Speaking In Tongues In an attempt to preach to the unconverted, the word of God gets hip. by Jim Hanas ou watch them like you would any other commercial, wondering what it is they’re trying to sell. A twentysomething woman with a cell phone mulls over how hot Hell must be. A mother smirks at the idea that the church can speak to the quirks of her family life. The colors are saturated, the effects are like LSD-tracers. The surprise comes at the end, when the name of the sponsor ghosts in: Germantown Baptist Church. “It’s a campaign to address the doubts and fears of an unbeliever,” explains Patrick DeMoss of Impact Productions, the Tulsa-based non-profit firm that developed the flashy “What If It’s True?” campaign from which the six television spots being used by Germantown Baptist are taken. “Our mission statement here at Impact Productions is to reach a sight-and-sound generation with the gospel of Jesus Christ.” DeMoss’ firm is an innovator in that area. Impact began 15 years ago as a management company for a touring, Christian-based production called The Toymaker’s Dream before turning to film and video production. Last year, the organization made news with its MTVish spin-off of the omnipresent “Got Milk?” campaign which featured a bungee-jumper plunging, apparently to his death, followed by the question, “Got Jesus?” “We were aware they did some cutting-edge commercials we really liked,” says Germantown Baptist’s executive pastor Pete DeMoss (no relation) of the church’s collaboration with Impact. “It really fit with where we want to be as a church. We want to be the church for people who don’t have a church. … We’re really not concerned about reaching church people. We want to reach people with real pressures and real questions about life.” The six spots address such questions from a skeptic’s point of view. Actors shrug off the possibilities proposed by Christianity — like Hell, salvation, and God’s interest in individual lives — before viewers are asked, “What if it’s true?” The commercials, says Pastor DeMoss, are running mainly on channels — like MTV — where non-churchgoers are likely to be watching. “We put our commercials on a lot of channels that our people won’t watch,” he says. The same spirit of preaching to the unconverted is also behind the “God Speaks” billboard campaign, which began appearing locally a few weeks ago. Originally sponsored by an anonymous donor and placed on eight billboards in South Florida, the campaign — which features simple, sometimes sardonic messages from God — now includes more than 5,000 billboards in 100 cities, including Memphis, with twice that projected by the end of the year. “This has been the greatest creative challenge we’ve ever had,” says Andy Smith, president of the Fort Lauderdale-based Smith Agency, which developed the campaign. “Part of our target audience is people who used to go to church, but don’t go anymore, to get them to start thinking about it again.” Unlike Impact, however, Smith’s agency does not have a religious focus. “We just happen to have God as a client right now,” says Smith, who himself is Jewish. According to Smith, all but one of the 18 slogans in the campaign — one that makes reference to Sunday being the sabbath — can be best described as non-denominational and Judeo-Christian, rather than strictly Christian. The campaign’s messages from God include: “We Need To Talk,” “I Love You … I Love You … I Love You,” “C’mon Over And Bring the Kids,” and “You Think It’s Hot Here?” Both campaigns can be seen as part of a larger trend toward clothing Christianity in the trappings of fashion, a trend that has given us everything from “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets to Christian industrial bands. And as advertising generally resorts to increasingly more imaginative ways to reach consumers inured to the wiles of the hard sell — through various self-conscious forms of meta-, anti-, and post-marketing — it comes as no surprise that religious groups are adopting the same technique, slipping on the vernacular of pop culture in an attempt to fly beneath the secular radar. Christianity and consumer goods are really in the same boat in one respect. No one wants to hear about either of them. Not in the middle of Friends. “If you’re going to compete with Budweiser, if you’re going to compete with Nike, you can’t come out there looking like a used-car dealership,” says Impact Productions’ DeMoss, “because people will just tune you out.” WWJD? Now you know.