The Future's Orange - no longer

Very struck by the mailing from the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity (LICC) about the new Orange ad. The mailing is entitled Who Are You? Incidentally, their regular mailings are excellent - visit http://www.licc.org.uk

The optimistic mantra that began, ‘The future’s bright, the future’s …’ has been ditched. In the biggest global advertising campaign ever launched, Orange have introduced their new litany: ‘I am who I am because of everyone.’ It’s playing on a TV near you.

For sixty seconds, the camera pans over a range of people, a disembodied voice explaining, ‘I am my mum, and my sister. I am my best friend, Mike, who I’ve known since school’ and so on. Backed by a chilled, trance-like music track, it works. It doesn’t scream the product it’s selling, it merely gives off a vibe that emphasises how important communication is.

We are surrounded by competing voices trying to shape us, not least, ironically, the advertising world. This world is the funfair mirror of our culture, taking our desires, our aspirations, and our beliefs and slightly distorting them before reflecting them back to us. The apostle Paul’s urgent plea not to be conformed to the world (Romans 12:2) continues to be relevant to all of us; if we are not on our guard, we will find ourselves unwittingly moulded by the loudest voices, the most insistent personalities, and the most forceful events.

This week Alexander Solzhenitsyn died. His writing, courage, and independence have been praised. During the time of the Cold War, he was the darling of the West – the writer who unveiled the inhumanity of the communist system in Russia. When the Politburo could no longer stomach him, they deported him. It was a shock, therefore, when in 1979, delivering a speech at the bastion of Western liberalism, Harvard University, he placed both communism and Western capitalism on the same level: morally bankrupt, because of their insistence on living without reference to God.

Prophets are never easy to live with. They seem to enjoy flying in the face of received opinion. They rarely present their words against a chilled, trance-like soundtrack. They are what they are because of others around them, and because of what they obediently allow God to say and do through them.

We are all being shaped, all being discipled. It’s just a question of who is doing that shaping. We need to assemble the different shaping voices into a proper, biblical order of significance, so that we, in our time, can accurately ‘hear what the Spirit says to the churches’ (Revelation 2:7).

Neil Hudson