Find Your Path, Share the Journey, Make Me Sick

Okay, enough already. I’ve had it with the advertising efforts of the United Methodist Church. They are, in a word, inane. First, we suffered through “Catch the Spirit” in the 80’s and early 90’s. The “Holy Spirit as the common cold campaign” is how I saw it. It was also a grand case of false advertising since you were in fact more likely to catch a cold, the flu or a cold shoulder than you were the Holy Spirit by attending most United Methodist churches. Can anybody sing “nothing but the dead and dying back in my little church?”

Then, just a few years ago, the media gurus came up with “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors.” Yeah, right. Another example of false advertising if you ask me. To be accurate UMCom should have made the tagline “Cold Hearts, Closed Minds, and Locked Doors.” I have sat through far too many worship services in churches filled with the “chosen frozen” than I care to remember. Open minds? Not when it comes to that dreaded four letter word for churches: “change.” And when it comes to open doors, well the last church I served that had “open doors” was in the middle of the nowhere in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and that was 17 years ago. My current church has more closed and locked doors than it has people in attendance (Okay, I am exaggerating a little, but I have been tempted to suggest a name change to “The Church of the Locked Door”). Not even Jesus could get into our church on most days, no matter how long he stood outside knocking.

And now this. I was sitting in my favorite easy chair, watching Battlestar Galactica on the SciFi channel, when this odd little commercial began playing. It had a Buddhist Zen kind of quality to it, complete with pebbles marking out a path. A path to where I wondered. Well, it seems it was a path to your friendly neighborhood United Methodist Church. Imagine that. And then the new slogan for our dying denomination flashed on the screen: “Find Your Path, Share the Journey.” I almost gagged on the Hershey peanut butter chocolate bar I was eating.

Of all the innocuous and insipid things I have seen tied to our denomination, this one takes the cake. Nothing about God, nothing about Jesus. If they had really wanted to use this kind of motif, would it have been too exclusive to have a “Christian” theme for the commercial or perhaps suggest that peoples’ path should be “the way of Jesus?” I mean is that too much to ask for God’s sake? I guess it is, and that’s really sad. I think John Wesley, Jacob Albright, Francis Asbury and the other founders of the UMC would be rolling over in their graves if they saw the kind of weak witness that the UMC was sponsoring on the television airwaves today.

For another perspective on this advertising campaign, see what John Battern on the blog Out the Door has to say here. Thanks to John for the above picture of “Find Your Path.”

Technorati tags: “catch the Spirit”, “Open Hearts Open Minds Open Doors” “Find Your Path Share the Journey” “United Methodist Church, advertising, praying to the Porcelain God