Well, it's finally over.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008, after about two years of campaigning, a man was elected to serve as the 44th President of the United States. And unless you just got home from the former planet Pluto, you know that that man is the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Hussein Obama II.
There's no doubt it's an historic occasion. Americans have elected their first African American President. Of course, based on his voting record in the Senate, it seems as though Americans have elected their most politically liberal President and naturally, a lot of Evangelical Christians are not exactly happy about that fact. But I find that there was more history made in this election than just those items. And most of us Evangelical Christian-types would do well to note: Barack Obama understands something about getting his message across to the people. I heard some of the pundits talk last night about how Campaign ‘08 was unlike anything that had come before it. I had noticed the same thing.
The Obama campaign captured the imaginations of many. There’s no doubt of that. Many young people and African Americans especially seemed swept up in the notion of making history in the voting booth. I got a stronger sense of this the day of the election than I ever had before as I was driving down Hwy. 98 in Durham. As I raced along the rain soaked asphalt, my attention was drawn to a tent set up outside a church along the road. Braving the misty rain of that Election Day morning, two African American males were selling shirts to people in the neighborhood. Their tent bore a sign reading “Custom Obama Shirts for Sale.” And they actually had customers! Buying T-shirts! IN THE RAIN!
That got me thinking: When had I ever seen people on the side of the road selling custom-made shirts for a political candidate? And not selling them as just one product alongside other popular designs! Just selling shirts for a politician! Furthermore, how popular has someone or something got to be for people to stand around in a tent on a dreary day selling paraphernalia on the side of the road? And how much more popular must that one or thing be for people to actually show up to buy the merchandise? I knew there was very little chance that John McCain was going to win the election but at that moment I had a concept of why. Senator Obama and his campaign managers had captured the hearts of people, something that Senator McCain had not even come close to doing.
Throughout that day and into the night, I thought about all the stickers, signs, posters, internet banner ads and such I had seen for the Obama campaign over the preceding months. They had seemed strange (even occasionally disturbing) to me and unlike any Presidential campaign before. There were so many slogans: “Change We Need,” “Our Moment is Now,” and especially the one word, “Hope,” stand out among others. There were the line drawings of the candidate’s head, smiling and depicted from a low, seemingly heroic angle, these often appearing above the aforementioned “Hope“ and awash in light blue cream and red (and looking to me more than a little like propaganda images of revolutionary Communist-types like Lenin and Guevara). There were the very retro-looking red and blue Obama/Biden bumper stickers (which I believe were mainly put out by the ultra-liberal moveon.org). And there was that now famous (or perhaps infamous) “O” logo—so simple, so professional, so sleek—with the stripes of an American flag draped through the center appearing as a path to the future. Each of these designs spoke to different segments of the population and most of them were undeniably cool-looking. And they conveyed so much in so little.
But that was a small portion of the overall approach of the winning campaign. The Obama camp seemed to be able to use every weapon at their disposal to get the word out. You could hardly go online to any popular websites without seeing banner ads prompting people to register so they could vote for Obama. In the last days of the campaign, the Obama camp outdistanced McCain on the number of phone calls made to prospective voters in battleground states, many of the calls made by live operators. Toward the end, while McCain was focusing on how Obama was going to screw up the country, the Illinois senator’s message was more positive: categorizing his opponent as desperate and his supporters as heroes getting ready to change the world. And everywhere you looked--online, on television, on T-shirts--you saw his face, smiling reassuringly or looking determinedly off toward the horizon. He always seemed confident, personable, filled with charisma. It’s hard not to admire the effectiveness of it all.
Well, all of these thoughts led me to another: How is it that a presidential candidate can inspire so many people to action when the church in America can’t even seem to inspire its own members--much less the world at large? And that’s when I realized that a lot of what Barack Obama has been doing is what we as believers need to be doing if we ever want to reach out to a culture that has almost completely written us off as irrelevant. So here are a few ministry lessons I think we as Christians seeking to glorify our God in the world can learn from Obama:
1. BE POSITIVE. The first and most important thing is to offer people that one word that has become so attached to Barack Obama, thanks to the geniuses that marketed his campaign: HOPE. I know it’s easy to look at all that’s going wrong with the world (election results included) and complain. Believe me, I am as guilty as the next guy of grumbling and mumbling (and more guilty than the two guys next to him) but nobody likes to hear people grouse or offer grumpy, unsolicited advice all the time (believe me, I’ve learned that the hard way!). Most people see where things aren’t so great. They want to know where they can look for hope that things can be better. Who better than believers in the Lord Jesus Christ to offer that hope? Why should we be so negative all the time when this world is not our home? We have the hope of heaven. We have the Holy Spirit living inside of us which means we have a source of wisdom and comfort that this world can never comprehend. And we have God’s Word that assures us of the truth behind those things we hope for. That’s so much better news than what any politician can offer to hurting people. So why do we act like all the news is bad all the time? We know who wins in the end and it isn’t some senator, whether from Arizona or Illinois. Nor is it the forces of darkness, despair and death.
2. BE PERSONAL. Secondly, we need to personally reach out to people. If we can find the disenfranchised and show them that we love them and we want them to be on our team because God wants them on His, God will be glorified and people will be drawn to Him. It’s not enough to sit back in our churches and hope they come to us; we need to go to THEM! That’s what Jesus did. That’s what Paul did. Barack Obama spent lots of time courting more liberal voters in traditionally conservative states--even in conservative districts of some of those states. He reached out to working class folks who are afraid of losing their jobs. He went on the Michael Baisden Show by phone the night of the campaign. He spent time in his own phone banks in towns he was campaigning actually calling people himself. If a candidate for President can meet people where they live, why can’t we? Seems to me Paul had something to say about that (1 Cor. 9:19-23). Why do you think Obama’s campaign put out all those different slogans and poster designs in all those different styles? Why did he even bother campaigning in historically red states? And why can’t we as Christians start focusing on how we can reach people—even if it means we have to change how we do things—rather than what makes us comfortable? This convicts me as I’ve been learning it in my youth ministry. Oh, and even more convicting, perhaps? Part of being personal means we actually need to LISTEN to people tell their story rather than trying to figure out how we can fit the Romans Road into every conversation. You don’t like people that don’t even know you telling you what you should or shouldn’t be doing and thinking, do you? Why would someone who doesn’t even know Jesus feel differently about that?
3. BE PROFESSIONAL. Why is it that it seems like every form of entertainment or culture has an inferior “Christian” alternative these days? Well, actually the reason is obvious and sad: American Christians have, by-and-large, much more interest in providing themselves with “inoffensive” entertainment than they do with actually reaching out to a lost world and those marketing to Christians know Christians will buy their stuff even if its sub-par. Of course, you try to sell the less-than-pro “Christian” stuff to the masses and they just laugh at you. And why should we expect otherwise? Oh, how I long for the days when something done in the name of God was done more effectively than anything else out there, when Bach would compose musical masterpieces to God’s glory or Michelangelo would paint and sculpt for chapels and cathedrals. The church of today, it seems, thrives on doing things so much less attractively and effectively than the world (for more on that, check out this website: churchmarketingsucks.com). When you take all of Obama’s campaign paraphernalia and set it alongside his opponent’s, it’s not hard to tell that a WHOLE lot more money and effort went into the campaign that actually won the election. There was pretty much one style of McCain poster/button/sticker. Obama had multiples put out by his national campaign and several more that were being done by various interested parties. The slick “O” logo was, by itself, better thought out than any visuals I saw on the McCain ticket. And so much of the design work in Obama’s camp was based as much on advertising for magazines and MTV as it was on traditional political advertising. The result was McCain/Palin signage made the Republican ticket look like a throw-back compared to the “cutting edge” symbolism of the President-elect-to-be. And related to this idea of professionalism…
4. BE PLUGGED-IN. As believers and ministers, we need to understand something about what’s going on in the world around us and how best to communicate to that world. It’s safe to say that the Republicans had already been successfully categorized as “out-of-touch” with working-class America and youth culture by the time the campaign started and Barack Obama capitalized on that but if anything, the Obama camp lengthened that divide while creating an image that Senator Obama understood so much better where Americans were coming from. If there was a way to get the word out, his campaign seemed to know how to utilize it. Commentators were already talking about how politics had changed forever with this election before the first return had even come in, with a new emphasis on the realm of the digital. The Obama banner ads were everywhere online. There were multiple domain names for websites where facets of the Obama campaign would be illuminated. Facebook groups and fan pages sprung up like weeds, some official, some entirely nonprofessional. Al Gore may have invented the internet, but no candidate has used it as effectively as Barack Obama. Why is there even still a church in America (including my own—but I’ll work on that when I get a chance) that doesn’t have a website? Think about it: When was the last time you cracked open the old yellow pages to find anything? And if you have done so recently, I bet it was because you weren’t close to a computer or your iPhone didn’t have service where you were.
5. BE POSITIVE. No, I didn’t miss something. It’s just that I don’t think I can overstate the importance of this quality as it relates to ministry. So positive campaigning gets a second mention. If we think scaring people into the Kingdom works in 2008, we need to go grab a venti espresso and WAKE UP! No one wants to hear Christians tell them how bad they are. I’m sorry. It just won’t work in a day and age when sin is seen as a manmade category that only exists in a few closed, superstitious minds. But that’s not to say people don’t realize things are messed up and that they need help. And we have HOPE for them. Real hope. Not the savior of liberalism but the Savior of the world. So let’s stop complaining and start encouraging! Honey, vinegar and flies—you know how that one goes and it’s still true.
Having said all this, I don’t want to leave you with the wrong impression. Because I think there are a couple of major things the Obama campaign has done that we need to keep from doing at all costs. And that leads me to the two negative lessons I have to offer from Barack Obama’s campaign (not the only negatives necessarily, just the only ones I’m offering):
6. BE HONEST. I’m going to have to sound a little more biased here but really, does anyone who voted for Obama have an idea of what he’s actually going to do in office? The only thing I know he’s promised for sure is signing the Freedom of Choice Act which would take away all restrictions against abortion, including repealing the Partial Birth Abortion Ban. He’s tentatively offered a pullout timeframe for Iraq but I think it’s safe to say that that’s subject to change. Beyond that, most of what he’s offered has been based on himself and his opponents personally—such as charging that the McCain campaign would try to point out that he Obama did not look like all those Presidents on our money, which Obama later promised was not playing the race card (I’ll let you decide on that one). He also talked a lot about more about how the Republicans had screwed up than he talked about how he would fix it—although, as previously noted, he did a great job of building up the hope in voters that he would be able to do something to change things. But as believers, we need not only to offer hope but to be frank about the contents of the hope we have to give and why it matters. We have nothing to be ashamed of. “Bait-and-switch” evangelism belongs more properly to the counterfeit groups—the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the like—who always want to focus on secondary issues and who don’t give the full picture of what they believe until their convert is already secured in their camp. Be real and be honest. It’s what so many people are looking for and what so few of them expect, especially from the church.
7. BE HUMAN. The final lesson from Obama is also based on a negative of his campaign. If there is one thing that everyone seems to acknowledge about campaign Obama ’08, it’s that the candidate seemed to be sold as some kind of superhero or savior. The cult of personality can be a powerful force in politics and occasionally even in the church but it’s usually not a good idea for believers to spend a lot of time promoting any leader other than Jesus Christ or any agenda other than the Scripture. For one thing, no one but Jesus can live up to that level of expectation or scrutiny. I think back to the fallen TV evangelists of the 1980s. They had polished their images so much that they seemed like helmet-haired angels of God but the damage that was done to the Kingdom in those days after they fell remains incalculable. The word “televangelist” still means “shyster” to most people to this very day and no preacher, even if he’s on TV every day, wants the “T” word applied to him. But if we approach people with the notion that we know we can fall and fail—that we still mess up but God has changed us on the inside—that can communicate to people. That brings me to the other reason the “supersaint” image doesn’t work: People just don’t believe it. They may be desperate enough for change that they believe the hype about a political candidate but (hate to burst your bubble) most people stopped believing in our hype a long time ago. It’s time to offer some truth instead of hype. And shouldn’t truth be what we’re about anyway?
So that’s it: the lessons I learned about ministry from Barack Obama. Many more could (and hopefully will) be added to the list. To that end, what lessons would you add? Do you think the church could (or should) take cues from such a radical Presidential campaign? Or am I just off my meds (again)? Leave a comment. Let me know.
