The Dangers of Marketing the Church

As I continue to graze on the various books that come my way, I've stopped for a while on a book by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger called "Emerging Churches." It's not often that I stop and say “wow!” but I did in chapter seven and I thought I would quote a few lines for you. They are talking about serving God and people with an attitude of generosity instead of out of the culture of exchange (ie return on investment). They make some broad generalizations of a style of church that tries to attract people with programs or entertainment and label them “consumer churches.” Here are various quotes from pages 136-139. Let me know what you think.

At the core of the gospel is God's generosity embodied in the concept of grace. Jesus served in this way and those communities who decide to follow Him must do likewise.

Advertising and marketing, which are so seductive and pervasive in culture, have a profound impact on spirituality and the pursuit of God. Today, typically, individuals come to spirituality as shoppers. They consume spiritual experiences. They pursue the next experience that promises to take them to a higher spiritual plane and yield greater growth.

Churches that adopt a marketing approach treat their visitors as customers, numbers and potential converts instead of simply as people. A culture of self-interested exchange permeates the life of consumer-oriented churches, where the "customer's" financial support is solicited in exchange for spiritual services rendered.

The underlying assumption is that customers are never satisfied and are liable to take their business elsewhere. Satisfaction is an elusive target, constantly moving and taking on new forms.

Much of marketing practice borders on manipulation by creating needs. Until one sees or experiences a product one often does not "need" it. The creation and the presentation of a product create the need. Marketing is not neutral; it fosters human desire as much as it satiates it.

Churchgoers associate the consumer church's products with "need satisfaction." There are areas of an individual's life that are ambiguous and insecure, to which the church seeks to respond by creating and offering products that will address those gaps. Consumer churches present a relationship with Jesus as the answer to widespread feelings of angst. Thus Jesus is turned into a product that satisfies needs. The problem is that Jesus won't satisfy individual needs, for the gospel is primarily about God's agenda, not ours. For true satisfaction to take place, needs must be reformed and transformed to correspond with the gospel.

When Jesus is presented as a product and ceases to satisfy, as all products cease to satisfy at some point, one must then move on to another spiritual expression. By marketing Jesus, therefore, the consumer church actually makes the pain worse, for now even God (from a visitor's perception) cannot help. Instead of challenging the logic of the economic system, which the kingdom does wonderfully, the consumer church blesses the economic rules and creates transitory, surface-level Christians in the process.

This critique of a consumerist society reveals the extent to which the church itself has become subverted by the wider culture. The church as a sign of the kingdom of God, must demonstrate an alternative society. Consumerism both pacifies and disempowers people and robs them of their individuality and creative potential. Consumerism destroys community by discouraging active participation.

Unbridled consumerism also leads to greed, acquisitiveness, and wastefulness as people become dissatisfied and bored with their possessions and strive for the latest and the biggest (or the smallest, in the case of gadgets). Emerging churches believe that people need to be delivered from the covetousness and selfishness so that they can be liberated for a life of service and generosity.

Is Hills an Emerging Church?

Good Question!
I've had to think about that a bit over the last little bit and have had to do some more reading. The previous two posts will give you a bit of background on emerging and missional movements. However there is no real clear expression of what an emerging church really is. If I were required to accept everything that proponents of the emerging church advocate it would make me very uncomfortable. However in true postmodern emergent style let me tell you what we do instead of a list of our statement of faith - because in terms of theology, I am a evangelical who is part of a pentecostal denomination. But what we do doesn't really fit too many categories.

Do I think Hills is an emerging church? Yes and no. ... Someone described Hills as "a small church, a house church, not that unlike a cell group that meets (except with better musicians of course) ... with the removal of formality and hierarchy and format … “ I would add that we have a commitment to whole church participation, praying for one another every week, meals together (not as often as I’d like) a lack of a fixed order of service (although we definitely follow a pattern) and hopefully a responsiveness to the Spirit. I don’t think we are doctrinally different from the Evangelical mainstream although I am a bit offbeat sometimes. Living out life – we encourage holiness, prayer, evangelism, neighbouring. Approach to evangelism - God has placed you where you work and live – love God, love your neighbour, help your neighbour love God. Look for divine appointments.

I'll give you a general description of emerging church from my point of view. I’m not sure where the term originates, but I think there are those who take the concept to absurd extremes as well as others who react to it with equally absurd extremes. In general it is to me a view and practice of Christianity that recognizes its unbiblical practices (dating back to Constantine and the ongoing unbiblical changes made to the church) and tries to recreate church in ways that line up more closely to the New Testament and tries to address the needs found in our world.

Even as I say that, I know that I still participate in some of the stuff I feel has little Scriptural basis – however my approach is to hold those things lightly and make them our own. The best example of that is our Advent sevices – I think many of our Christmas traditions have pagan origins but they can be used to point to Christ and incorporate Scriptural teaching. (The whole debate over the past few years about Christmas trees and crèches and saying Merry Christmas is just so silly to me.)

What all this means to me is that many of the things that we traditionally consider Christian are at best merely conveniences or traditions and at worst heretical. For example the traditional Sunday morning church service has very little biblical backing. Things like church buildings, professional paid staff (ouch), hierarchies of denominations, sitting quietly, one main speaker, choirs, worship teams, the centrality of the pastor/teacher role, lack of participation by 95% of the people, to say nothing of paganized and commercialized celebrations (like Christmas, Easter, Halloween, etc.). This has resulted in a passive Christianity with a lack of discipleship, purpose, anemic Christians who don’t use their gifts, a complete disappearance of certain functions (apostles, prophets, etc.) - building centred worship, consuming all of our resources on ourselves, a “come to us – all are welcome” mentality that has for the most part lost credibility and relevance to much of our world. What comes with that is a top down control structure that borrows more and more from the corporate model. Large churches need a CEO type senior pastor in order to make sure everything happens right and very little is flexible enough to meet the changing needs of our communities. This structure also makes everyone so busy with church that they have no time to be connecting with their neighbours, and with their communities.

I see the emerging church as a way of viewing life and a reaction to the churchy traditions of the past that have hurt rather than helped individuals and communities. It meets because it has to meet and because it wants to meet. The people celebrate what God has done during the week. Its people live out what they believe. They know each other and hold one another accountable. It’s small and nimble, able to adjust to its surroundings. It’s tough to do in our busy, commuter world. It’s tough to do with Christians who have gone to traditional churches because they think that the pastor is an expert who knows God and Scripture better than they do and who can block for them (football analogy) as they go through life.

I'm sure there's much more I could say to describe us but that's all for now. Next I think I would like to address some of the shortcomings and even heresies included in the emerging church movement. Stay tuned!

The Missional Church

Just to confuse you a bit more, many people who are thinking about how the church is changing are using a new term called "missional" to describe the charactaristics of this new way of doing church. Jim Thomas writing on the Urbana website (www.urbana.org) writes a good summary of what missional means and what missional churches look like (and what they don't). I thought I'd quote portions of it here to give a bit of an overview.


The Missional Church
by Jim Thomas

There is much talk in the (North) American church about being missional. This word implies at least two theological and ecclesiological (i.e. church related) course corrections. On the one hand, missional hints at moving from church as a “club” for Christians, to church as Christ’s body, sent by God to reconcile the world to Himself. On the other hand, missional means moving from missions as an activity in which a few Christians are sent to foreign countries to convert unbelievers, to mission as God’s most basic purpose, intended for all believers.

Two of the leading threads in contemporary church thought are called ... emergent and missional. 
The emergent and the missional church movements share a conviction that mission is the heart of the church; that the meaning of mission in contemporary society needs to be recovered; and the need for new manifestations of mission that break free of some traditional models which are either no longer effective, or worse, have become a negative witness.

The essence of their message is the importance of both word and deed in witness, and rejection of the liberal/conservative split over how to witness to the kingdom of God. Liberal churches have traditionally emphasized social justice as witness and the here-and-now of God’s kingdom, but they have deemphasized verbal proclamation. Conservative churches have placed nearly all of their weight on verbal witness and the “by-and-by” of God’s kingdom, while shunning social change and justice. Integral mission underscores that God’s kingdom is both present and future, and in the absence of deeds and lives reflecting the nature of that kingdom, verbal proclamation falls on deaf ears.

Characteristics of missional churches

Minfred Minatrea studied a number of missional churches. He defined missional churches as “Reproducing communities of authentic disciples, being equipped as missionaries sent by God, to live and proclaim his kingdom in their world.” He noted nine practices that they have in common (with my explanatory phrases in parentheses):
1. Having a high threshold for membership (high expectations for believers)

2. Being real, not real religious (being transparent, authentic, with one foot in “the world.”)

3. Teaching to obey rather than to know (a practical faith)

4. Rewriting worship every week (Creative, participatory Sunday morning services)

5. Living apostolically (each believer as a missionary)

6. Expecting to change the world (aggressively engaged in transforming communities)

7. Ordering actions according to purpose. (Ruthless aligning of resources with mission)
8. Measuring growth by capacity to release rather than retain. (Not megachurches but multiplying churches)

9. Placing kingdom concerns first (in contrast to denomination first. Thus, cooperation with other churches)

Common Deviations from Missional
To further clarify what a missional church is, we can describe a number of common alternative models.

Missionary churches. Some churches are described as “missionary churches.” They are noted for sending a lot of missionaries to foreign countries, raising funds for missionaries, holding missions conferences, and featuring missionaries prominently in the Sunday services when they are in town. In this perspective, however, the missionaries are a subset of the congregation. In a missional church, every believer is regarded as a missionary and church life is oriented around the implications of that view. Thus, missional churches significantly “raise the bar” in terms of mission. Also, since the term missionary carries such strong mental images, some of them not very positive, an alternative to saying that every believer is a missionary is to say that every believer is to live missionally.

Church growth. One might think that churches that are focused on growth in numbers have evangelism as their mission. While this may be true for some churches subscribing to the church growth philosophy and practices, there are some aspects of the church growth school that run contrary to missional church philosophies and practices. For one, missional churches focus on kingdom growth rather than church growth. They are more likely to focus on planting new churches than in enlarging themselves (though they do not shun numerical growth as a by-product of being missional), and to measure growth by “the ability to release rather than retain.” Kingdom growth often means collaborating with other churches. Church growth, however, often occurs at the expense of other churches and creates competition rather than cooperation. The church growth school promotes “the homogenous unit principle” which says that people want to become part of a group of people like themselves. This principle is thought by many to be counter to the biblical mandate for cross-cultural unity. In addition, one study has shown that multi-ethnic churches grow faster than mono-ethnic churches. Finally, a church that is remaining stable in size while also releasing people to other and new churches is growing in a sense. It has to be bringing in new people all the time to compensate for those who are leaving.

Maintenance churches. Minatrea refers to these as conventional churches. McNeal describes them as churches with a “club” mentality. They are churches that have made themselves their purpose. Their priorities include maintaining established programs and practices, in large part because they are established, and keeping people coming to the church in order to maintain the programs. The church building (enlarging and maintaining it) is often a key goal or priority. At the risk of overstating the nature of maintenance churches, I would place in this category churches that have a self-absorbed spirituality. That is, churches focused on orthodoxy, tradition, or health and wealth messages. (This is not to say that more traditional churches cannot be missional.) A related category of spirituality is what I would call "knowledge-centered." This is a church that elevates analysis and knowledge of the Bible but does not exhort and practically enable people to an active Christian life-style. Information (by itself) is seen as a necessary and sufficient witness, and believing it brings salvation and the Holy Spirit, leading in turn to a transformed life.

As we commit to becoming missional churches, we should expect some bumps. Becoming more missional will require "organized abandonment" of some policies and programs that do not align with our mission. There will always be tenacious advocates of any program we either abandon or radically change, and people who will take issue with every dollar diverted in another direction. To travel this course successfully, church leaders will need a clear vision of where we are headed and why, resolve to stick to decisions, and a strong community among themselves to help deal with the arrows that will fly. But the price we will pay will be worth the goal we are aiming for, a church that is working aggressively to: follow Jesus as Lord; manifest God’s kingdom to an unbelieving world; and work with the Holy Spirit in drawing people into his kingdom.

Thinking in the New Year

Well it's been over a month since my last post. I've celebrated Christmas, been to Florida and back. and have been adjusting to a new year and writing 2007 on my cheques. A couple of conversations over the past little while have been about the emerging church and what it's all about and some of it's red flags. I thought I'd pull together a few quotes and a few thoughts and invite some feedback ... or maybe I'll just mumble to myself to more fully understand what I think.

So I wanted to start out with a quote from Scot McKnight who blogs at www.jesuscreed.org who explains through a letter to Matt the concept of emerging from and emerging to.

Dear Matt,
You’ve asked me what is one of the most commonly asked questions about the emerging movement ... what we are emerging out of ...?

Let me say what I think “emerging” means from two angles:

First, we are emerging into ... how we think the Church should be in the future. We use emerging it refers to the direction we are moving. We want to be the kind of Christians that speak the gospel in our world in such a way that it cuts into the fabric of sin and constructs a way of life that is fully consistent with the way Jesus calls us to live. Since we think culture is changing, we want to understand that culture and both connect to it and critique it. So we are seeking to be Christians in our day — and that means in the postmodern era.

We believe that there is truth to the claim that we are now in a postmodern era. We think that postmodernity is changing the current generation — in how it understands truth or (the best way of saying this) our articulation of the truth of the gospel, in how we relate to one another in the world, and in the weakening of the grip of the Western culture’s belief that scientific knowledge tells the whole truth.

That’s the into part.

Second, we think “emerging” relates to moving from where we’ve been, and frankly for must of us (though not all) where we’ve been is conservative evangelicalism. It is not that we have all (some have) abandoned that evangelicalism, but we think that shifts and adjustments are necessary to that traditional expression of our faith in order to ltrust, live and speak the truth of the gospel to the current generation.

It is also my hope that we are emerging from the disunity of the Church, the fracturing of the Church into all kinds of splinter groups. Most of these Christians really do believe the same gospel but can’t get along for what is sometimes not all that important of reasons. So I hope we can emerge from the tribal mentality that has too often characterized Christianity

And lots of us think we need to emerge from the power structures of our past. Matt, this is odd to say, but my generation is the hippie generation; we fought hard to democratize church members The problem is that my generation got tired of the effort to live like a body, and gave all the power back to the leaders. Maybe there’s a social cycle in this, but one thing is for sure: emergence wants to renew the democratization process. It’s fun to see how this is happening all over the place — from house churches and simple churches to smaller missional and emergent gatherings. (Again I could go on.)

All of this means we want to get together on the basics of the gospel, the basics of our creedal faith, and on the basis of a life devoted to following Jesus — and do all these as a community, regardless of “who” we are.

Above all, though, we are working at seeing “what will happen next.” In other words, one can’t predict emergence; one participates in emergence. And we are watching some grassroots shifts in gospel living begin to take shape in all sorts of ways — in how we do church, in how we preach, in how we evangelize, in how we organize our gatherings and “services,” in how we related to the State, in how we participate in capitalism and wealth and possessions … I could go on.
Blessings, Scot

Thanks Scot - a pretty good introduction.
He also has a good (although a bit intellectual) article about the emerging church in Christianity Today which you can find here.

More to come later. Stay tuned.

Christmas Party

Our Christmas tree
(picture taken with my cellphone)
Yes it's real




We had our annual neighbourhood Christmas party last night (Sunday). A regular stream of people came through - close to 40 altogether and more than half of them our Jewish neighbours. People seem to enjoy it and have a chance to meet and reconnect with neighbours they haven't seen since last year. Kirstyn sang again - did her song 3 times during the evening so that everyone could hear it. She did a song by Jacqui Valesques called You're Only A Prayer Away. She really does touch people's hearts with her singing - a number of people with tears in their eyes - there is an anointing on her singing.

Maybe I should explain ... This is our 7th annual Christmas Party. We live on a stree that is about 90% Jewish. We know most of our neighbours and invite 70 or 80 of them over once a year to reconnect with us and with one another. It's a busy time of year and they don't always make it - but most send their regrets. Someone suggested that maybe we should throw a Hannukah party because we're in a Jewish neighbourhood - but honestly I wouldn't know how. For now - untill someone else wants to throw a Hannukah party (hopefully inviting me) - we'll keep up the tradition of getting our neighbours together in the winter when nobody comes outside.

Check out some of the goodies - of course all home baked by my lovely wife.

New Website is Up

You can head over to our new website. We finally have it up and running. It's nice and simple and just tell you a little bit about ourselves at Hills. The website is www.hillschurch.ca and a link is on the sidebar there to the right. Check it out.

An Interesting Guy

I talked to a very interesting guy yesterday. He's my son's friend and has just gone away to college in the Hamilton area. He was looking for a church to attend and decided to go and visit a number of churches to see what they were like. His criteria were "Were these churches friendly and accepting?"

Not so interesting you say? Actually, it's the way he went about looking for a church that caught my attention. He dressed up like a homeless person (adding appropriate smells) and went church to church, Sunday by Sunday to see how he would be received. There were some who accepted him, others who suggested he clean up before he comes in and still others who told him to leave. No one offered him money or a meal (except for a church that was having a meal for visitors that Sunday).

He went back to some of the churches dressed as most people would attend church and found that many of them were not much more accepting than when he was dressed as a homeless person.

As someone who has worked with the homeless for a number of years, I'm left feeling a little uneasy. Now it's not because I haven't been tempted to do the same thing (because I have). And there were times when we actually "set-up" the churches I spoke in, and had a staff person come into the church dressed up as a homeless person interrupting my message. Let me tell you that created quite a stir.

I'm not sure if I'm uneasy about the churches or the activities and attitudes of this young man. Some questions come to mind. What is a "good church?" Why do you attend one and not another? Can you determine whether or not you would attend a particular church based on one visit? Does visiting a church and attending its services really give you any basis for knowing whether or not it is a good church? Sometimes I think that what happens during Sunday services is almost irrelevant to what a church is really all about. Too often we think that church is a place or an activity rather than the gathered body of Christ. Should a church be judged on how people are welcomed at the door or by the kind of relationships it has among its own members and with its community? Does outreach happen on Sunday morning at church or on every day and in every situation?

I would also wonder why a homeless person would come to a church in the suburbs. It takes a great deal of energy to go so far out of your way. If that happened during one of our church services I would try to determine the person's need - because normally it is not "Hi, I'm just checking our your church to see what you're like." It's usually an acute need - whether it be spiritual, physical or financial, or an invitation by a friend - that would drive them so far out of their way to come to Suburban Community Church.

A church should definitely be a good neighbour and have compassion for the poor but most suburban churches will be very ineffective if they based their ministry to the poor on the number of homeless people who came through their doors on a Sunday morning. There are suburban churches that have effective ministry to the poor but they usually do it by partnering with an urban church or mission and supporting them with people and finances. To measure a church's effectiveness we should look at their financial records and activities of their members and perhaps their list of programs.

But then maybe I just analyze things too much.

The Canadian Way

I'm not sure why I'm so patriotic on my blog, but I was sent this email and I thought I would post it here. It speaks of the truly great but quite unrecognized contirbutions Canada has made to world peace over the years.

Sunday Telegraph Article (date uncertain)
Salute to a brave and modest nation
Kevin Myers, The Sunday Telegraph

LONDON - Until the deaths last week of four Canadian soldiers accidentally killed by a U.S. warplane in Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops were deployed in the region. And as always, Canada will now bury its dead, just as the rest of the world as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.
It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower ... that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet again.

That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North American continent with the United States, and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts. For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: It seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved.

Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10% of Canada's entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.

Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, its unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular Memory as somehow or other the work of the "British." The Second World War provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack. More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone. Canada finished the war with the third-largest navy and the fourth-largest air force in the world.
The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time. Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign in which the United States had clearly not participated - a touching scrupulousness which, of ourse, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity.
So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality - unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg, Alex Trebek, Art Linkletter and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer, British. It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.
Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves - and are unheard by anyone else - that 1% of the world's population has provided 10% of the world's peacekeeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peacekeepers on Earth - in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peacekeeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.
Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular on-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace - a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.

So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan? Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable things for honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun.

It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour comes at a high cost. This week, four more grieving Canadian families knew that cost all too tragically well.

Life Passages

I guess when you hit 50 you start having less to say. I posted a week and a half ago and then had a busy weekend. We attended a friend's son's Bar Mitzvah - both the synagogue portion and the party the next evening. Everything was top notch. Adam, the Bar Mitzvah boy did great in his reading, the food was fabulous, the party was great and our hosts are such great people.

I actually think that the rite of passage concept (like a bar Mitzvah) is actually a great concept for youth and helpful for their transition into adulthood. However in our culture ... it may be more helpful to be doing it a few years later than the entrance into teenager-hood. Those early adolescent years are tough. They still seem like children in so many ways. In some places they do a sweet 16 party for girls. That seems to me to be a better age to do a coming of age event.

I think we should do a big party for every significant transition. We already do birthdays. Weddings, graduations and retirement is all celebrated in some way. How about a moving away from home party when your adult children finally move out on their own? Well maybe it becomes one long party for the empty nesters. Or how about a "turning middle aged" party? Or maybe a mid-life crisis party? When exactly does that happen? How about a "halfway through raising your kids" party? This way you know how long you still have to go.

All in all I think life should have more parties. Jesus believed in parties. I think being with Jesus would actually have been lots of fun - challenging to the core, but fun. Raising dead people, calming storms, healing lepers, confronting the religious establishment, feeding 5000 people, lots of road trips. There was always a crowd and lots of opportunity to celebrate life and life passages.

A Busy Week

Well, I turned 50 this week. I saw it coming for a long time but when it actually hit I was a bit surprised by how old it sounds. I don't feel any different. I was at a retreat on my birthday with a group of about 50 other leaders from the GTA and somehow they found out it was my 50th (my wife has a guilty look on her face). When one of them wished me a happy birthday he said "I thought you were younger than me - but you're actually a few years older!" Maybe it was intended as a compliment but I suddenly felt older.

My Dad also celebrated his 54th wedding anniversary this week - the first one with out my mother who passed away in September. I ached for him and felt the loss more greatly myself. Today is my mother's birthday as well - another tough day. I usually bought her a dozen yellow carnations on her birthday. Life goes on but it's not always simple or easy.