Joel Rubinson says that, in this down economy, businesses should focus on being a friend to people. People feel the recession is a crisis much like a natural disaster or epidemic. Uncertainty and anxiety reign.
Smart businesses, therefore, will position themselves as friends and neighbors who are there to help. He cites Hyundai’s offer to take [...]

(Quick Thought is a new feature, providing a quick post for you to respond to with your first reactions and thoughts.  The goal is to keep comments short, too.  Maybe a couple sentences but no more than 100 words or so.  Let’s see where the conversation goes!)
“Pre-existing conditions accepted.”
I saw that on a spam fax [...]

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At first I shook my head.  Then I started to laugh.  Finally a co-worker helped me realize he’s evangelizing to someone who is already a believer.
Stick with the whole thing (it gets good about a minute in) and share your thoughts.
(Thanks to Matthew Paul Turner for originally posting this on his blog.)

The Pew Forum recently published a survey on why people change religions from the tradition in which they were raised as a child. They have a handy interactive graph that shows why people switch to and from and in between traditions.
But I’m particularly interested in why people who were raised as protestants leave protestantism. I’m [...]

1998: Korn Rocks
I’ve never been a big Korn fan, but metal music is a guilty pleasure. Over a decade ago, a high-school student near my hometown was suspended for wearing a T-shirt featuring logos of the metal band Korn. It’s a fairly rural, conservative, religious, family-oriented community—the kind of place metal music tries hard to [...]

I just had an inquiry from the Religion Editor at a major American weekly news magazine. She wants to know our take on the phrase “followers of Jesus,” particularly as an alternative to the term “Christian.” 
I see it on Facebook regularly, when some of my Christian friends describe their religious affiliation with a variety of terms that [...]

You’ve probably heard of the famed magic duo Penn and Teller.  If you know them well, then you understand that Penn Jillette, the one that talks, is a big time atheist.  Phil Cooke had this video on his blog where Penn is talking about a recent experience where a Christian gave him a copy of [...]

This is a bit of a follow up to the “What if Starbucks Used Church Marketing” post from last week.  Richard Reising, the church marketing author behind the video, had a post on his blog about a scene from the short where the two visitors were driving into the “Starbucks” and noticed all of the [...]

My grandmother passed away last month at a hospice in Portland, Oregon. Nanna Mary was always petite. But in the final weeks of her life she was tiny, a shrunken version of the vigorous little English fighter who had served in the Royal Women’s Army in World War II and went on to travel the [...]

A few weeks ago I ran across this article on Swerve called What the church should learn from google. Here’s the meat of the post:
There are few user interfaces that are simpler to use than the Google search box. Who would have imagined that the massive scope of the entire Internet could be navigated through [...]