Too brand specific. . .

By now the Cracker Barrel dust up is old news but not without its own issues.  It would seem that those in charge thought that Uncle Hershel and the whole restaurant had become too brand specific.  In essence, they thought that markets had done too good a job in carving out the Cracker Barrel brand and was preventing it from appealing to others and growing.  The answer was to erase some of the distinctiveness of the brand and make it more generic, more like the other guys, and more modern.  The end result was that there were some who thought that had already been tried to no success -- letting go of old menu favorites or making them seasonal as well as adding liquor to the menu.  But the question remains.  Is there such a thing as being too brand specific?

What Cracker Barrel found out was that there is a fine line between tinkering with things and alienating their consumer base.  There was no progress in rebranding into one more nameless and faceless bland restaurant.  Who wants to eat there?  Those who never walked through the door still won't and those who had were thinking they weren't anymore and those who like the aura but did not eat there often were also disillusioned.  The more modern vibe to appeal to a newer and younger demographic became a sure way to drop stock price and tick off those who pay the bills.  Cracker Barrel will have to eat some crow in order to survive and will probably never shake off the idea that the big wigs in the boardroom do not have an inkling of an understanding who the down-home cooking, front-porch rocking chairs, and nostalgic Americana phenomenon really is.  No news in that, is there.

There are those in religion who have wondered the same thing.  Is Rome too brand specific?  That might have been on the minds of some in the post-Vatican II days when everything was being made new.  It might have been on the mind of Francis in his upsy-daisy tenure at the helm of the ship called Rome.  In either case the same result applied.  Those outside were not attracted to Rome lite or Mass lite and those inside wondered why they were there and those who never attended but thought themselves Roman had another reason not to attend.  We have all seen where that ended up.  The Latin Mass crowd became the whipping boy for all that had been bungled in the rebranding of Rome -- despite a couple of attempts from JPII and BXVI to regain control of the narrative and walk back the excesses.  Now Leo has a mess.

Lest we Lutherans get to smug, we are in the same boat.  Some blame the liturgical movement for everything bad but, in many respects, the fruits of that movement in Lutheranism have not be bad at all.  More frequent communion, restoring our own old ceremonies and rituals, pulling some vestments out of the forgotten closet, renewing private confession, restoration of the Psalm and Old Testament to the Sunday lections, flourishing of new hymn writers and hymns, and a host of other things are the not so bad fruits of our own liturgical movement.  Sadly, however, the danger did not come from things too Roman or catholic but the other flavors of Lutheranism.  We were becoming more brand specific in distinguishing Lutheranism from a slightly more liturgical flavor of Protestantism but then things got complicated.

On the one hand, some began to complain that we were too brand specific and people were not being brought to Jesus because our Lutheranism had gotten in the way.  They opted for less liturgical worship, more contemporary Christian music, a pop culture uniform instead of vestments, and a warehouse or stadium style of church building.  It did not bring in the numbers of new folk but shuffled the deck with people hopping from one new thing to another.  In the end, it muddied the idea of Lutheranism until nobody knew what to expect on Sunday morning.  There was no brand.  There was only an imagined ideal of belief that manifested itself very differently on the ground.  Like Cracker Barrel, when we lost the accoutrements of liturgy, hymnody, sacraments, vestments, and piety, we found ourselves angering those who paid the bills and still offering little or nothing to those who had never darkened our door before.  The worship wars were never between degrees of ceremony but always between those who thought that Lutheranism had a face on Sunday morning and those who thought it did not matter as long as the seats were full.  The church of Johann Sebastian Bach ended up with an image of an aging praise band singing yesterdays hits off key.  Talk about messing up a brand!

On the other hand, some began to complain that we were too brand specific because our Lutheran doctrine had gotten in the way.  They opted to be more friendly toward culture -- even if that meant distancing yourself from God and His Word.  They may peace with the sexual revolution, embraced all sexual desires, blessed every imagined gender, tolerated and then promoted abortion and birth control, took up the cause of social justice, and warned against climate change.  The problem was they forgot the cross in all of this and Jesus became a logo for their newly adopted social posture instead of a Savior who died for sin to raise sinners to heaven.  They kept the worship forms and words but did not believe what they symbolized or said.  So they talked about a Virgin birth they did not believe happened and stopped talking about Adam and Eve at all.  They talked about systemic sin but not personal sin.  They set the communion table for Methodists and Presbyterians and all sorts of others who did not agree on what was being served there and they pushed out those who did.  They muddied the Lutheran brand doctrinally while keeping the liturgical look of it all.  They kept the menu but changed what the food tasted like.  It was disastrous as well.  These liberal leaning Lutherans bled off members until they were a shell of their former size and joined those who danced with the evangelicals on Sunday morning while presuming they still bled red in what they believed and all Lutheran churches were diminished in size, identity, and meaning.  The rocking chairs were still on the front porch but the merch inside was woke and people did not know what to think -- especially with those who said they kept the merch but replaced the rocking chairs with modern lawn furniture.  Nobody know what to think.

Brand specific Lutheranism was our strength -- or so TIME magazine thought in 1958.  We did, too.  But not now.  We are therefore in a position of trying to recover the brand while getting all the franchisees on board so that we can present ourselves to the world again.  That is not as easy as we imagined.  It is not going well or fast.  In the meantime, we aged, stopped marrying, had no kids, and found that this life was good without Jesus in the mix.  In other words, we began to act less like Lutherans and more like the people around us who did not go to church.  The work is still going on but brand recovery is not easy.  Just ask the folks at Cracker Barrel.