I Hated Christmas

The meat was gone. Celestin was not willing to serve borrowers. We were doomed. Another painful Christmas. But, oh well, this was just another of those many Christmases. We we were getting used to them, or so we thought.

As soon as I arrived home from the butcher's shop I started crying. Papa had talked to Celestin the night before. He had explained to him how he (Papa) had not been paid by the tea factory for almost three months. He wanted to borrow some meat for his children for Christmas. It was well known in the village that every butcher had some meat left at the end of the day. But not this Christmas of 1987. I was 12. I arrived at Celestin's butchery at around 6:00AM. I was the first customer to arrive. I waited. I watched Celestin and his friend Paul grab the bull by the horns, lay it on the ground, and skin its thick brown coat off. It was Christmas in the making. I couldn't wait. Paul grabbed the thigh by its bone and ran a three-cord string through it. He mounted it on a tall eucalyptus tree and started chopping at it. By that time many children had arrived. Some with their parents, others with their big brothers or sisters. I started wondering how many of them had money and how many were here to borrow a kilo or two. Paul started chopping off pieces of the Christmas delight and laying them on a brown, and slightly rusted, weighing scale the size of an old record player. One kilo, two kilos, one after the other. He chopped the thigh to the bone and was ready for the next one. Mrs. Celestin was seated quietly on his three-legged stool pocketing old and new shilling notes from the shoppers. If the whole thing could be sold in one day, Mr. and Mrs. Celestin would walk away with more than fifty thousand shillings. That was a lot of money back in 1987's uganda.

The third piece of Christmas was gone and customers were still arriving- with lots of cash, mostly old notes stacked away for 12 months in preparation for Christmas. Others were waving new notes from the bank. These were mostly teachers and other civil servants. I waited. The sun began to turn yellow. The clouds gathered. Paul chopped. Paul chopped away the last piece of Christmas. Mrs. Celestin pocketed the notes. The meat was gone. Nothing left for the borrower.

I looked around to make sure I was not missing anything. Tears started to form in my eyes. A big and dark lamp of sadness grabbed my throat. This was one of those Christmases where the poor had no chance to celebrate.

I slowly eased out of the happy crowd and headed home. My mother saw me first and knew something was wrong. "What's up muneza?", she inquired. "You don't look happy". And how could I. The greatest day in the year 1987 was slipping away. And the greatest gift was gone. Gone to those who had the money to spend.

Last year when I was buying some meat at QFC in Portland, Oregon I received a sad flashback of the events of 1987 and the years following that. There is still so many children in Africa reliving my pain. And that is why I created Christmas in Africa. Last year I raised $15,000 with the help of Africa Mission Alliance. We purchased hundreds of gifts for children who, like me, were planning to swallow their sorrow and let another merry Christmas slip by. But not this time. Will you join me this Christmas to put a smile on a child's face? Go to http://www.africamissionalliance.org and join me to make this Christmas memorable for a poor child in Africa.

The Naked Future of "ME"

Integration. Systems. Collaboration. Synergy. Specialization. Jack of all trades is fired. Gone! Welcome global village. You can’t eat alone. The world is in my house- wirelessly. Real-time news SMSed from Africa. A riot on a Kenyan street is captured live on a street-side vendor’s Nokia and SMSed into BBC’s newsroom in 23.5 seconds. The rain is moving towards the next village and a neighbor sends text to warn farmers. No gas at station 14- all traffic please redirect. A Facebook group against Mugabe spreads faster than measles- not that both are the same- or are they? Quit holding onto ideas- or ideologies. Sharing is the new personal property rights. Byebye intellectual property rights. Welcome creative commons and open source. I am having lunch at Pizza Antica in Tiburon, CA- check my twitter. I am leaving quite a trail. Invasion of privacy? What are you talking about? Talk exposing your own privacy. I saw that skeleton in your closet on Myspace. But I don’t care. Skeletons are out for sell. Will you buy mine? That’s the naked future of “ME”.

Social Entrepreneurship vs. Social Innovation - Social Innovators

When did you first hear about social entrepreneurship or social enterprise? Not long ago. Now, according to Stanford’s Social Innovation Review, social entrepreneurship is old talk. What really matters today is social innovation. This really leaves me wondering if we are just playing around with words. But Stanford being Stanford, they almost got me convinced. If you have been following, I covered a discussion about social entrepreneurship with some definitions from trusted sources. I wrote that a social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. At my time of writing, which was about three days ago, I was trying to understand the mechanics of social entrepreneurship when someone dropped the bomb saying social entrepreneurship is old business. And that’s when I went hunting for the real difference between innovation and entrepreneurship, which brings me to this discussion.

Let’s indulge ourselves in the definition of innovation. Innovation-: the act or process of inventing or introducing something new: new idea or method: a new invention or way of doing something.

Looking back at the definition of entrepreneurship, it is so apparent that social entrepreneurship cleans after social innovation by organizing whatever it is that has been proposed as the way forward of solving a social problem. Truth is both innovators and entrepreneurs are needed. But it seems entrepreneurs act on the propositions of innovators. Innovators first. Entrepreneurs next.

Social Innovators

Social Innovators

Enrich the Poor by Impoverishing the Rich?

“The poor will always be with you”, a friend of mine quoted Jesus in my face when I told him I was turning down a lucrative job offer to work with the poor. His understanding is that the poor are necessary for the economies of the world to make sense. My friend is not alone. His opinion is shared by economist Thomas A. Garrett (see publication at http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/re/default.html). Garrett believes that an individual’s ability to largely determine his level of economic well-being encourages innovation and entrepreneurship. He ads that economic studies have documented a positive correlation between entrepreneurship/innovation and overall economic growth. Garrett’s analysis suggests that a redistribution of wealth would increase the cost of entrepreneurship and innovation -- the result being lower overall economic growth for everyone, regardless of income.

The truth is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Income statistics show that the real income of the wealthiest five percent of households in America rose by 14 percent between 1996 and 2006, and the poorest 20 percent rose by 6 percent. This curve is bound to continue for a long time. And the big question is: should
Governments put in place political policies to even out the amount of income individuals are permitted to earn? In other words, should money be redistributed to benefit the poorer members of society, and should the rich be obliged to assist the poor? Is financial egalitarianism the ideal for human existence, or is income inequality a necessary evil? Did the rich become rich by exploiting the poor or gaining unfair benefits? Are redistributive practices justified?

What do you think?

One Penny Per Tear

A picture of a malnourished child in southern Sudan flashes across your fourteen inch screen. A soft voice in the background tells the story. A few more pictures, a couple of video clips, a tear here and there. We are done. That’s all. Our program is efficient, effective and necessary to change the world.

Humans are emotional and caring beings. A picture of a suffering child somewhere in southern Sudan will definitely raise emotions, cause a tear here and there, and open wallets. What emotion can’t do however is demand accountability. There are so many problems in the world that we can throw our money at. But in the end, it may be just that; throwing money. Recently I talked with a non profit leader about goals and strategic planning for his non profit. He told me he can’t really do goals because the change he is making cannot be measured in terms of goals and plans. “Wonderful”, I said. “But what about efficiency? How do you measure efficiency if you don’t have goals?

A lot of non profit leaders run away from setting goals because they think that this kind of stuff is for the big guys in for-profit businesses. A friend of mine remarked that passion does not always come with ability. That for sure is true. But we have to remember that we can’t change the world by blowing wind. If we are to change the world, then our non profits, social entrepreneurs, and philanthropists of this world must learn to plan. One man once said that if you are failing to plan then you are planning to fail. I believe that the structural design of any successful nonprofit is no different than a for-profit company. In both cases, management needs to identify goals and mission, develop a focused strategy, and build efficient organizational structures. This is the only way we can measure the change our money is making in the world. Helping orphans in southern Sudan is a noble cause but results can be very difficult to measure unless we have a definite plan. I believe that its high time donors demanded amore strict accountability system within their recipient organizations. Donors must be looked at as shareholders in their nonprofit of choice. And as such, they must demand that their funds be allocated efficiently and effectively.

As we tighten accountability measures in nonprofit organizations, I believe we will achieve so much more than we would by tossing a coin here and there in response to our emotions.

Old Wolves in New Sheep Skin

Corporate Social Responsibility Vs Social Entrepreneurship

I find it hard to justify the idea that social entrepreneurship should include for-profit businesses. I actually have a problem starting with the very definition of social entrepreneurship. Like it or not, Wiki is here to stay so I will borrow their definition of social entrepreneurship. “Social entrepreneurship is the work of a social entrepreneur. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. Whereas a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return, a social entrepreneur assesses success in terms of the impact s/he has on society”. And here is my problem. If a social entrepreneur measures performance based on social change, then we do have a conflict of interest here. In order for a business to survive it must turn a profit. But social entrepreneurs are not about profit. Their gig is social change. As someone who has worked in the non-profit sector for 15 years, I find this concept of marrying philanthropy with pure business quite amusing. One of the hardest things to do in a non-profit is to put profit above social change. And these two tend to be in conflict with one another. Now if you are talking profit and social change in the same sentence you must be an expert at oxymora.

My take is that unless social entrepreneurship is entirely non-profit, there is no big difference between this buzz and the old boy called corporate social responsibility (CSR). I will borrow Wiki’s definition of CSR to support my point. “Corporate social responsibility (CSR, also called corporate responsibility, corporate citizenship, responsible business and corporate social opportunity) is a concept whereby organizations consider the interests of society by taking responsibility for the impact of their activities on customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, communities and other stakeholders, as well as the environment.” This obligation is seen to extend beyond the statutory obligation to comply with legislation and sees organizations voluntarily taking further steps to improve the quality of life for employees and their families as well as for the local community and society at large.” Wiki continues to say that “the practice of CSR is subject to much debate and criticism. Proponents argue that there is a strong business case for CSR, in that corporations benefit in multiple ways by operating with a perspective broader and longer than their own immediate, short-term profits.” Now this last part is what really interests me. If corporate social responsibility is good for business, then the so-called social entrepreneurship is really the same old CSR wolf in sheep skin. In my opinion, we must separate wolves from sheep otherwise we will find ourselves feeding wolves with lamb milk. I am okay with social entrepreneurs who plow back profits into their social businesses. But a social entrepreneur who pockets the difference is no different than the old boys. Just in case you can’t read between lines, what I am saying is that all social entrepreneurships should be non-profits. Period.

$154 Billion. Free Money for You, Come December 25

One hundred and fifty four billion dollars can be yours to spend on the charity of your choice, come December 25. By sacrificing one day in a year, we could put enough money in the hands of all non profits in America to operate for six months without raising a penny. That includes all non profits that help orphans and widows, do disaster intervention, save dogs, cats and gorillas, protect the environment, and many others. If all Americans decided to skip Christmas and use the money to save the world, we could have enough money to run 22 countries in Africa debt free for a full year.

If all Americans gave one Christmas away, we could have enough money to pay off all the debt for the whole continent of Africa.

In two months from today, on December 25th, Americans will spend money equal to what it would take to feed four million orphans three meals a day for ten years.

Merry Christmas everybody!

How to Catch a Runaway Dog

We had a very wayward dog when I was growing up. Twelve hours out of twenty four we had her tied up on a rope so she couldn’t bite people during the day. We let her loose at night. But once in a while she got off the hook during the day. Very hard to catch her when she did. But my mother knew how; get a bone, dry or not, and wave it in her (the dog’s) face.

This is true not only for dogs. Marketing uses the same concept. Research and development use the same concept. What do people want? How do they behave? How can we reach them? New might be good but not interesting. People resist the new. A good salesman will sell the new using the old language. “You will love this”, he says to an 84-year old woman; “my grandma loves it so much”.

This lands me on the page where I wanted to be. Social entrepreneurs. Change agents. Non profits. A very meaningful non profit had mercy on us when we were growing up in a refugee camp. Someone from far away working with an international non profit came to our refugee camp and found us playing a soccer ball made out of banana fibers. He was so moved that he went home, collected money and sent 100 soccer balls to us. I was 10. But the new soccer balls had one problem. They bounced a lot and we played on dry gravel, sand and soil. We didn’t find bouncing balls very useful in our game. So we decided to make some changes. We started by reducing the air inside. But that too did not work because the thing could not get off the ground. So we did what we knew how to do best. We sold the balls and bought plastic bags. We had always dreamed of making balls out of plastic bags. Plastic bags were way cooler than banana fibers. But we never had money to buy plastic bags. So we upgraded using the money we made from our new imported soccer balls. I think we sold the balls for a 10th of what it actually cost our friend to buy them. But who cared. We saw the balls as an opportunity to get what we had always needed, not what someone else thought we needed. I wish our friend had asked. He would have changed our lives for way less than he paid

The Communal Challange in Africa's Economic Development

The African society is highly communal. This presents both an opportunity and a threat to economic development. Advantages of a highly communal society are many. Collective education and information sharing is possible by utilizing existing informal leadership structures. On the other hand, highly communal societies can become a liability especially where structural differentiation is not possible and community subunits are not organized for mutual benefit through functional specialization and interdependence.

The four factors of production as we know them, land, labor, capital and entrepreneurship, interact within a productive society to create wealth. In Africa, however, especially in rural Africa, some of the factors of production are not developed or there is just so much of one factor in relation to the others. To ensure economic development, the four factors of production need to be developed into meaningful production linkages. In order to do this, a few changes must take place. First there is need to increase differentiation of production units into patterns of functional specialization and interdependence. Second, new mechanisms of integration, coordination and control should be developed. Thirdly, there is need for structural changes to the key features of society such as cultural values, goals, and distribution.

Countless efforts are being made today to bring about economic change in Africa. One of the most popular ones is micro finance. Large amounts of funds are being pumped into small villages to improve food production, crop yields, and healthy living. What such interventions lack though is the facilitation of structural adjustments which must go with any financial or moral support. There is need to create inter-village linkages to foster productivity, differentiation and specialization. The economy needs to be looked at as a sum-total of individual specialized units. Eeconomic interventions should put the responsibility of, and resources for, development into the hands of villagers who manage their resources through collective responsibility. In order to create wealth, technical expertise using existing structural/cultural arrangements must be strengthenedThere is need to create economic activity through providing access to external market linkages between neighboring villages.Fostering cross-village communication by expanding general social norms, and creating functional and responsible democratic associations could be an added advantage as well.

French Electronic Music

Justice, a French electronic music duo consisting of two friends, Gaspard and Xavier, warms up the crowd on a chilly French evening. French being my fifth language, I can hardly put two words together to understand what in the world these two are singing about. I don’t care as much for French music any ways as I do for French poetry. On this warm western evening though, watching Justice from my SONY VGN, I know I should not be dreaming in French; unless, of course, I am Julie Delpy or Adam Goldberg in “Two Days in Paris”. Of course I can’t stand a whole two days in Paris unless my smart pumpkin has fallen off my shoulders.

Back to Justice. I am stuck with a wrong name (Justice) singing the wrong kind of music (electronic music) in a wrong language (French) from a wrong city (Paris). But the name of the band arouses an impressive imagination. The name “justice” reminds me of the unattractive sounds that we all make to the children of the world; children suffering from Malaria, Kwashiorkor, HIV/AIDS; children from war-ton countries striving to keep their skin on their bones. We sound like a French electronic music band when we kneel down beside our beds and say the Lord’s prayer, wishing well those far away, as if they are too far to be touched. There is French electronic band music in each and every one of us. It sounds unpleasant to the hungry and sick listeners. And we love to play our depressing electronic music. We play it from the pulpits, in our political speeches, in our leftovers tossed in collection baskets with everlasting noises. We play too much French electronic music we have lost touch with real music- real lyrics from the classics of love and the country ballads of tenderheartedness.

There is a song in each and every one of us. That song is calm, kind, tenderhearted, compassionate, and caring. It’s the song of humanity. The peaceful sound of “I will do something to end the suffering of the world”.

Sun-Kissed

I have been sun-kissed. I am talking about a pre-birth tan. And that gives me a foot forward to complain about my fellow sun-kissed friends especially in the west-most part of the sun. And without measuring melanin content, I believe I am a few ancestors away from big foot in Zimbabwe. So when he hurts I hurt. When he hurts others I cry. And he has been making me cry non-stop. And then he sarcastically calls for a meeting, the like of which journalist Heidi Holland mistakably calls a “father and son” reunion with Brother Morgan. Come on Heidi! Do you have a father?

Dogs and Sheep

A friend of mine once asked me if carrots grew on trees. Which reminds me; some time back I was driving through a local town in Hawaii and came across a herd of sheep. A friend of mine who was riding with me wondered why some one would keep all those dogs in their backyard. But that was not far from a good friend of mine that has just returned from a mission trip to Rwanda who was asked if he saw gorillas in town. I mean, come on! Gorillas in town!!, are you kidding me! Now wait when you hear this: “Do you eat cooked food in Africa?” Okay, that really got me. I mean, fire was discovered in Tanzania by a caveman a few years ago in African history. Are you wondering whether cavemen eat cooked food? The answer is yes. Of course we are so many years ahead of caveman living. Little wonder we eat cooked food. But seriously, what’s up with our education system? I mean, why are our kids getting slower and slower about world events and simple visual recognitions? Did I say kids? I meant, why, including more than kids, are we so… uninformed?

A few days ago I was talking to a western investor (and by WEST I mean from Jupiter) about real estate investment in Kampala Uganda; Talk about 50% ARR (Annual Rate of Return). The gentleman looked me in the eyes with an absent-minded-I-know-the-answer-kind of look and said “what about Joseph Kony? Is it safe to invest in a city where Kony’s soldiers vandalize houses everyday?” I know you were going to laugh at this. If you didn’t laugh, please stop reading this because what follows is probably going to annoy you even more.

I called this note YELLOW AFRICA because of my affinity to bananas. My wife knows I can have bananas for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Did you just say MONKEY? Please!! Anyways, yes, bananas. According to my banana preservation technique, there is a time in the life of a banana when it is the sweetest. It’s normally between the stickiness and the stinkness of a banana. Imagine if a country like Rwanda was a banana. Maybe we could call the time period between 1991 and 1994 “sticky Rwanda”. But ten comes 2005 and 2006. Close your eyes before you read this because your Jupiter-mind will not believe it: Percentage change of Rwanda’s GDP growth rate was a stinking 477.78%. In the same year, United States’ percentage change in GDP growth was a sarcastic -27.27% (we are talking minus in terms of negative growth. It’s like walking to heaven backwards).
Now let’s talk future. In 2007, United States’ GDP growth was, you got it, Zero. What about predictions for 2008? Yeah, that’s right: minus (negative) thirty one point two five percent (31.25%) “ungrowth”.

Now going back to our sticky Rwanda, 2007 figures show that Rwanda’s GDP outgrew one hundred and twenty two (164) countries of the world at a whopping 11.54% growth rate. Now that’s what I call a really-yellow-banana ready to go. And we have so many of them in Africa. Lots and lots of them. But our Jupiter minds have not been programmed to see them. We miss them. Everyday. Until we hit rock bottom. Then we wake up to India, and China, and Taiwan, and Singapore… and it’s too late to jump onto the boat. Fasten your seat belts. And if you would excuse me, we are off to we-told-you-we-were-really-ripe-for-investment land”.

Tell Me Today About Tomorrow

One of the most widely read Christian books is “Purpose Driven Life” by Rick Warren. Why is this book so popular? Is it because people really want to know what plan God has for their lives? May be. May be not. Knowing the future has been the fascination of many generations. In Africa we have fortune tellers who use all kinds of tricks to prove that they can foretell your future. Horoscopes are popular in the west. There is a deep desire in every man or woman, for gender sensitivity, to want to know the future. Why do we want so much to know the future? I believe that human beings don’t like surprises. Not knowing what the future holds leaves us to a game of chance and sheer trust that the future will be what we expect it to be. To take the surprise out of life we spend hours and hours consulting books, fortune tellers, horoscopes, give it a name. Thousands of books have been written on how to determine your career. Psychologists boast knowledge of your future by analyzing your talents and passions.

What surprises me about these future speculators is not so much that they exist, but that very few of the predictions they make actually happen. You see, to me, something that is not a hundred percent accurate all the time cannot be truth. Truth has to be a hundred percent true at all times. There is no such a thing as partial truth, lopsided truth, some-how-true truth, or not-yet truth. Truth is true at all times. And that is why I believe that only God knows what our future holds. He is always true to himself. David, talking of God, says, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you understand my thought from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down, and you are intimately acquainted with all my ways.” David understands the futility of trying to figure out his future. If God has known him from before time, then the same God knows where his life is leading. Only God can know our future. He has always known our future. The psalmist says, “Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, you are there. If I take the wings of the dawn, if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, even there your hand will lead me and your right hand will lay hold of me.” God knows our life map. He has the power to change your course if he wanted to. It doesn’t really matter what the psychologists say. A friend of mine used to stutter a lot until God called him to become a preacher. He could not believe it. His first sermon in the pulpit was a nightmare. And so was his second, and third, and forth, until the church he was called to pastor started to grow. The church grew from one hundred people to a thousand in less than two years. He still stutters and the church is still growing. You see, the psalmist understands this when he says, “For You formed my inward parts; you wove me in my mother's womb. I will give thanks to you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are your works, and my soul knows it very well.”

So why worry about the future if someone is taking good care of it? Shouldn’t we all be minding our present business and rejoicing in the fact that someone has our best interest in mind? I think we should.

How Lessons Learned from Culturally Relevant Marketing Can Transform Evangelism Patterns

Here in the city of Portland, one of the largest American crusade evangelists is organizing a mega citywide outreach to win souls for Christ. His present campaign beats the marketing strategies of fortune 500 companies. He has people. He has money. He has volunteers. Everything is free, it is non-profit money. Everything is donated so star evangelist can afford to put on such an expensive show with no responsibilities to shareholders or venture capitalists. This is a safe business for church people. But just how much result can we reap from citywide evangelistic gang-bouts today? Is the harvest still the same as the early 80’s and 90’s when Billy Graham last wooed masses with his soft-spoken accentuation and a hard-pressed call for repentance?

One of the leading US church consultants was asked how he could describe Christians in terms of evangelism today. “I am frustrated by church people letting Billy Graham do the job for them,” he said. I can’t agree more. Billy Graham is an old man who is skating straight to heaven with angels waiting for him at heaven’s door gates. When are we going to stop waiting for Billy to come to our town and do our evangelism? When are we going to stop thinking of evangelism as multitudes gathered at crowded stadiums? Somewhere along the path, Christians need to realize that evangelism is more than a big bang task to accomplish. Somehow the light must come on for us to see that evangelism is a way of living our Christian life.

Today’s advertising patterns and marketing culture trends call for even a more urgent change in the way we do evangelism. The big crusade billboards do not work anymore- ask any average business owner in town. Television and radio commercials are losing grasp of the ever changing culture. Which crutch are we going to stand on?

I believe there is so much that churches can learn from ordinary business marketing trends to engage today’s culture with the message of Christ. It is not new information that consumers today are rejecting traditional forms of marketing. The artificial and highly scripted marketing campaign is not popular any more. Multinational corporations are becoming “the enemy of the state” so to say. The public has developed high distrust for the outrageous promises delivered by corporations on TV and other media. Consumers are sick and tired of advertising spin-offs with tactical story telling that settles for no more than empty promises. This kind of disgust is affecting not only marketable goods and services but the message of the church as well. Anything that encroaches on the public private viewing freedoms is received with contempt. This includes television evangelists and large Christian meetings infomercials

The public is turning to a new form of buying called “peer-advised buying.” Peer-based sources of information that help the public to exchange observations about experiences in the marketplace are becoming popular. The marketing manager at “3-Foot Corporation” (fictitious name) is no longer the message controller. The new marketing manager is the consumer. The consumer is found everywhere from a high school football team to a local pub. The marketing mass has become highly fragmented. Numerous sets of subcultures are screaming to be reached in their own way and on their own terms. In brief, the consumer determines how you do advertising. In other words, in the new marketing world, culture determines who buys and sells. This kind of consumer advised buying is setting trends for all kinds of public groups including church membership and product purchases.

Savvy corporations today are flocking to culturally relevant marketing. This form of marketing however does not produce quick-fix results like the mass media has always done. Its strength lies in the power to embed the products in the minds of the public, thus producing greater returns in the long run. People flock to what promotes their culture. The new culture is what people watch, read, and share. Only those companies that maximize on this knowledge will be able to reach the post mass-marketing consumer. This shift has so many implications on the way we do evangelism today. Evangelism will have to be culturally relevant to break through the clatter of subcultures that are sheltering themselves from the outside world. You find them everywhere; from myspace and facebook groups to Google Orkut communities. Rumor has it that these subcultures are creating all sorts of goods and services including the time-old economic systems such as barter trade.

One of the ways that corporations are making use of culturally relevant marketing is through product placement. Product placement advertisements are promotional ads placed by marketers using real commercial products and services in the media. Product placement appears in plays, film, television series, music videos, video games, books etc. This and many other culturally relevant marketing techniques are going to set the trend for advertising in a post mass-marketing generation. This is something that churches can borrow from. What about incorporating the message of the gospel in a movie and pay placement fees? Movies have the power to reach more sheltered houses than any international evangelist will ever step into.

So here you have it. If you are so passionate about reaching our generation for Christ, it is high time you started breathing in their space and reach them on their own terms. Or you can stick to the same old-time prophetic finger-pointing and miss the whole deal of God’s ways. Jesus was always relevant to his culture. He spoke farming to farmers, fishing to fishermen, and laws to lawmakers, Pharisees and Sadducees.

Are you ready to drop your guard and REACH?

Amon Munyaneza

Are You Available?

One of the biggest catastrophes of our time is that no body is available.

Fathers are not available for their sons. They are busy trading stocks on Wall Street from their high ceiling offices downtown. Mothers are not available for their daughters. They are busy working 12 hour jobs and shopping for the next fashion trend. Husbands are not available for their wives. Wives are not available for their husbands. Dog owners are not available for their dogs. Dogs are left in the hands of dog sitters. The owners can’t walk their dogs anymore. They hire dog walkers. They are not available for their dogs. Your local phone company is not available for you. They have left you in the hands of some outsourced customer service representative who you can’t figure out a word that she says. People are simply not available

I am really not so bothered who is and who is not available for me. What bothers me is our audacity to not be available for God. You would think that people would fear to log off and sign out of God’s care and love. But this is not true. People are not available for God either. Today’s God has become a God of convenience. He is an accessory to our daily costume of restless living. We pick him up when we need him. We put him down when we don’t need him. God’s will is that you be available when he needs you. I know we all want to be important. We all want to be needed. And it is okay to want to be needed because that is why God created you. God made you so you can be needed. God did not create anyone that he did not want to be needed. Everything God created was needed and is needed. But to be usable you must be available. If you are not available you are not usable.

Today my challenge to you is that instead of spending sleepless nights wondering what God wants you to do with your life, just spend more time with him letting him know you are available. You will be shocked how much he can do with you when you become available. Those coincidences which are actually not so coincidental will start happening more often. The earth will start aligning itself to meet your needs. You will release the power of the divine to work on your side. Things you didn’t know existed will start becoming alive to you. I am speaking to you from experience. Ideas and dreams are everywhere. Think of people who have made a fortune. Garbage collecting companies have made millions disposing of other people’s trash. Ideas are everywhere but you need to become aware of them. The only way God can breathe on you those life changing ideas is when you become available and tune in to him through prayer, reading his word and walking with him everyday in holiness and humility.

Are you available?

Desiring God: Desiring Goods

In our last discussions we labored to show that branding is about differentiation, competition, and segmentation. Marketing is about satisfying desires and needs of a target audience. The mission of the church is to build a universal community of believers characterized by unity, fellowship, mission, and an overriding desire to build the kingdom of God here on earth. Thus Godly desire should be geared toward those purposes for which the church has been created. From the above and the following discussion we are starting to see how church branding and marketing principles can affect the mission of the church.

In his book “Consuming Religion,” Vincent Miller discusses the desire for consumer goods and Godly desires. Miller writes that our society is marked by a massive deployment of infrastructures and practices aimed at eliciting, inciting, and sustaining consumer desire. But what do consumer desires have to do with Godly desires? Or put yet in other words, what does Madison Avenue have to do with Jerusalem? One could try to distinguish these desires by their objects and argue that consumer desire is different from Godly desire because the former is focused on material things. Miller however adds that consumer desire does not start and end in the desire for material things. Consumer desire exploits more profound longings- a desire for more than just goods. If a church concentrates on giving people what they need, it misses the big point which is that people are obsessively consuming things because there is a void within them which can only be satisfied by God.

As Augustine puts it, consumerism tempts us to become entangled in the “love of low things,” which causes our advance to be impeded and sometimes even diverted and we are held back from our pursuit of “higher things.” Thus, rather than turning our hearts towards what can truly fulfill us, we squander our love on petty objects, rendering ourselves unclean in the process. For Augustine, we should and, in the end, can only enjoy God. Nothing else can fulfill our desire. The myriad cultivations of consumer desire seem quite literally to encourage us to enjoy lower things. But lower things cannot satisfy us. The human person can never be fully satisfied with finite objects and, as a result, is constantly searching for more.

Thus, however unwisely man may choose what to set his heart on, he will eventually be spurred on to seek more, since man is made for fellowship with the divine, and only that will satisfy the profundity of man’s desire. Every church should strive to sell this idea- that it is only God who can satisfy.

Consuming Sacred Bread at Individual Tables

The calling of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost began to produce what 1 Peter calls a “race, priesthood, nation, and people” (1 Peter 2:9-10), a worldwide multicultural fellowship of witnesses. The people of God, in all their cultural diversity, may be understood as a universal community of communities. The particular church community is, in an essential sense, an expression of the universal church. Thus specialization and segmentation advocated for by church marketing compromises this universal personality of the church.

In his high priestly prayer, Jesus set out the purpose of the church as the community of communities:

“I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in me through their word; that they may all be one; even as you, father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me. The glory which you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as we are one; I in them and you in me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that you sent me, and loved them, even as you have loved me.” (John 17:20-23)

This prayer is a central New Testament passage defining the purpose and relatedness of the church. It teaches us that the dimensional connectedness of the church is not merely a matter of institutional unity, and even less of efficiency, stewardship, good public relations, or effective growth strategies. The oneness spoken of here is a matter of obedience to the Lord of the church, obedience that centers on his mission, “so that the world may know that you have sent me.”

The church is not only a community of communities, but it does share in the Trinitarian relationship of Father, Son and Holy Sprit. As Metzger notes in his book “consuming Jesus,” one of the ways the communal and commissioned church of the triune God repositions itself as a divinely communal entity is through the Lord’s Supper. The supper illuminates and intensifies the profound reality of participation: the whole church is present in each assembly, and each local assembly is present in the whole through Christ, their head. In its own community and beyond, each church is to exist for the whole church, not as a specialized enterprise that only cares for its own existence.

This communal nature of the church removes the emphasis from the organization and places it on the collective relationality of its members. The church as an organization must serve the purposes of the triune God within the body. Thus the mission of the church goes beyond self-preservation to becoming an instrument for building community. The church’s goal is not serving the organization’s own ethics and purposes, but leading the organization to fulfill a more universal purpose as a representative servant of God on earth. The church works for the ultimate order of manifesting the glory of God, of becoming a people of God, of serving the purposes of God, and of fulfilling the plan of God.
A community-centered people of God must orient their desires not towards their personal good feelings but towards the broader category of the will of God on earth; which brings me to discussing personal desires as compared to religious desires.

Until next time,

Happy new year to you all!