Eating the Meatball Sundae

Seth Godin, one of my favorite business authors, published a book a couple of years ago entitled Meatball Sundae. The idea was that taking two perfectly good items that don't go well together and combining them was messy, disgusting, and ineffective. Like a meatball sundae.

The main premise of the book was aimed at understanding how meatballs - the basic staples of life, things people need - used to be marketed with mass-marketing techniques (TV, radio, print). The sundae - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, permission marketing, viral techniques - is depicted as New Marketing.

Generally speaking, you won't like a sundae topping on meatballs. It's not an accident that all the brands, products, and careers that have succeeded with New Marketing are brand-new and fresh. The New Marketing demands more than a meatball. It insists on a reinvention of the entire organization and the products it creates. Marketing is about the entire package. What you say and do as much as how you say and do.

When I look at church world, I see a lot of meatball sundaes. Not to take the analogy too far, but most churches are offering a smorgasbord of programs rivaling Baskin Robbins 31 flavors. They are taking what they've always done (you fill in the blank), maybe putting new language or a new look on it, and expecting to get something new.

It doesn't work that way anymore. We live in a complicated world now (not that 1950 or 1850 or 50 wasn't - it's just different). And that's my point:

Churches continue to interrupt people's lives with average "products" in the way they've always done it before. Hello? The world changed. Now we need to treat every interaction, product, service, and side effect as an opportunity to connect with people at the intersections of life where they are. Most of that is going to take place outside the walls of "church".

When we realize that the scattered "church" is where life is at, where people are hurting and asking questions and seeking relationships, then we will begin to understand.

Need a spoon?