers. You want a lot of people listening to you as you speak.
Drawing a crowd is no mystery. I've done it and many I know have done it. The best way to draw a crowd is to entertain them and their kids. If you pour gasoline on yourself and light yourself on fire people will come to watch you burn.
But here is my question, how in the world does appealing to people's basest consumeristic dreams form the character of Christ in them? I know that when I did things like this I rationalized it by saying, we'll draw the crowd and then we'll teach them the exact opposite - that it's not about them, that they need to live by the upside down values of the Kingdom, we'll call them to live sacrificial, self-giving lives. The problem is that approach does not work.
What you get when you attract people this way is the herd of the superficial that migrate to whatever the newest thing in town is. They come hoping that this consumeristic longing that they have for fulfillment can be met in the newest and flashiest, and when it fails to produce the result that it could never deliver. they are on to the next thing.
This is really the saddest part about all of this. This consumerism that has saturated every layer of the church from the leadership to the smallest rugrat leaves everyone miserable. Pastors hate being Jojo the Circus Clown. After several years of this most of them drop out of ministry, many with nothing left of their faith in God or in people. They do this because they realize what they were knocking out their brains to create was little more than a show. For the average person this way of approaching church life keeps them shallow and when the inevitable hard times of life come they are totally spiritually bankrupt and have no resources to draw upon to help them move forward with God and life.
What Kind of Spirituality Do We Need?
You see the deep sustaining faith that we need doesn't come from light machines, helicopters, or Disney style entertainment. It doesn't come through slick marketing, free coffee, or our favorite pop music that serves as an illustration to a spiritually centered entertainment. Real sustaining spirituality takes (all my hyper-reformed brothers close your eyes for this sentence) work. It requires effort on our part. The first place you are going to need to expend some effort is in developing a biblically centered worldview. This will not come from the sermons on Sunday morning. It means that you need to get in a good class that will take you through both the Old and New Testaments. It will require that you actually read and reflect on the text and will involve discussing the themes with other people at various stages of their walk with Christ. It will require making this type of study and reflection part of your life for the rest of your life. You have to go beyond the surface to the nitty-gritty faith sustaining meat.
It will require that you learn to pray, really pray and dialogue with God through all types of prayer. Meditation, reflection, intercession. worship and celebration, confession, spiritual inventory, thanksgiving all need to be part of the line of communication that opens up between you and the Holy Spirit. If when I say, "You need to learn to hear God's voice" makes you think I'm psycho or that is not possible you need to learn a lot more about prayer.
Community, and I don't mean getting involved in a small group. That can certainly help, but I mean choosing to do life with people. Choosing to walk through conflict and not walk away, learning to really communicate and be a team, a fellowship, learning to extend and receive grace. Being in a place where you are known and known by others. Relationships based on mutual interdependence and the bond of Christ. If you are always seeking for yourself and hop from place to place to place, you will never experience this and never really grow. You will be like a leaky cup that no matter how much water is poured into you, you will never be full.
So What is the Way Forward?
I think for a season our churches will have to become much smaller. I think we will have to realize that in many cases our growth has been false growth. I think we will have to roll up our sleeves and do the hard work of disciple making that does not happen in a factory, one size fits all setting. We will have to stop whoring ourselves out to the culture using gimmicks and the grossly secular to inspire growth. It might mean that many pastors have to go back to being tent-makers or live simpler life-styles. We will have to produce out of our churches leaders with the character of Christ that reach two to three people that they are discipling every couple of years and teaching to do the same. This is not church growth, quick fix, kind of stuff, but the longer I've been in ministry the more I believe it's the real deal and the only way forward.
I'm praying that God will allow us at The Vineyard Chattanooga to structure our church in such a way that it can become a living embodiment of these values and serve as a model for the way forward.
