Noted marketing consultant Seth Godin recently wrote of hope mongering as a means for developing relationships in business. There is plenty of fear mongering, he noted, but hope brings longer-term results.
I am hesitant to let the business world co-opt a term as rich as the term hope.
Theologically the kind of hope a business guru talks about reduces down to wishful thinking and optimism. But the message of Christian hope is based on an understood reality—God’s ultimate victory over the powers of evil, a victory in which we currently participate.
Ever since Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, life with God has meant hope. God’s work is about hope. The well-known song “The Steadfast Love of the Lord” sets to music the text of Lamentations 3:22-24. But this text comes in the middle of serious lament over the fall of Jerusalem and the terrible plight of the survivors. We are not in the Garden. But God is still working to bring us back.
The fact that the text for that song comes is the middle of a lament makes sense in some ways because hope and fear go together. The notion of hope only has meaning when that which long for is more desirable than our current state. And in God’s story, hope is always more powerful than fear, pain, sin, or injustice.
Hope that does not affect us now is not hope. Hope does not mean we do nothing, waiting passively for rescue. Hope means we know rescue is on the way, so we do everything we can to be part of that rescue effort. Hope empowers us to be part of what God is doing in the world.
Complacency is the enemy of God’s message because complacency neither fears nor hopes. Ministers and churches content with who and what they are will not be able to live in hope, nor share hope with others.
Unless the painful state of the world pains you, unless you long for the redemption of lost souls, unless you long for life in the renewed Garden of Revelation 22, you cannot truly hope.
Hope may be good business. But it is better theology. And it is the lifeblood of transforming leaders.
