Transforming Sermons: That'll preach

Thursday, December 08, 2005

That'll preach

It looks like product placements have now extended to sermons:

The official marketing for The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe apparently includes a sermon contest, wherein the winner gets a free trip to London and $1,000 in spending money.

The details on whether or not Disney itself is behind this campaign is not clear [Update: It looks like they are]. But can we all agree that product placements in sermons are a bad idea?

Coming clean: I won't say the same for blogs. I added a link here to the ESV homepage in exchange for a free Bible.

Update: Keith Plummer has a brief post with more helpful details on this story at The Christian Mind.

2 Comments:

pgepps said...: We can certainly agree that product placement has no place whatsoever in sermons.

My pastor here in Japan has a young man's love for pop culture, and I enjoy and encourage that. I cringed heartily when he got into a Passion phase, though--he didn't get bought off, but he did mention it in a way that made me uneasy.

Still, he meant well, and I can't understand Japanese well enough to criticize him.

I hope we'll be able to resist the rush of marketing-to-us that is no less than trying-to-coopt-us that is coming. The idea that the greatest fixtures of the culture are going to answer "Is this vile world a friend to grace / to help me on to God?" with a resounding "YES!" scares me much more than a good knock-down-drag-out with the ACLU ever could.

And thanks for the prime linkage! I'm sure your readers are quite capable of backtracking the research for themselves, and using it discerningly--that was part of a Sunday School series I began (which never really took off--hazards of a rhetoric teacher doing College class).

Cheers,
PGE; 5:51 AM, December 09, 2005
Milton Stanley said...: You're quite welcome, and thank you for both your comments here and for posting the fine, succinct post on John 1.; 9:07 AM, December 09, 2005