Reforming Church: production

To read other posts in this series, click here. Reforming Church: production (Part 4)

In 2008, I became a Thirty-One Consultant. Having moved to Birmingham as an engineer, I had given it up to become a wife and mom since the last piece of my story in the beginning. I had two kids at the time, and I was desperate for anything besides just motherhood to fill up my time. I was still fairly green and quite lost in the uncertain way new mothers sometimes have. I hungered for something else to fill my time and a way to help out financially. Back in those days I was as shy as ever, so I am not sure how I thought sales would work for me. The thought of having parties and having to stand in front of other women filled me up with fear, my palms got sweaty, and I did all I could to do to avoid it like the plague. As you can imagine, I wasn’t a good saleswoman, and did not have enough acquaintances to just make money off friends.

However, the idea intrigued me. Thirty-One is a direct sales company that sells bags in the spirit of the Proverbs 31 woman. As I saw it, I thought maybe I could combine the idea of selling bags with the idea of sharing the gospel. I don’t intend to speak ill of the company now, but at the time I got out of the business because the bags were made cheaply in China, and with my own bags falling apart, I had no heart to try to earn money off a product I did not believe in, so I quit. I learned two things from that experience: I am not a salesperson, and the gospel can never be paired with a product. It must stand alone. In fact, I began to wholeheartedly disagree with companies that use biblical notions to sell products.

I am a consumer of Christian books, bibles, and music, so to be fair, this was an area of great dissonance, but direct sales companies like Thirty-One that used the Bible to sell their product kept me away from their products. For one, if a product is to be paired with biblical truth, it must be a great product – not made in an assembly line with little thought to how long it will last at the customer’s expense. In other words, if you pair something with biblical truth, great pains must be taken to ensure its quality assurance for these Christian women are putting their integrity on the line for a product. I became unwilling to sell my integrity for a product. For two, pairing products with this notion began to become inherently wrong to me. It felt like just using the Bible to make a cheap appeal at mass marketing – a cheap gimmick if you will to get Christians to buy their goods. That’s why when I see direct sales companies using the bible as their approach, I am very leery. Even as recent as my tryst with Young Living essential oils, I went into it hesitantly. My blanket statement on that is while they work and I enjoy them, and while I have read why they are even biblical, I am hesitant to sell them in this same spirit, but they do meet the high standards a product being sold under this nature should meet. It’s true – I am a hypocrite, and that’s why this series is so hard to write.

photo credit: Nick in exsilio via photopin cc