I’ve always been impressed by Apple Com­puter’s mar­ket­ing genius. They are known world-over for get­ting peo­ple to buy their really shiny devices, and today, when pre-orders for the new iPhone have begun, is no excep­tion.  All morn­ing I’ve seen peo­ple tweet­ing about “order­ing the new iPhone” or “fail Apple, site is down” and when I tried to go to apple.com for some­thing unre­lated today, it was run­ning hor­ri­bly slowly.

All of this is because Mr. Jobs is an expert at cre­at­ing buzz and gen­er­at­ing intense excite­ment for sep­a­rat­ing peo­ple from their cash. He knows how to design, pack­age, adver­tise, and secretly work on new things in a way that draws inter­est and pro­motes con­ver­sa­tion.  And I can’t help but ask myself in all this, “why can’t the Church do this?”  Cer­tainly, Chris­tians hold the keys of the uni­verse and it’s our job to com­mu­ni­cate the most impor­tant mes­sage in His­tory to the world!  Why can’t we gen­er­ate enough buzz that peo­ple shut down our web servers?  Why aren’t peo­ple stand­ing out­side the church doors for hours to make sure they get a great seat?  Why aren’t peo­ple stand­ing around the water­cool­ers dis­cussing what God is doing in their hearts instead of the last Lost episode or today’s World Cup game?

I know the answer resides in people’s hearts, and in the fact that the gate to eter­nal life is nar­row, but shouldn’t we still make every attempt to gen­er­ate buzz for it and try to inspire those around us to seek Christ?  I think the last thing we should do is mar­gin­al­ize our abil­ity to reach those around us, even if it might not look as shiny and cool as the world’s solu­tions.  Besides, the peo­ple who had the lat­est 3Gs few weeks ago now have the old model… thank God His King­dom will never crack, grow old, or have an expi­ra­tion date!

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