Yesterday I posted a link on my Facebook wall. It is called Churchmarketingsucks.com. It is a site that I found way back and I found that it is a very good site for us, Christian designers, to read about.

No, it’s not a site that declares church marketing sucks, but it is actually a site that drives our motivation about designing things for the church and God.

In a brief, they believe that if you are a good designer, then you should or even have to give out the best design effort possible to create a thing that communicates God to the masses. Let me quote what they wrote:

Our mission is to frustrate, educate and motivate the church to communicate, with uncompromising clarity, the truth of Jesus Christ. Church Marketing Sucks is a part of the Center for Church Communication, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping the church matter.

Frustrate.
Something’s wrong with your church. Something’s wrong with the Church. Church marketing efforts and communication in general suck. We’ve got the greatest story ever told, but we don’t know how to tell it. The church has a problem communicating, and it’s time to change.

Educate.
We love the church, but it needs some help. Typos, cheesy logos, and bad clip art aren’t helping the cause. But snazzy marketing won’t save this ship, either. It’s not about being perfect, but there’s a better way to communicate. It’s authentic, it’s loving, and it knows how to spell.

Motivate.
This isn’t simply about putting butts in pews or selling glossy postcards. It’s about helping the church be the Church, and seeing lives changed as a result. If helping the church communicate better allows one person to finally glimpse the Gospel, then our work has been worthwhile. It may be fuzzy math, but God can worry about that.

Offended?
Good. So are we. For too long the church has been the object of scorn and Christians have been the reason people turn away from Christianity. It’s time to change.

If you’re offended by our use of the word ’sucks,’ we do offer an alternative url, ChurchMarketingStinks.com, and we’d encourage you to check out our rationale for using the word ’sucks.’

Not Offended?
Good. You can help. If you think you know what you’re doing, if you think your church’s marketing doesn’t suck, then come alongside and offer your support.

What’s in it for Us?
A lot. We want to see this name changed to ChurchMarketingNoLongerSucks.com as soon as possible. All of us behind this project are communicators. From writers and designers to businessmen and creative pastors, we all want to help the church communicate better.

The reality is that we all have day jobs, too. Many of us make a living at the very thing we’re asking churches to do: design better, write better, communicate better. Are we asking churches to hire us? Nope. Do we need them to hire us to put food on the table? Nope. Would we turn a church away if they did want to hire us? Probably not.

ChurchMarketingSucks.com is an idea, not a business. You’ll notice there is limited (and filtered) advertising, no pop-ups, no gimmicks. We’re a part of the non-profit Center for Church Communication, whose mission is to help churches matter. What’s in it for us is what’s in it for the church: not sucking.

Yes, DESIGN better. Our church can afford to do that, but we often being faced with the statement of “GOOD OR BAD IS A RELATIVE THING”. Oh I agree completely, and probably not all of the members of the church have the best design or artistic taste or aesthetically inclined, but try this argument: If we can afford (please note the statement “we can afford”) to print out a design that works best in full color for God, would we still want to print out those cheap photocopied ones? Or those poorly designed flyers with crappy typography. Too bad, in our church, yes, they would print out crappy leaflets or use those crappy flyers. Heck, even our website sucks, our annual budget report sucks, our church office signage sucks, and our church magazine sucks. That dreaded Indonesian horror magazine might’ve look better.

This is not the case of saving money, because by all means, the church can afford that even after saving its money. We’ve been blessed by God with the capacity to do so. This is because nobody realized how important communication, branding, and everything else in regards of expanding and communicating His Kingdom to others. Probably we should consider helping other churches that are less fortunate to be able to do the same.

So, is it hard to give the best for God? No, it is not when you give it out to the people who really have the expertise and wanted to help. Too bad, some of them already disappointed to even want to help again. It’s all about being ignorant and being simply tasteless.

So go ahead, visit the site and open your minds. If you’re a designer, designing for God is not something hard to do. All we need to do is just not to suck. Because if you do, then it’s probably because you don’t have the talent (perhaps God wanted you to use your talent somewhere else, this is not something bad).

I’m not shamelessly promoting myself as a good designer, I’ve decided that my days in graphic design service at the church is nearing the end, and someone should really replace my spot. I believe there are lots of good designers in our church. Why not ask them how to do things? They know best because it’s their expertise. Remember, this is for God, so I’m taking this seriously. It should be the best. After all, in the end, a visual disease is still a disease. Doctors would like to cure AIDS so bad, and mechanics fix cars that are broken. And we designers, just like doctors, we cure visual diseases. That’s why God gave us the talent.

Idiots.

Following the last post I made regarding Indonesia’s energy crisis, and the fact that I read in Kompas today that we’re going to have random power outages from July 11 to 25 (each power outages can last up to 8PM), I can only conclude that PLN, is a nut case and they really suck monkey balls. In this case, maybe they are gorilla balls instead. I simply cannot understand the logic that they cannot provide us the same amount of energy that we paid off the previous month. Unless there are resources corruption (which we all know that it is at least 90% real), there is just no way that this could happen.

To PLN’s management, take a look at this. That is an article about a Danish island, called Samsø that runs entirely, yes, ENTIRELY on renewable energy. So is it possible that in a macro scale, a country runs on renewable energy? Unless we don’t want to, yes, it’s absolutely possible, and the people living in Samsø actually REALLY CARE about their future. We just need no corruption and 100% responsibility and commitment. Is this something we can have? No. Why? Because we are simply to dumb to realize that ELECTRICITY CAN BE GENERATED WITH OTHER THAN FOSSIL FUEL and most of the ones involved in making decisions are busy making themselves rich.

Crazy? If you live in Europe, maybe. But if you live in Indonesia, it’s just something that happens daily.

If I have to vote, I would probably vote PLN for the crappiest company in Indonesia (along with Bakrie Telecom and Lippo following it). Why? Because nowadays we often get those blackouts without any prior announcement. The reason? Well, that’s easy, they simply don’t have enough power to light up Jakarta from 00.00 back to 00.00. As a good electric bill payer, I found this disgusting, and before anyone yells back at me on how I should be concerned with our country’s energy crisis, I have my own reasons to justify that.

First of all, in a small scale, I pay for the electricity that I use, and oh do believe that I use electricity with great concern. I turn off things that I don’t use, unplugged things that I don’t use for months, upgraded the office monitors to LCDs, and the list goes on. And when I do use a lot of power out of the meter, I am perfectly aware of the costs that I have to bear each month. So, in a sense, I do pay for what I use, so I could care less if PLN is unable to provide that to my house’s power grid.

Second, where the heck is the industry on building power plants? How come from the day I stepped on the elementary grade, the number of power plants available in Indonesia is nowhere near plenty. Answer? Let’s just say, we don’t have to ask where the money went to.

Third, if the government is really that concern about the energy crisis, they should take approximate steps to develop greener energy. Take wind power for example, we have plenty of wind down here. If the government put some effort to install residential-grade turbines on every few blocks or so in the city, I’m sure some of that power consumption need could be taken care of. But no, we’re not going there, are we?

Fourth, is of course back to the fuel drama. We have lots of alternative energy sources out there, and yet, some power plants still rely on oil to run. This is just plain stupid.

FIfth, the idea of building a nuclear power plant. Well this just sucks monkey balls. If our country can’t even take care of simple matters such as garbage or traffic, I don’t see why we SHOULD build a nuclear power plant. I can envision the comeback of Chernobyl, or the second coming of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Without the bombs, of course. We won’t need them as it would probably explode on its own. Even developed countries are now moving away from nuclear power plants.

So, until the government and every bit of Indonesians that have no conscious of what lies 30 years ahead can pull their minds together, I’m as sure as hell that the blackouts are going to be more often. I’m going to invest on a generator. Something that is perhaps more reliable than our trusty ol’ power company.

Due to an unfortunate event, I had to have my car’s bumper claimed and fixed. Right now, my car is bumperless. And no, I’m not switching to any crappy fiberglass custom bumpers. I am not a riceboy.