…postcards from Texas

Yesterday I came across this blog post in the New York Times from M.P Mueller on the New York Times blog. In it, Mueller extols the virtue of the handwritten touch in promoting client loyalty. In it she shares the story of a man who was so delighted to receive a handwritten postcard from a local clothing shop that he took pictures of it on his smartphone and shared them online! Print, rather than pixel, has become so counter-cultural that it merits special attention and provokes a special response, it would seem. Commenting on this phenomenon, Mueller says:

Why is a 40-cent postcard so powerful? As technology races forward,

people are increasingly starved for those high-touch extras,

like homemade meals and personalized notes.

The whole post, which you can find here, is well worth a read.

I spent last Saturday at a small churches’ convention as part of the Baptist Assembly in London. Most of the churches represented are not big on budget or personnel. Where they excel, I suspect, is precisely in those ‘high-touch extras’ which Mueller describes above. Are we missing a trick here, I wonder?  Are we undervaluing the low-cost high-impact of the personal touch and over-estimating the impact of  higher cost approaches? This is a genuine question, since I set high store by effective marketing and conscientious use of digital technology.

All the same, this little blog post was a reminder to me about remembering the church’s incarnational roots – where the most powerful medium for the message is one clothed in flesh.