Some of our favorite articles are in this category, and they’re here because they didn’t fit into one of our main blog categories.
Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World (Thomas Nelson, 2012)
If you’re familiar with Michael Hyatt’s work, you know I’m clearly a fan. I use Michael’s website theme and before that, I was modeling much of my website on what Michael does.
“Platform” is the book that inspired me to take blogging and leadership seriously, and the practical advice in it has been invaluable to me. If you aspire to create great content and get that content in front of a large audience, this book is a must-read.
Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World (HarperBusiness, 2013)
“Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook” is the single best book I’ve ever read on social media best practices. I took some social media seminars and webinars four years ago and have based most of my practices on what I learned then. Little did I realize how much the social media platforms have changed, often making the best practices of 2000 the worst practices of 2014! This book was just published last year and is completely up to date.
My favorite aspect of the book is that Gary includes over one hundred color screenshots of other brands using these social media platforms, usually poorly, with his commentary. The lessons I learned from those examples stuck in my head and I’m in the process of improving the way I use Facebook and Twitter because of these tips. I strongly recommend it.
My work has never been about radically changing the pro-life movement. Instead I’ve merely wanted to help us tweak the way we communicate, in order to help us connect better and ultimately persuade the pro-choice people we talk to.
While I spoke at the Students for Life Conference following the West Coast Walk for Life, I didn’t make it to the walk itself this year. However a good friend of mine named Jen Serban did go, and she had a concern about some of the signs and chants that were being used by the pro-lifers. I’m going to post those thoughts below with Jen’s permission, and then I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on whether any change would be good. I’m always impressed with the thoughtful people who read this blog, and I think an amazing discussion could be had on this subject.
Photo credit: ProLifePhotography on Flickr
What a great event the Walk for Life is! Especially having people from all backgrounds, representing different faiths or no faith at all! It is wonderful to see such a large group of diverse people standing in the gap for the unborn and their families.
There was one thing, however, that bothered me during the walk. It began when we walked past a big group of pro-choice protesters. They were on the sides yelling their standard slogans at the people participating in the walk. Of course, their rallying cry’s were of varying accuracy and vulgarity, but some of their signs were actually quite compelling and deserving of pause and consideration.
However, the group that I happened to be walking with took a different approach. They began chanting, “Pro-life! Pro-life! Pro-life!”
At first I thought about how great unity is. Then it really started to bother me.
I have, for the most part, avoided commenting publicly on Abolish Human Abortion. (From what I hear, fewer and fewer people take them seriously as their anti-Catholic views become more public as well their extreme arguments that the pro-life movement is to blame for abortion being legal.) I feel the need to say something now though, because they just publicly attacked my friends, and they did it with particularly bad reasoning. This blog is about helping pro-life people to become more persuasive and less weird, so let’s attempt to apply some clear thinking to AHA’s attack on Justice For All.
Click here to see the Facebook post for yourself.
The link is to a video of AHA-member Danny Ehinger talking to a pro-life student who had gone through a previous JFA training, who expressed some concerns about AHA’s activism methods. The student explains that he’s all for getting people talking about abortion, but he felt like there were better results when JFA came on campus because some good conversations had taken place, whereas on this day the classroom discussions were a lot more heated and tended to end with students screaming and nearly getting kicked out of class.
The student expresses a concern about little kids seeing the signs, and encourages AHA to use more questions on their signs to create dialogue as opposed to just putting statements on their graphic signs.
Danny interrupts him and makes a very shrewd debating move:
So, your main concern, from what I’m hearing, is the other students that are getting angry about it.
The student says, “Yeah…” And Danny says,
And so that’s where we have a little bit of a difference. My main concern is the 3,500 babies who are going to be murdered today.
That is so intellectually dishonest. The student’s main concern that he wanted addressed at the moment was the use of the signs and the effect they had on people as well as their dialogues about abortion in the future. That doesn’t mean the student cares more about that than abortion. If Danny had asked the student, “Are you more concerned about abortion or the students who are offended?” I’m sure the student would have said something like, “I’m more concerned about abortion, obviously, which is why I’m concerned about your methods. I want abortion to end as soon as possible, and this doesn’t seem like the way to make that happen.” Instead, Danny takes the opportunity to act like he’s the only one in the conversation who actually cares about abortion, a moment that will make all the AHA fans cheer when they watch it.
Danny mentions checking out JFA’s website and says:
I’m okay with [JFA’s] premise of ‘We want to talk intelligibly to people and nicely to people.’ However, my question is the root why, why are they doing what they’re doing?
So this is the analogy I kind of came up with. Imagine if you’re in class, okay? And, there’s 50 students. And you hear gunshots, you see gunfire in your class. You hear people are being killed, okay? Half of the class gets up and says, ‘That’s wrong! We have to stop it!’ The other half of the class gets up and says, ‘No, you should have a right to do it!’ The teacher gets up, and this is what I think Justice For All is doing, ‘Let’s talk about this intelligibly.’ Is that the right behavior when there’s a gunman shooting kids?
And when the student goes to say, “That’s different,” Danny ignores him and restates the original question, which unfortunately gets the student to accept Danny’s premise.
Later, Danny adds this point:
What we need to do as Christians is stop talking about something. Because when we say, if I told you, ‘Do you like this grass?’ We could have a talk about it and we’re elevating the grass, kind of, to a place of it could be good or it could be bad… When our premise is ‘Let’s go and spread how to talk about abortion, we are making abortion higher than it ought to be. What we should be saying is, ‘Abortion is wrong and we ought to end it.’
Here are four problems with AHA attacking JFA with these arguments:
Eight years ago I made the second best decision of my life, just behind deciding to follow Jesus: I married my best friend, Hannah.
I have no idea what people are talking about when they talk about a “seven-year itch.” I’ve never been more in love with my wife than I am now.
This has been a year of re-discovering how to love my wife well, making sure that I’m not just doing the things that are in my top two “love languages,” but her top two. Frankly, this is still something I’m working on, but it’s incredible how much room there is for me to grow in loving my wife.
That makes my marriage the adventure of a lifetime.