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Propaganda – The Power of Spreading An Idea

April 26, 2012 in coffee thoughts, occupy the church, opinion, technology with 0 Comments

Recently I was pondering some public relations disasters I’ve been hearing about and observing sometimes from a distance, such as with marketing, or in the Church. As many people do, they had failed to take into account how information on the internet going viral is the same as a lit match, a bucket of gasoline resulting in a forest fire. You can’t put a cat back inside the bag once it’s out. Or to borrow another innuendo, you can’t put the beans back in the can once they’ve been spilled. What’s done is done. This can be good, or it can be bad. You can’t prevent what information gets out there. But marketers can be wise about what they do in reaction to how something goes viral that they may not have wanted going viral.

Once you plant an idea in people’s heads, even if you try removing every instance of it from history books or from any page on the internet that may have hosted it, it is in there and can germinate and blossom. You can’t do anything about it. This is both a hopeful thing, for positive reasons, but can also be a dreaded reality for those who want to stop the spreading of ideas. You can delete web pages or Facebook comments, but you can’t erase people’s memories, try as you might! You cannot contain a fire.

The direction my thoughts are wandering in as I drink my coffee this morning, are mostly with the powerful way ideas can spread. Especially in this day and age of the internet which has given anybody on this planet with access to it the ability to share anything they want or can. With the mobile web and smart phone revolution predicting that more people will use the internet on a mobile device or tablet than on a desktop by the year 2015 (I think maybe even sooner), we are constantly needing to unlearn our methods of communication from the past at faster paces than ever before, and adapt. We can’t underestimate the emerging new methods for information sharing. I was talking with a mobile marketing colleague the other night who told me something like “businesses who don’t have a website that’s mobile optimized or that looks good on a smart phone or tablet are going to be screwed in a year”.

One would think this revolution in world communications, taking place faster than the color TV revolution of the 1950s would be a good thing, but likewise it has just as much capability of being used wrongly as any other method of communication ever known to man has had its abuses.

Recent Propaganda

Not many months ago, the US government unsuccessfully tried to pass the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill, much to the chagrin of most internet users once they finally became informed. In case you didn’t know about it or didn’t realize it when it happened, many websites such as Wikipedia and Google either shut down their sites entirely for one day, or made an obvious splash page directing visitors to information about it so people could be informed of the dangers of this bill. Large quantities of people phoned representatives to urge them to vote against it. Now, an even more insidious bill is being proposed called CISPA. Do your research, Google it and get mad. Very mad. I’m not going to spend much time writing about it because I’ve noticed almost nobody really cares.

Leave me alone, Steve and let me keep my head in the sand where I’m comfortable. OK that was sarcastic.

Historical Propaganda Machines

I’m currently more than halfway through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. The reason I’m taking so long to read it on my Kindle is because it’s almost 1300 pages in print, so it’s not exactly a fast read, but it is worth the money if you’re a student of history like I consider myself to me. That being said, one of the things the Nazi government made sure to do in the 1930s was to implement a department of propaganda, who were in charge of radio, print, film and the emerging technology of television broadcast. They saw to it that nothing was allowed to be broadcast into the German consciousness that was not pro-Nazi. Opposing ideas were not permitted. The Gestapo weeded out anybody from public offices or deep thinkers with lots of clout who had anything to say that presented the government in a bad light. Not just people who were anti-Nazi, but people suspected of not being pro-Nazi enough.

History has taught us many thousands of such political threats were assassinated during those pre-war years. You may not be willing to admit it, but the US government is getting increasingly controlling with their policies, and if there’s anything more threatening to keeping the well-being and control of the masses, it’s a medium such as the internet in which heretofore has been a network used for the free sharing of ideas and worldwide communication. Therefore it’s no surprise that governments bent on doing who knows what exactly, are trying to do everything they can to funnel the internet and turn it into a consumption–only network that, um, they control, which they deem themselves the most worthy to be in control of. For our ”safety”, of course.

But my thoughts are not meant to be going into politics or governmental opposition. Observe this picture and let’s move on in a different train of thought for a moment.

#McFail: Social Media and Preventing Things We Don’t Want Going Viral

Back in January, McDonald’s promoted the hashtag #MeetTheFarmers to get real-life stories about the company’s trusted suppliers and their healthy ingredients. It seemed like a smart idea and initially elicited some good tweets. But then came the big mistake — McDonald’s introduced another hashtag, #McDStories which backfired. Prooooooofoundly. How so? By including the McDonald’s brand, the hashtag became a target for a deluge of negative tweets, far from what the bigwigs at McDonald’s were hoping for, or expecting. It got ‘tweetjacked.’

People tweeted things like:

“Watching a classmate projectile vomit his food all over the restaurant during a 6th grade trip. #McDStories” @jfsmith23

“I haven’t been to McDonalds in years, because I’d rather eat my own diarrhea.” @MuzzaFuzza

“These #McDStories never get old, kinda like a box of McDonald’s 10 piece” @nelo_taylor

And on and on it went, and on some level, still goes.

After one hour McDonald’s cancelled their promoted hashtag, but the damage was already done and if you search you still see evidence of #McFail on the social search site. Their promotion backfired gloriously, and merely cancelling their promoted tweet did absolutely nothing to stop the flood of negative ideas from spreading once they’d gotten out. Heads at McDonald’s marketing department underestimated the risks of this campaign and sought feverishly to plug the holes in this fast sinking ship of a campaign disaster this turned out to be.

What We Can Learn From This

Internet marketers are learning from one of the biggest social media mistakes in recent memory to be even more careful with the risks they take using these mediums to promote themselves. Even if you can erase the evidence that there ever was a campaign that went wrong, you can’t erase people’s memories from remembering that they saw it happen. But you can handle how you respond and react.

If you are trying to control people, you don’t enjoy a free flow of ideas unless they are a free flow of your own ideas. If you are creating a discipling culture, you can reproduce healthy ideas into others who can pass them on into others, and start a real spread of ideas. This results in evolution and revolution. But if you are creating your own ministry, business, empire or mega church, you don’t like questions because out of necessity, “dumb sheep” will challenge the things that are made of wood, hay and stubble. I already shared some of my thoughts on that in my post about why we’re on a crash course towards change.

The biggest thing leaders can do when a problem gets out of hand is to remain humble instead of trying to contain the fire, and only make things worse for themselves. Damage control is easier to do from a place of humility than it is from a place of defensiveness. Whether McDonald’s handled themselves properly in their business context, is a matter of subjective opinion. But when it comes to church leaders, the best thing we can do is ‘lay low’ and remain humble. God can defend us.

At any rate, my coffee is finished. I may explore more of these thoughts later.

Where’s The Jesus Revolution?

April 16, 2012 in charismatic, occupy the church, opinion, prophetic with 9 Comments

I’m not personally a fan of Glenn Beck (nor am I an enemy!) so I had not come across this post on The Blaze recently until someone shared it with me. I had mixed feelings about this news because I didn’t really find it to be news. Brownsville Assembly of God has been struggling with debt for years, ever since the revival during the late 1990s. J. Lee Grady posted something on it in 2006 when then-pastor Randy Feldschau resigned from pastoring the church, and the Brownsville Revival School of Ministry–by then named Brownsville Ministry Training Center–migrated to Louisiana and ultimately shut down. Or morphed into something else. Or… whatever it is exactly that happened to it. That was never really clear to me, as are none of the things that have been explained to me about why things have or haven’t happened over the years connected to the revival.

I originally started writing this blog post immediately after reading the Blaze article in responsive reflection, but then hesitated posting it publicly until a more appropriate time. Then the other day I saw a few of my Facebook friends sharing a video of one of the revival’s leaders making a prophecy and “receiving” what he says in it, that I’m just baffled at how near-sighted many of us have become and how adept we are about forgetting and ignoring failed prophetic words that still have yet to come to pass.

None of the thoughts I’m sharing are intended to be accusatory or finger-pointing at anybody–please understand that before reading this thinking you’re going to be vindicated if you’re looking for fault to satisfy a grudge you may have with anybody involved (when I am not mentioning names anyway, but I am talking about BOTH sides of the split in 2000 and onward and indicate when I’m being more specific). But if I’m going to share these thoughts on my blog and not Fire Press, then I’m not going to hesitate to own what I have to say and take responsibility for my opinions and the questions I’m asking.

Why Is Everybody So Hush Hush About Failed Prophecies?

It surprises me to see that there’s so little out there on the internet about those early years of the new millennium concerning the dwindling of the revival, and the split that resulted in a new church plant and school, which I went to in my early adulthood for Bible teaching and ministry training. I’m more than surprised, actually, that there’s virtually nothing on the internet from somebody–anybody–in this day and age of social networking and the fast spread of information via internet, who have gone public to say anything–whether good or bad! With how many private messages I keep getting on Facebook, and emails from former classmates and schoolmates of mine disgruntled in various ways either in the wake of the revival’s downfall, or disillusioned that there was no “Jesus Revolution” like some of the leaders from FIRE–the school and church formed after the split from Brownsville in the early 2000s–had prophesied. For years I heard it prophesied that something would happen, some “explosion” of a prophetic movement to start in 2006-07; that FIRE school would “train an army of thousands”, but yet more than a decade on still struggle to get a few dozen students to enroll anymore, and BRSM no longer even exists.

This summer when I was back in Canada, I pulled out of one of my storage boxes a copy of the book “Disgracing The Glory: A Review Of The Conflict Dividing The Brownsville Revival School Of Ministry Pensacola” by Marge Wolfe. I literally could not put it down and finished it in a day and a half. I had read it before, shortly after the conflict when I had lived in Pensacola, but this time I was reading it through the lens of a decade that has passed. It shocked me to see how nothing has turned out like any of the individuals quoted in the book, on both sides of the conflict, had proclaimed it would. More on that in a short bit. But with all these prophetic words and proclamations that have been shared publicly over the years, I would have thought it would be easier to find something–anything–when Googling it.

How do such public statements and prophetic words from those days get swept under the rug so easily? Are the millennials who sat under these ‘words’ just going into hiding or denial? Or, have we merely forgotten? Personally, after more than a decade, I’m surprised to only find a few comments in articles like this one from The Blaze or Charisma magazine. Does respect for the leaders who poured themselves into us and shared their vision trump the freedom to ask honest questions, and say “hey, why hasn’t what you said ‘God told you’ would happen, happened already?” There’s not necessarily anything inherently rebellious with merely asking questions, but these are important questions that need to be asked and I don’t know very many people who have or who are.

A “New Jesus People”?

Those of us who went to FIRE after the split from Brownsville in 2000-01, were bombarded with a message of a coming “Jesus Revolution” and all sorts of other things God was allegedly going to do in Pensacola, Florida that would supposedly dwarf the revival of the late 1990s. It didn’t come to pass, and basically we packed up and moved to Charlotte, NC. On the BRSM side of the split, in a few short years there was an exodus of key leaders who had taken over their school (when most of its faculty and staff had gone to the new FIRE), the pastor of the BAG church left as well, and eventually so did a lot of the church members as the Blaze article went on to elaborate. Or course, it didn’t help much that during my first semester in Pensacola was when 9/11 happened, so the prophetic words were in overdrive in those days! ”This was the straw that would break the camel’s back“, “the spark that will ignite the flame“, “the gunshot heard around the world” and other such statements made in the excitement of it all. Revival always follows catastrophes, after all!

Some of us distinctly remember one professor getting up on a Sunday evening in the final months before FIRE’s move to Charlotte in 2003 and said God was about to do something big around the globe and was giving us the next 3-4 years to prepare for it. He even did the usual “I claim to be prophesying, so make sure to test this” preface. It left a lot of us in anticipation. I remember traveling to Washington D.C. for a weekend a few weeks before the 2004 US elections to pray in front of the Supreme Court with red tape on our mouths with what went on to become “Bound For Life“, and I remember the leader spearheading it saying we needed to pray for George W. Bush to get re-elected, because “he would help facilitate” some kind of revolution if he were in office in the next couple years, otherwise our hope would be lost for at least another 8 years. Dubya was going to be a “burning bush” in the White House. These were exciting times! We were history makers!

So with excitement many of us were in anticipation when finally, along came 2006. I remember living in The Netherlands towards the end of the year, trying to find anything online or find news to see if a catalyst or anything had been happening in the world or the prophetic church. The year ended relatively uneventfully in that regard. No worries! The prophet did say “sometime in 2006-07″, so it could be this next year. Technically the prophecy has not failed! Whew! And then along came and went 2007. And then 2008. And 2009. Bush’s second term seemed to be worse than his first and, I don’t remember a global movement breaking out–do you? It seems there’s been no discernible “global revolution” or “Jesus people movement” or “prophetic movement” or whatever various things those of us from those classes and sessions and prayer events were encouraged to be prepared for.

Everybody just…moved on… and acts like it’s no big deal when they move the goal posts and continue to share their latest prophecies–which is really silly since some recordings are still online and I’ve shared one with people who didn’t believe me that anything with timeframes and dates had ever been said. Out of my friends who had moved to Charlotte, and fallen out of favor, many of them–if not most of whom this applies to–have pointed out to me they lost interest with this ‘movement’ when it never came to pass in 2007 like prophesied and they had gotten tired of it and now fellowship with other churches, often still in the Charlotte area. I too was disappointed, but I kept on faithfully plugging away like someone who’d still throw themselves on the sword for the cause of the revolution. Maybe it was still going to happen but we just got the dates wrong. Or didn’t prepare ourselves enough? Yeah, the prophecy couldn’t be false, we just must be doing something wrong. Yeah, that’s it!

I KNOW I’m Not The Only One Asking

About 6 or 7 months ago, I was included in a private Facebook dialogue with upwards of twenty people, when another grad and friend of mine had asked “does anybody else wonder where the Jesus Revolution is?” and virtually everybody involved chimed in and shared prophecies that had never come to pass, or reasons they had moved on–except for one or two people. But I’ve always wondered why everybody was being so private and covert if everybody’s “moved on” and “doesn’t care anymore”? What’s the harm in bringing discussion out in the open and taking a look at where some of us have been, and where some of us thought we’d be by now–when many of these prophetic words were given and stated publicly? I’m not trying to stir up trouble, just asking honest questions.

When my social media friend Carlton writes a series of posts about his time during the Brownsville Revival, and the posts each get over 500 hits (so he’s told me) when I’ve helped share them on my social networks, I conclude that people are out there lurking but not commenting in any way, shape or form to acknowledge they even read the material. It goes to show me there are many others out there asking questions or at least reflecting on our time in this movement. It’s almost as if nobody wants to admit that there were things taught and preached–and in particular–prophesied, that were wrong and have never come to pass. I’m not advocating holding anybody’s feet to the fire or stoning any false prophets, but a decade is a fairly good amount of time to look back and see some of these events and ‘words from the Lord’ for what they really were–a puff of smoke. The emperor has proven to have no clothes.

No Grudge On My Part–Just Asking Questions!

Lest you think I’ve got some kind of axe to grind, I assure you I don’t. I’ve hesitated posting something like this for a long time because I know it will be interpreted by some as a lack of dedication to the cause , or ungratefulness for the influence these people have had on my life in the past, and stuff like that. One of the friends who proof-read this post for me pointed out that if people read this already knowing that I left FIRE International last year for several reasons I’m not touching on in this post, it might hinder their perception from being able to read what I m actually trying to ask questions about. I accept this possibility for having my motives questioned and my tone misunderstood. But the thing is, I never felt like I could honestly ask questions out loud like this while I was still in the group, but had been having questions like this gnaw in the back of my head for the last few years. But now feels like the right time. I have nothing to prove or get vindicated about.

I’ve processed most of my thoughts and disappointments, and I don’t write from bitter disillusionment–trust me. In fact it’s my prayer that nobody reading this post will interpret it as completely negative in tone. Spunky, sure. Negative, no. I’m extremely grateful for my time at FIRE in the past for theological training and depth into the Word of God itself and I’ve learned a lot which will always be with me in my spiritual DNA. As much as I respect and look up to the men who taught me, I also realize they are human beings too, and have missed the mark significantly on many of the grand prophetic words of “global revolution” and revival we naively (or arrogantly?) thought God was going to use us to start. The way I have moved on is more towards an apathy and no longer feeling like I need to help collectively hide the elephant in the room of many consistently failed prophecies, of which the reader can even go get some of them since they’re still preserved in mp3 format on the internet.

“Last Days Generation?” Nah, Nothing New Under The Sun

I’ve also processed my thoughts and shared my heart with older people my parents’ age, outside of revival circles who were saved in the 1970s during the real Jesus People Movement, who tell me they were also told they were a “special last days generation”, that Jesus was coming back during their lifetime, and so on. My parents are acquainted with individuals entering into and already in their 60s who have no retirement savings whatsoever because when they were young adults sincerely believed Jesus was about to return and they wouldn’t live long enough to retire. One man, who I recently befriended, finished my sentences when I told him my journey, telling me this is all nothing new and young people like myself are easily susceptible to teachings and ‘prophetic movements’ that make us think we’re more important than we really are. I mean, I fell for it, so I fully understand why some of my friends and Bible school roommates are disillusioned and have written off anything that looks “charismatic” or “prophetic”. But I will not, and do not dwell on the negative, because I’ve never seen any benefit from going that route. It’s kinda like taking your new girlfriend to the place you used to hang out with your old girlfriend, hoping the old one will see how happy you are with your newfound love.

I guess I’m trying to say I just don’t really care anymore, honestly. But like I said earlier, I’m just asking some questions that I’ve been reflecting on after hearing about the aftermath of the revival.

A Call To Action

To my fellow so-called “revolutionaries” who “were born for such a time as this” : Stop waiting for some vague and nebulous unquantifiable revolution to happen. Go make disciples who make disciples and stop waiting for a “revival breakout” whose wave you’ll ride when it finally gets here. If you start making disciples who reproduce the Jesus in you into others who do the same, you will start a real movement.

Go for it!

Those are all my thoughts I’m willing to post publicly for now and would love answers to my questions–if there are any. I’m just hoping this may give some edification to some out there processing and moving on from things in their own journeys.

Loosely related: if you never listened to it already, check out this podcast I recorded last July or so with Dave Edwards and SJ Hill about God and natural disasters and failed judgment prophecies.

Accountability and Spiritual Covering–Are They Biblical? – Personal Thoughts

March 20, 2012 in kingdom of God, leadership, occupy the church, podcast with 0 Comments

Last week I got to record a podcast with SJ Hill again, and for the first time author and speaker Dr Stephen Crosby, who I’ve been getting to know a bit better through Skype and having had lunch with him the last time I was in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’ve been meaning to have Dr Crosby on the podcast for a long time, and just now finally did one together. I think it turned out great.

It flows a bit out of what Dave Edwards and I talked about the week before, and the whole Mars Hill excommunication controversy. While Google searching for a stock photo or something to use to go along with the post, I came across a written article online that underscored the very reason we’ve felt the need to discuss the things we were discussing today. I found it at this link, which states, without an ounce of Biblical reference anywhere on this particular page, that

The pastor in a conventional church has very little spiritual protection. Spiritually, he is at the top of a pyramid. This pyramid structure makes him very vulnerable. Anyone who has been on the top of a human pyramid knows that it is a very insecure place to be. It is easy to lose ones balance and fall.

Along with it is the following photo:

It was hard for me to tell if this should be treated as a joke or if the author was stating this is what people believe, without encouraging it, but the sad reality is, there is an awful lot of this thinking in the Body of Christ, and I’ve seen it most prominently in charismatic circles. But it still begged the question regarding these ‘pyramid’ views of how spiritual authority in the Kingdom of God and the Church works. Eventually you have someone at the top who is not covered. This is, of course, ridiculous and unbiblical.

That being said, join me this week for a sacred cow barbecue with a couple of insightful authors: SJ Hill, international speaker and author of Enjoying God and previous recurring guest on the podcast, along with Dr Stephen R. Crosby, author of Authority, Accountability and the Apostolic Movement.

We tackle this stuff today: Do we base our idea of accountability on the Bible, or do we do it like a businesses, or even the military? Is accountability enforced or lived out by signing documents? Does the Bible really teach pastors or leaders are superior in any way to the rest of the Body of Christ? Did Jesus make his disciples sign documents when they left all to follow Him?

If anything the Body of Christ is not a pyramid, but looks more like this picture below, and we hope to unravel some of this silliness for as many of you as possible will listen to the show.