Last post, I talked about what the church can learn from the game Monopoly. In this post, I’d like to focus on what the church can learn from an actual monopoly. To do this, I’d like to share a little bit about my struggle with my local cable provider. Some of you may remember that I was having trouble with my internet connection, well I finally got through to my cable company’s tech support yesterday afternoon. After spending about an hour on the phone with the automated help trying to get a real person to answer the phone, Jarrod finally picked up. Now, I’ve worked in call centers before, and I know that you have a script that you have to follow, but that doesn’t mean I don’t hate it. After a few minutes I broke down and said: “Hey, I work with computers a lot, I’m an IT manager, and I’ve done everything I can on my end to fix the problem, I think what I need is someone to examine my wiring.” Jarrod agreed to send me some help if we didn’t get the problem solved within the next few minutes. Randomly, my connection started working again. I should have known better, but after seeing it work for the first time in about a week, I told Jarrod that everything was ok and that I didn’t need any more help. That was a big mistake. As you can probably guess, about 10 minutes later my connection crapped out again. So, I picked up the phone and got ready to waste the rest of my day talking on the phone. Eventually, hours later, I got another tech person to agree to send someone. The moral of the story? My cable’s customer service stinks. Hardcore. They don’t care about me at all.

Unfortunately, they’re the only game in town. If you want cable, you’re going to give them a call. Otherwise you have to get satellite, which, in my case, isn’t an option. They are a textbook monopoly. They don’t have to provide good customer service because people have nowhere else to go. And they aren’t alone. Walmart, Microsoft, McDonald’s (That one’s for you James) they all count on the fact that you will eventually have to shop/compute/eat with them.

Is it just me, or does the church have the same mentality? We know that we have the ultimate truth, so why should we waste our time going out into the world telling them about it? They should be the ones knocking down our doors. After all, eventually every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. If they don’t get on board before hand, it’s not our fault. Right?