The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never
be done. The way of doing it is a secret I can learn from no one else but Him.

If I never become what I am meant to be, but always remain what I am not, I shall spend eternity contradicting myself by being at once something and nothing.10

OH, INVERTED WORLD—THE VENEER OF CULTURE
Above all, let there be enough live action! They like to watch, and that’s the chief
attraction.
With lots of things before their eyes displayed
For crowds to stare and gape in wonder of,
There’s most of your success already
And you’re the man whom they will love.
By mass alone the masses can be won …
— Goethe (Faust)

The problem does not end with the individual. As we are manipulating those around us with the masks of our veneer, we are simultaneously interacting with a culture that is being manipulative. In fact, we can see evidences of veneer in all channels of cultural influence: media, arts and entertainment, business, education, government, church, and the social sector.11

Let’s look at the channel of media, as it tends to exhibit the most brazen form of veneer, and within that channel, the practice of marketing. In a June 2008 article for Fast Company, bestselling authors Dan and Chip Heath point out how marketers try to embarrass the customer into buying a product. They write:

A commercial in Visa’s check card campaign shows a deli where people move through the line with elaborate, precise choreography, like a Broadway production number.Customers complete their transactions by swiping the check card, and they all seem delighted to be part of the capitalistic clockwork. That is, until the moment when one misguided schlub pulls out some cash. Then everything comes to a crashing halt. No more dancing, no more delight. The cashier looks disgusted.

Yes, Visa and its ad agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day, are trying to make you feel embarrassed for paying for your lunch with cash.12

The authors continue on to quote an “astonishing statement” from a Strategy+Business article written to advise businesses on how to grow faster in China. The article, by Edward Tse, a VP with the consultant Booz Allen Hamilton, is quoted as saying:

Too often, companies focus on understanding only the current demand of the consumer. A better course is to anticipate or even create demand. Through smart marketing, Procter & Gamble, for example, created the perception that dandruff—traditionally a nonissue for the Chinese—is a social stigma and offered a product (Head & Shoulders antidandruff shampoo) to "solve" the problem.13

As a company, Visa makes money by charging retailers a percentage of their profit on the sale and, depending on how the card is used, by charging the consumer an interest rate on the money being charged to the card. This is not a very pretty-sounding proposition. To counter this, Visa tells you that using their product is easier than any other form of payment and that everyone is using it and if you don’t use it, you will inconvenience those around you.
.
Even more egregious than Visa, Procter and Gamble had a product with no market. So, they created a demand that previously did not exist. They took a perfectly normal human condition and manipulated the situation to make the consumer think that dandruff is gross and embarrassing. Behind the veneer of these companies are products that are offering a false value, one that they define. They inflate their status to you, the consumer, to make up for the shortcomings of their product.

This same type of manipulation is happening throughout the other cultural channels (we’ll look at the church in the section below):

CHANNEL OF CULTURE                       EXAMPLES OF VENEER

Media                                                      Books are published on platform of author, not content

Arts & Entertainment                               Manufactured artists/bands (e.g., Avril Lavigne, video games
                                                                (escapism), television ("reality" shows, false sense of portrayal
                                                                to relationships, projectoin of a false sense of beauty)

Business                                                  Housing market price inflation, inflated stock price             
                                                                 of companies that have not made money; Enron, et al.

Education                                                 Tenure, forms of testing that are concerned with answers over
                                                                  understanding

Government                                             Political misrepresentations, use of power for personal gain

Social Sector                                            High administrative costs at charities


So, as we have a veneer that we present to those around us, we interact with a culture that projects its own veneer. The interaction of the two creates a grand collision of lies. We are being told what to think, how to think, what
to buy and from where. We are letting the external forces of culture dictate our behavior. As a result, everything in culture becomes inflated: us, the goods we consume, and how those goods are marketed.

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH—THE VENEER OF CHURCH
The Church Without Christ where the blind don't
see and the lame don't walk and what's dead
stays that way.
—Flannery O’Connor (Wise Blood)

Along with the influences of politics, entertainment, media, and other social expressions, we find the church. Since the church’s inception in Acts 2, its identity has ebbed and flowed in many expressions throughout history. From persecuted subsect of Judaism to dominant Roman Catholicism to sixteenth century Protestantism, the church has always seemed to know when it needs a revival. Church scholar Bruce Winter suggests that the church endures a reformation every four hundred years. If that’s the case, we’re about due.

The church, as a social institution, must also deal with cultural shifts in knowledge, meaning, and language. Never static in its proclamation of God’s Word, the church constantly searches for ways to engage the world with the gospel.

But, at times, the church’s message can be compromised for the sake of relevance. In an attempt to adapt to society, the twentyfirst-century evangelical church is undergoing changes of its own. From incarnational-missional to relevant seeker-sensitive to home church to simple church to deep church to emerging church to online church, the church’s buzzword lexicon grows exponentially with each new church-growth conference.

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