In my early high school years, a friend travelled to the United States for a sporting event. He returned with many wonderful tales of the Land of Liberty, among which was reports of a product called Crystal Pepsi.
At the time, PepsiCo had pulled its products from the South Africa in protest of apartheid policies, which meant that Crystal Pepsi was unlikely to find its way here, but the concept was intriguing. Crystal Pepsi was not a clear, lemon-lime flavoured drink, like Sprite. It was said to taste very much like original Pepsi—cola-like—but was entirely transparent. Since the product never reached South African shores, I had completely forgotten about Crystal Pepsi, until I heard it mentioned recently as an example of a failed product.
The reality behind Crystal Pepsi’s failure, however, is more sinister than a simple failed product.
Initially, Pepsi’s colourless cola was a success. In its first year, it captured 1% of America’s cold drink market, worth nearly $500 million. This garnered the attention the Coca-Cola company, which was reeling to consolidate market share after the failure of its revised “New Coke” recipe.
Coca-Cola respond to the success of Crystal Pepsi with Tab Clear, a similarly colourless cola product. Tab Clear proved to be a failure and the consumer market, which assumed that Tab Clear and Crystal Pepsi were essentially the same thing, responded to both with equal distaste. Within two years, both Crystal Pepsi and Tab Clear were removed from the cola market. But this is where the plot thickens.
Sergio Zyman, at the time chief marketing officer for Coca-Cola, later admitted that Tab Clear was intentionallycreated as a bad tasting drink. The goal was to sow confusion in the transparent cola space, with the hope that consumers would paint both clear colas with the same distasteful brush, which would sink Crystal Pepsi despite its initial success. He described this as a “kamikaze” marketing strategy: crashing Coca-Cola’s own product but taking down Pepsi’s with it. It was ruthless, but brilliant. And it is a wonderful metaphor for Satan’s strategy against Christ’s church.
As God’s archenemy, the devil would like nothing more than to destroy the church of Jesus Christ. He will employ any strategy he can to this end, and Coca-Cola’s kamikaze marketing might be symbolic of his greatest ploy.
Consider, for a moment, three ways Satan might choose to wage war against the church.
First, he might attack directly, employing open, violent persecution to destroy churches. This is certainly his strategy in some parts of the world, where violence against Christians abounds. In many parts of North Africa and Asia, it is dangerous to be Christian. Some sociologists have suggested that more Christians were killed for their faith in the twentieth century than any preceding century. In fact, many estimates suggest that more than half of Christian deaths by persecution over the past two millennia occurred in that single century.
History has shown, however, that open attack has limited success in the long run. God tends to build and purify his church in the face of open hostility. Rather than destroying, open hostility often strengthens the true church.
Second, the devil might exert his energies into allowing churches to exist, but making people believe that it is an inherently evil institution. We see this when militant atheism attacks religion as a concept and argues that the church is inherently oppressive. This is often the case in entertainment media, where Christianity is persistently portrayed as a villain, which only exists to oppress by exerting its own power. The recent psychological horror film, Heretic, is a good example of this. The film centres on an elderly recluse inviting two Mormon missionaries into his house, purportedly to receive their teaching, but who spends the time foisting his own idea that religion exists only to control the masses and that true freedom is found in casting off the shackles of religiosity.
This strategy, however, proves to be of limited success, because when people are confronted with the gospel in true, Christ-centred churches, they soon see the beauty of Christianity and reject distortions to the contrary.
But consider a third avenue of attack the enemy might employ. What if he resorted to kamikaze tactics? What if he created a competing product, which looks very much the same as the real thing, but is designed to fail and to bring down the genuine product with it? What if Satan created institutions that look and sound like true churches, but are designed to leave a bad taste in the consumer’s mouth, hoping that the consumer will paint true churches with the same brush? How much more effective might a Tab Clear approach prove to be?
I am persuaded that examples of such counterfeit churches abound in our country and continent and, sadly, have turned many against the true churches by association. Many fund their way into churches only to be burned by theological and ministerial scandals, which puts them off Christianity entirely. They assume all churches must be the same and therefore reject the church because they have tasted the deliberately inferior product.
Aware of this danger, faithful churches should respond in two ways.
First, they should be careful to point out the inferiority of Tab Clear churches. I do not mean that churches should give themselves to heresy hunting, spending all their energy in “discernment ministry” whose only goal is to point out the error of the latest theological fad. This sort of discernment ministry is often self-righteous, critical, and unedifying. It invests so much energy in exposing error that it fails to uphold the beauty of what is true.
Nevertheless, there is a desperate need within Christianity for biblical discernment. When church leadership is aware of error knocking on its door, it must speak out and expose that error.
For example, in an African context, people need to see the anaemia of the prosperity gospel. True churches must be willing, in humble and appropriate ways, to speak against the false prosperity gospel. In many places where the gospel has taken a historic foothold, the error of thinking that Christianity advances by a show of political and social power needs to be exposed. These are distortions of biblical Christianity and too many who have embraced them have ended up burned and utterly rejecting Christianity because of them.
Second, faithful churches must work hard to model the beauty of true Christianity in a way that upholds glory of the gospel. Churches should teach sound doctrine and model biblical virtues that flow from the gospel—love, generosity, integrity, forgiveness, restoration, etc.—so that people can see Christianity as God intended it to be. We must work hard to ensure that our churches are places of refreshment (see 2 Corinthians 7:13) by welcoming the weary, remaining faithful to biblical truth, and modelling humility and repentance.
Reflecting on the downfall of Crystal Pepsi, one consultant opined that the clear cola “didn’t exactly fail on its own merit.” Instead, “Coca-Cola targeted and eliminated it from the market.”
Pepsi was not blameless, however.
True churches must not make the same mistake. By preaching and modelling gospel truth, faithful churches can differentiate themselves from superficial Christianity and prove to refresh where so many other “churches” burn.