{"id":418,"date":"2007-12-14T14:57:29","date_gmt":"2007-12-14T14:57:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/?p=418"},"modified":"2007-12-14T14:57:44","modified_gmt":"2007-12-14T14:57:44","slug":"targeted-christmas-marketing-encounters-of-the-mission-kind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/?p=418","title":{"rendered":"Targeted Christmas Marketing Encounters (of the mission kind)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>First <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/?p=417\" onClick=\"popWin=open('http:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/?p=417','myWin',''); popWin.focus(); return false\">Richard&#8217;s news<\/a> if you missed it. Now&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>A bunch of us were Christmas shopping last night after which bro-in-law told me that he had had his presents wrapped for free by people outside a church in the high street. I said I couldn&#8217;t bring myself to do that as it was cheating &#8211; I was a Christian already!<br \/>\nOK, I&#8217;m making a few assumptions which are really about myself and not about the people doing the wrapping:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;m assuming that they are trying to reach out to people who don&#8217;t know about God&#8217;s love by wrapping the presents and<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m assuming that they aren&#8217;t particularly intending to wrap everyone from their own church&#8217;s presents.<\/li>\n<li>So therefore I&#8217;m thinking that they don&#8217;t want to wrap other church people&#8217;s presents.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The questions that now go through my head are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Should mission activity be a simple extension of what we do for ourselves (the group), just extended out to others? (because otherwise we are saying we aren&#8217;t willing to do things for our closest friends what we are willing to do for others) or<\/li>\n<li>Can mission be doing something that when &#8216;they&#8217; become &#8216;us&#8217; we won&#8217;t do for those people anymore?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know &#8211; I think that there is more to this than meets my eye.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I&#8217;m going to give bro-in-law the benefit of the doubt: He is single and perhaps he was trying to meet some generous Christian females from our nearest big town!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>he had had his presents wrapped for free by people outside a church <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/?p=418\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mission"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}