WHAT THE CHURCH CAN LEARN FROM DUNKIN' DONUTS

Being a great lover of coffee, I love this post.
It's a great article Paul McCain linked to on Cyberbrethen by Michael Kelly, a young adult resource specialist for Lifeway Publishing, the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, so, again, he can't be accused of being a stick-in-the-mud, doctrinal, unloving, too Lutheran or close minded type of person. If these folks are saying things like this, maybe we folks need to listen, carefully.
“Dunkin Donuts is creaming Starbucks right now. Dunkin won the taste test, it’s 3 times cheaper, and the company is actually expanding whereas Starbucks is closing stores every day. Dunkin is about to roll out a $100 million marketing campaign to trumpet the results of the taste test and try and put the dagger into the heart of Seattle. Some people are saying that Starbucks has seen its better days, and that this is just the beginning of the downhill slide.
I would propose that the church has something to learn from Dunkin Donuts.
The reason we have something to learn is that we too often try to be like Starbucks. We try to be slick, trendy, and hip. We try to be a place that is non-threatening and easy to come to. And when you walk in, you see beautiful people in holy jeans and black glasses, all looking very intellectual and hair-frosty. Additionally, we try to make church a low-demand environment, much in the same way Starbuck’s is. It’s low demand in that even though the basic premise of the store is selling coffee, some people don’t even go there for coffee at all. And nobody’s going to pressure them about the coffee. That sounds familiar, too.
But guess what?
People like Dunkin Donuts. They like that it’s not trendy. They like that it’s not hip. They like that it’s not cool. You know why they like it?
Because it’s simple: It’s good coffee at a reasonable price.
It’s not fru-fru, latte, grande, frappa-whatchamacallit. IT’S COFFEE. And at Dunkin Donuts, they call it what it is. COFFEE.
Seems like there’s a lesson in there for us as Christ-followers somewhere. Now hear me say this - I’m all for contextualizing the gospel. But I’m also for simply proclaiming what we have to “offer” rather than trying to make it about something other than what we have to offer.
And you know what else? The thing that we have? It tastes good.
Maybe the problem is that we don’t really believe the gospel tastes good.
We don’t believe it tastes good, so we feel the need to pile alot of stuff on top of it to make it more palpable.
Maybe if we really believed in what we claim to believe, we’d find that it does taste good, we’d have the courage to speak it and let it speak for itself, like Dunkin did, rather than trying to help out the product so much.”
Source March 24, 2009 in Pop-Christianity Evangelicalism American Christianity