Promoting the Consumerism Conference
Written by Mark Van Steenwyk : January 12, 2006
The upcoming conference on Christianity in a Consumer Culture is coming together quite nicely. In addition to having Ron Sider, Sondra Wheeler, Rodney Clapp, and Vincent Miller coming to be our main speakers, we have a number of breakout session leaders like Ryan Torma from Spirit Garage, Kevin Rains from Vineyard Central, David Fitch from Life on the Vine Christian Community (and author of the Great Giveaway)…plus a number of others. I mention these folks in particular because they are all church leaders and have blogs to which I link. We’re having folks from other walks of life as presenters as well).
But I need your help getting the word out. We don’t have a very large promotions budget. Our good friends at Emergent sent notice of the conference in their latest email newsletter, and a few bloggers are helping get the word out, but we need more help if we’re going to have the 200+ registrants needed to pay for the thing. Please help if you are at all sympathetic with the aims of the conference.
Why should you care? Well, if you’ve ever been frustrated by the ways in which consumerism and the consumer impulse make it hard to be Christian in this country or hard to do church in a way faithful to Jesus, then you know that consumerism is a HUGE problem that must be addressed by Christians. And, if you’re like me, you’ve felt powerless and unsure of how to respond to the consumerism and materialism in our churches. This conference is designed to get a bunch of excellent thinkers and a bunch of excellent "doers" in the same room (though most of our folks are a bit of both) to work through how we as Christians can live our faith out in this consumer culture of ours–a culture that makes it very difficult to live out the Gospel call. Rodney Clapp makes the case even more eloquently in a recent interview.
Here’s how you can help:
- register for the conference
- if you think folks at your church would be interested in coming, email me your mailing info and I can send you some nifty brochures which fold out into posters
- if you are a student or professor, see if your school would be interested in displaying the poster, and then email me your mailing address so I can send you some
- link to the conference on your blog or website. you can host the conference banner on your blog with the code below:
<a href="http://www.consumer-culture.org/"><img
src="http://missionthink.typepad.com/missionthink/images/banner_s.gif"
width="175" height="100" border="0"></a>
(the banner will look like the one on the top right of my blog)
I’m open to any other ideas you’ve got…but they’ve got to be cheap!
for further reading . . .
- None Found
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Mark, I copied your post to display on my blog too rather than recreate it. But I can’t get the banner code to display as just code without the actual image. How did you do that?
Hmmm…I don’t know how that works, but typepad allows you to post somethings as text only and some as html.
so, umm, like where is this conference like going to happen like?
April 28-29 in Minneapolis. The website has more info.
Ahh, but minneapolis is such a huge place . . . is there a specific location decided on yet?
More specifically, where on the University of Minnesota Campus is the conference occurring?
I cannot seem to find that info on the website for the conference.