Recently we’ve had the un-pleasure of mentally fighting back with potential customers of ours on the premise of price vs. value. This debate has been going on since I can remember, but we just got a comment from a pastor about our brand new New Year’s Video called This Year. He says it was a “Good message, well done, but at 50 cents per second, way to expensive.” It’s a high end, TV commercial style sermon illustration that is only 0:44 seconds long and we’re charging $20 (as we do with every sermon illustration). One of the big problems with this kind of thinking is we don’t spend any less time or money on something because it ends up being shorter. In other words, we spend roughly the same amount of money and invest the same amount of time on something whether it ends up being 30 seconds or five minutes (And I promise you all that we are not in this to get rich but to serve God… you can check out our books :). Our intent with “This Year” was to make a very tight, powerful video that could be used by pastors to set up a great message about the coming year. A tongue and cheek style simple short for New Years that pastors can take in a lot of different directions.This issue of Price vs. Value has become a big issue within the filmmaking community…the church filmmaking community that is. I personally see an enormous divide between the price of a product/service and the value of said product/service. Others I guess don’t see it that way. Chuck Brady, from the online publication, Bizcovering, says “In simple terms price is the same as affordability. It comes down to whether or not your prospect has the means to pay for your product or service. Value on the other hand comes down to whether or not your customer thinks your product is worth the money.”

So, if the folks on the price per second side of the isle are right, and it really does come down to value for the length of the product, then that means you MUST get more value for your $8.50 movie ticket to go see Transformers (run time of 2 hours and 15 minutes) than for your ticket to the 2005 Academy Award winning movie Crash (run time of only 1 hour and 47 minutes). Maybe you did like Transformers more, but was it because it was longer? Was Crash a worse movie or worth less at the ticket window because it was shorter?

Again, our heart in all of this is to serve God and His Church with our gifts. Not to gouge churches for money by overcharging for Sermon Illustrations. I know there are a lot of churches out there barely scraping by, but so are we, and we’re all in this together, right?

Love to hear what you think. Post it. Email it. Blog it.

My father used to tell me, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” That may be over simplifying things, but in light of some of the criticism I see flying around in Christian circles, I think it’s something we need to think about. There is a disturbing trend in culture that I see infecting us as Christians. It’s this need to be critical, to tear people down, to be just downright mean. In our space it shows up in the comments and reviews left about videos on sites like SermonSpice and WorshipHouse. People going as far as to say things like, “there’s a reason why it’s free.” And here are a couple of comments pulled off WorshipHouse… “pretty lousy.” That was all they said. This one might be the worst I’ve seen: “Really stupid. Not deep, not funny, just stupid..” And here’s my favorite comment that one of our videos has received, “Nice concept, but it’s been done. And better. By others.” By who? When? What am I supposed to do with that?

This is just a small sample of the comments out there. You can surf around and see them for your self. I’m not trying to whine or cry about it. I just think we need to have a frank and open conversation about this. Why do we, as Christians feel a need to tear down these films and videos (and here’s the important part) without offering anything constructive to put in their place. Let me explain what I mean by way of a C.S. Lewis quote. Everybody loves Lewis, right? Once, when Lewis was criticized for oversimplifying the Gospel, he responded to his critic:

[He] would be a more helpful critic if he advised a cure as well
as asserting many diseases. How does he himself do such
work? What methods, and with what success, does he employ
when he is trying to convert the great mass of storekeepers,
lawyers, realtors, morticians, policemen and artisans who surround
him in his own city?

All I’m saying is that if we feel the need to say something, and sometimes something needs to be said, let’s be sure we’re coming at it with a spirit of wanting to help, to encourage, to see our criticism used to further God’s Kingdom and not just to tear down. And if we don’t have anything helpful or constructive to offer, then why say anything at all?

Ya feel me?