Monday, November 21, 2005

leveraging for Christ

The radio station KSBJ in Houston, known locally as the God Listens station, generally drives me insane with their self-righteous attitude towards the Christification of the world, or at least Texas, rather than humble evangelism.
 
They're going to be playing all Christmas music from the day after Thanksgiving through Christmas Day, like a couple of other stations. Now the other stations will have it all straight up Frosty, Bing, and (that bitch!)  Anne Murray too, with lots of commercials to rake in the dough (not the flaky pie-crust kind). KSBJ on the other hand is doing it as evangelism, mixing it up with classics, contemporary, and I hope true ecclesiastical, though I could not figure that out on their website. Anyway, all with no commercials. KSBJ is listener-funded, so they can manage it. Good for them. They may drive me nuts, but at least their basic capitalization off of Christmas is spiritual. Now, those new listeners and true disciples of Christ they reel in will hopefully donate to the station, so it's a pretty good marketing strategy for the survival of their "ministry".
 
So, how are they rake in the converts? By having current listeners spread the word of non-stop Christmas music with no commercials is capitalizing off of the over commercialization of Christmas.
 
Twisted, huh?

2 comments:

John Whiteside said...

Whenever I see their billboards, I think of ways to fill in the blank after the slogan.

God Listens... And He's Not Amused
God Listens... He's Goofing Off at Work

and so on.

Anonymous said...

My very unleasant neighbor has one of their bumper stickers on her car. She is no ambassador I'd want representing me! I'd imagine KSBJ sees its nonstop Christmas singalong as a service to people who want Christmas music sans the insipid commercials on Sunny. I HATE Sunny. But I never could stomach some of the stuff they play on KSBJ -- I can't stand that crap in church, either. Just because you're singing about God doesn't mean you can get away with being lame. (Hello, Creed.) I want my rock 'n' roll to actually rock, and if there's a little gospel in there, that's a bonus.