Religious Publishing that Sells

Now tell me what's wrong with this picture:  Religious publishers publish stuff that Churches and Church people will use in some way to enhance or enable the fulfillment of a task they do or a ministry they perform for some church or relgious organization.  Churches ,  in my humble theology,  are there to tell the truth and help their members see the truth and seek somehow to do something that embodies that truth.  Religious Publishers try to create resources,  or aggregate writers and teams that can produce those resources,  that enable the Church to present and unpack some truth that needs telling.  In order to meet the bottom line,  the processes that have been used to produce resources,  and therefore revenue for the Publishing Company,  focus on things which sell,  which tends to make more and more resources more and more alike,  as more and more publishers rely on research and assumptions that are dessiminated more and more widely,  so that more and more things are published that tend to stray from areas that may degrade sales.

The catch is,  the things that many people need is to free themselves from "marketed" resources and toward those resources whose development is driven in greater percentage by people who have an area of expertise and backed by some sound theology that is collaborated upon as a set of tools.  

Religious Education/instruction at its best is needs driven,  and the best indicators of those needs are the people and their personal struggles.  What better way to "sample" that  (ie. to do "market research",  is to "dwell among them" and listen to that market (again,  I sound like stuff in The Cluetrain Manifesto)

Religious publishing needs communities of Weblogs to aggregate several people resources:   The producers/creators of the resources and the users.   There need to be places to explore the ways a Church or theologically based organization can respond to the issues with which those audiences struggle,  or around which they have dialogue and seek to learn.  

The Left Behind series is an example of a religousd publishing trend that turns the "mission" (the creation and distribution of resources that address a preceived need) into a numbers game that basically follows a formula,  and people buy it for the entertainment value,  a value that is intensified by the sense that the books also do a ministry (which is,  to distribute the set of theological dogmas and charts and evets surrounding the apocalyptic interpretations of a few -----  which ,  unfortunately,  through mass market campaigns such as this,  serve to "spread" these ideas further).  

© Copyright 2003 Dale Lature. Last update: 9/23/2003; 3:35:38 PM.