Reaching With Preaching

The public library book shop's reject carts are always heavy on religious titles. Along with bible copies and guides for what practices to follow, there are all manner of self-help and counseling, fiction, and children's books. Titles by Protestant fundamentalists rub against similar offerings by right-wing Catholic writers and multiple copies of The Book of Mormon. There's a fair amount of Judaica, too. Christian books in languages other than English make a decent showing, and there are the occasional volumes representing other world religions, or sects thereof.

Even Jains have gotten into the act, with The Jain Way of Life having made it to the free cart. It's a total self-help program: along with guidance for diet and prayer, the author offers life tips (and rating scales) that are pretty indistinguishable from those of any business consultant—

Are you happy and engaged at your job? Are you using your best strengths and developing them into your recognized core competencies? Does your boss praise you and recognize your work? Or are you frustrated with the quarreling, turf wars, and endless delays in decision making in your workplace?

Internalizing and practicing our core Jain values helps us excel in our work place and greatly enhances the environment for team work and higher productivity. Evaluate your corporate leaders – are they are following these Jain core values?

There's more, in a pdf of the chapter, "Excelling in the Workplace," along with other topics from the book.

Religious titles tend to be from the last ten or fifteen years, but here's an exception—

Reaching People From The Pulpit
1958 (First Edition), Harper & Brothers

Other titles in this series—

The authors start with the basics of speech production. Ah,yes: those good old organs of speech illustrations...

... Never to be forgotten, no matter how long ago that linguistics course was taken—

Reaching People From The Pulpit and the other series titles were connected to the mainline Protestant churches of their era. As part of the Establishment, those churches were certainly influential, yet they would have found it unthinkable to muck with elections, as do today's right-wing churches. And speaking of "Reaching"—in 1958, there was nothing like the reach of the media empires controlled by the Pat Robertsons of our great [tax-exemption granting] nation.

Just to show how very different things were in 1958: when the authors write that natural, "living gestures" can accompany a minister's spoken points, this example from page 63 is what they chose to illustrate the idea—

Suppose we ask you a question. "What is the price of a Lincoln automobile?" If you are an average preacher, your reply will probably be, "How should I know? Preachers don't have that kind of money!" These were your words, but you said more than can be read in words alone. You raised your eyebrows, you wrinkled your forehead; you shrugged your shoulders, and lifted your hands from your elbows, palms upward. ...

Not necessarily the obvious direction of a ministerial palm today.

As it happens, there's just been appropriately big news in the religion biz; via Harry Shearer's LeShow segment, "News of the Godly: Church gets an agent," it's this Hollywood Reporter story—

WME [William Morris Endeavor] is getting some religion. In a first for Hollywood, the agency has signed global megachurch Hillsong to its client roster. Although WME already is home to celebrity pastors T.D. Jakes and Joel Osteen as well as Mark Burnett and Roma Downey's faith-focused LightWorkers Media shingle, Hillsong marks the first known instance of a major agency working on behalf of a church itself. But the massive, media-savvy Hillsong is an ideal brand for capturing the faith-based market.

The Pentecostal church, which draws nearly 100,000 attendees to its rock concert-like services in 11 countries around the world each week, is a favorite among young celebrity churchgoers....

...

WME will help the church, which has more than 10 million social media followers and 9 million annual visitors to its website, expand its TV viewership of more than 10 million globally (in the U.S., services can be viewed on multiple cable channels). The agency also will work to find film and digital opportunities. Warner Bros. had been set to release Let Hope Rise, a documentary about its worship band, in April, but distribution talks fell through in January.

Shearer adds, "They tried praying... 'Now, let's get an agent!'"