A New Years Thank You Note from The Evangelical Industrial Complex
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We would like to take a moment and thank the untold millions of Christians out there for their unwavering and mindless commitment to our Christian celebrities, perky conference speakers and megalomaniac pastors. Thank you so much for refusing to take your head out of the Evangelical sand over the past year!
Because of you and your unquestioning support, we can continue to invent new catchphrases and slogans every few years in order to sell more conference tickets, books and assorted merchandise. Our marketing people are working tirelessly behind the scenes to invent yet another profitable product disguised as "Christian literature." But let's not stop here, there's still plenty more we can do.
Working together, here's just some of what we can accomplish in the New Year:
We can continue to crank out motivational speech mediocrity with mega-church appeal; with all the theological depth of a one-day-only, self-help workshop run by teenage shopping mall food court attendants.
We can transform the transcendent and Holy God (who spoke the entire Universe into existence) into your personal assistant, life coach and dream interpreter. He doesn't mind at all!
We can normalize heterodoxy and heresy, and turn sound doctrine into the exception-not the rule. Remember, we determine orthodoxy; your job is to happily go along with us. You're AWESOME!
We can give lip service to the Bible while continuing to ignore much of what it actually says. Better yet, we can take a half verse and slap it on a coffee mug and it'll sell!
(By the way, 74.87% of our gross sales come from good old reliable Jeremiah 29:11. In this business we call it "the verse that pays." We could probably sell dirty sox if they had Jeremiah 29:11 printed on them!)
We can give lip service to those great pioneers of the faith (Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Whitefield, Wesley, etc.) while continuing to ignore much of what they actually said. Heck, nobody buys their crusty old books anyway!
We can continue to prop up and defend our growing staff of professional hype-monsters, marketing hacks and bloviating young egomaniacs with pastoral visions of grandeur. "Is he a pastor or is he a rock star?" As long as he can move product, who cares!!
We can continue to produce and market pulsating soft-rock musical drivel with a convincing level of polished sincerity. Moms and dads, do you think that these fresh-faced young musicians are the kind of people that should be dating your sons and daughters? You do? Good! That's all we need to sell more units and increase royalties!!
In order to continually provide you with "Positive and Encouraging Music That's Safe for Your Family" we have a long list of theologically vapid, yet attractive hipster musicians waiting in the wings; ready to replace the next Christian superstar who wanders into sexual indiscretion, biblical confusion or pitchy vocal problems. (You're welcome!)
Thanks again for all of your support! Let’s make this year even better than market analysis is currently predicting!
(By the way, if anyone has another runaway best-seller like The Prayer of Jabez, The Shack, Jesus Calling or maybe even a slightly provocative exercise DVD, please contact us so that we can buy the copyrights and send you appropriate compensation. Thank you, The Legal Team.)
Check out the new and improved: The Messed Up Church website!