Does God need a ‘re-brand’? That was the question I recently found on an online forum for marketing executives. In other words, if you think of God as a ‘product’, does he have enough relevance for today’s ‘consumers’ or does he need to be enhanced with a new advertising strategy to make him more popular? That’s what these marketing folks were discussing.

Respondents to the forum had a variety of viewpoints. Some thought God did need a re-brand because of the confusion around him. ‘From the voice of one marketer, he is the father of forgiveness,’ one said. ‘From another he is made responsible for the slaughter of innocents. If ‘God’ is open to this level of diversity in interpretation, then [the brand] lacks validity as a symbol of its product.’

Another said, ‘The problem lies with the marketing staff, not God. The church often misrepresents the product, failing to communicate God’s essence that in itself is relevant and impacting.’

Yet another added, ‘Whether agnostic, atheist or devout, one should be able to identify God, the product, [in the marketplace]. What’s missing?’ This marketer then had a solution: ‘God needs a new and improved logo,’ they said! ‘God the brand needs colour… and sponsorship. The next World Cup may be an optimal event for a brand re-launch… A sleek logo on the backdrop of stadiums, on countless products, as official sponsor of the Cup, and with [his] own website—what more could God want?’

Others on the forum took a different tack. Asking the question of whether God was still relevant, one person suggested, was like ‘asking if the air we breathe is still relevant.’ There’s no question. Another said ‘A re-brand of God is not necessary… In times of tragedy and strife, watch where people go for help. You’ll find many back in the pews.’ Another added, just after September 11, ‘In light of the events that transpired this week, I believe we will find that God is the only product that is resilient.’

Another participant to the forum may have been on the money when he said, ‘The question is not “does God need a re-brand” but “does God exist”? If he doesn’t, what point is there in re-branding a lie? If he does then we should ask “are we branding him accurately?”’

This question got me thinking, and it reminded me of The Last Battle—the final book in CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia children’s series. In the story, no-one has seen the Kingly lion Aslan for a long time. But there’s an ape in the outer reaches of the land who finds a lion skin washed down the river, and he hatches a plan. He drapes the lion skin over his friend Puzzle the donkey (who’s not very clever) and passes him off to the other inhabitants of Narnia as Aslan returned to them.

Since no-one knows any better or has seen the real Aslan they’re fooled by the trickery and begin to obey and worship an impostor. Only when the real Aslan returns are the animals set free from the bondage that comes from the false and faulty views they have of their ruler.

A donkey wrapped in a lion skin does not make an Aslan. A re-brand of an imaginary deity will not make a God.

I don’t think God needs a new label, logo or advertising campaign. I want the authentic product, not one shaped to fit consumer demands. And some years ago I joined the ranks of many who have found something authentic in a middle-eastern man who wandered the globe two millennia ago, healing the sick and befriending the outcast—the One who said, ‘If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.’

‘If you’ve found me, you’ve found the authentic God.’

According to new research, few if any of today’s Aussie youth feel a need for God and most are getting along fine without him. The Spirit of Generation Y project, which surveyed 1272 people born between 1976 and 1990, explored the Y Generation’s worldviews and values, sense of meaning and purpose, ways of finding peace and happiness, involvement in religions and spiritualities, and influences on their outlook and lifestyle. Overall, researchers found that less than half of Australia’s Generation Y believed in God, a third was unsure and one in five did not believe in any god at all.

While many youth have followed their parents away from church attendance, researchers thought they’d see a large increase in alternative, eastern and ‘new-age’ spiritualities by Generation Y. While there was an increase, it wasn’t as high as expected. Instead, 31 per-cent of Generation Y can be classified as humanists, rejecting the idea of a God altogether (although some participants in the survey did believe in a ‘higher being’).

These findings echo similar research done in the UK. There, authors of the Making Sense of Generation Y project, based on interviews with 15 to 25 year olds who had little or no connection with the Christian faith, were shocked to find that under 25's had no desire to find a transcendent alternative to their lives. The UK researchers were expecting to find that even if young people had little knowledge of the Christian faith they would at least have other spiritual or religious yearnings. In actuality, the British kids interviewed weren’t feeling at all disenchanted or ‘lost in a meaningless world’. Instead they found the world meaningful as it was, found happiness primarily through family and friends, and had little sense of sin or fear of death. (Although they were afraid of growing old.)

So, what are we to make of such reports? Could this supposed lack of spiritual yearning be a by-product of the seeming ‘immortality’ felt in youth? Could it be the result of a generation that’s never faced a world war, a Great Depression or even a recession; a generation handed enough employment and relative wealth to keep it occupied by life’s earthly pleasures? Could it be because Boomer and Generation Xer parents have largely left today’s youth fending for themselves when it comes to spiritual matters?

Possibly.

It may also be that Generation Y hasn’t got time for God. As Rebecca Huntley notes in her book The World According to Y, as both kids and teens Yers were pushed to be busy, successful and always doing something—whether it was after-school music tutorials or sports—and this frantic sense of always needing to be busy, travelling, socialising, buying, changing and learning has continued into their adult years. ‘All this,’ Huntley notes, ‘leaves Yers with little time for deeper thinking, an essential element for working out the bigger picture [and] exploring issues of meaning and purpose…’

Still, many teens and twenty-somethings are jumping off the treadmill, putting down the XBox console and taking a few breaths to consider spiritual matters. You will find thriving youth and young adult groups in hundreds of churches across Australia. Many are discovering early that frantic living and endless consumption will not fill the God-shaped hole within. Unfortunately, some Yers will wander down destructive paths for answers to their emptiness—like Don Stewart-Whyte, the 25 year old convert to radical Islam and alleged participant in this week’s foiled terrorism plan in the UK.

Some members of Generation Y wont feel a need for God until their idealic worlds of opportunity and plenty are confronted with crisis and loss, or until sufficient time is allowed to ponder why this world should have things like beauty, colour and joy in the first place. (As GK Chesterton said, the worst moment for an atheist is when he feels profoundly grateful yet has no one to thank.)

And until that moment comes, the offer of the Almighty will be the same: ‘You will find me when you seek me with all of your heart’ (Jeremiah 29:13).

A few years ago a newspaper article caught my eye. It suggested that in a vast and lonely Australian desert lay a secret. The story immediately set my imagination alive. I thought of the desert: winds sweeping along the parched soil of the land, kicking particles of dust into the air, tousling the spikey Spinifex shrubs, ruffling the fur of the few animals scavenging for moisture. And then I imagined the secret. Because in this dry desert, an unseen reality lay just beneath its surface:

Water.

Trillions of litres of water.

Around six years ago researchers found an underground basin in Western Australia’s Great Victoria desert. Beneath the red sand, sticks and scrub lay a reservoir holding a potential two trillion kilolitres of slightly saline water. While Perth draws cautiously from its often depleted Mundaring Weir water supply, the basin’s capacity was equivalent to 31,000 Mundaring Weirs. That arid desert may have looked like death from above, but underneath it flowed a river of life.

A giant lake in the desert—what an unexpected surprise. Stories like that remind me that ‘unseen’ does not equal ‘unreal’. I wonder how many trekked across that dusty land oblivious of the life beneath them. I wonder how many still do.

I also wonder how many unseen realities lie beneath the surface of our lives. Most of us have days when we sense a world of vivid colour is out there, but remains shrouded from us. Instead of seeing bright reds and purples we see only pastels. But through a brush with serendipity—the unexpected surprise—the veil lifts for a moment and we glimpse the vibrancy of that other world. And in that moment we sense something bigger than us has been encountered. Perhaps someone bigger than us.

What if coincidences weren’t so coincidental? What if they’d been ‘arranged’ just for us?

What if unseen footprints walked alongside us?

An ancient Hebrew song—a Psalm, Psalm 77 in fact—picks up on such ideas. Speaking about God, it poetically records, “Your path led through the sea… though your footprints were not seen.” The song reflects the experiences of Israelites thousands of years ago who had followed God out of Egyptian captivity—through a Red Sea split in half (if you remember the famous story)—and had been led out of their raging sea of troubles in the process. While their eyes hadn’t seen it in the material sense, this community knew that they had encountered God.

So, I wonder: could life flow right beneath our noses, just like that desert discovery? Could we have encounters with God that we don’t usually recognise as such? Could God be written into the drama of our lives as if played by a secondary character or an extra that we haven’t paid much attention to?

I think so.

Life can feel dry and arid at times. Perhaps we should stop, watch and listen. In that quiet moment we may then hear the One who said all those years ago, “If you’re thirsty, come to me and drink. Then streams of living water will flow from within you.”

Earlier this year I had the privilege of visiting India with a group of Compassion Australia staff. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the moment we landed in Calcutta (or Kolkatta as it’s now known). Stepping onto the tarmac the aroma of diesel fuel that permeates the air immediately hit us. Outside we were confronted with the cries of beggars as we got into our taxi.

We made the drive into Kolkatta’s heart and pulled up outside our first stop—Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity orphanage. We took off our shoes, and were quietly led around the various rooms inside this simple but neatly kept building. In one room some children were being fed lunch, in another some nuns met together to pray. Mother Teresa’s tomb sat at one end of a downstairs hall. We moved from room to room and met some of the 300 orphaned children being fed, clothed and educated there.

But it was the special wing on the second floor that I will remember most. Climbing the steps, we walked in and found rows of cots end to end. This was the ward where the most difficult cases came—those children with severe intellectual handicaps. In these beds lay little boys and girls, their arms and legs emaciated due to their lack of movement. Some children slept; those awake stared vacantly at the ceiling, dribbling. One little boy had a hole in his bottom lip—his grinding teeth had bit right through his skin. These children were so handicapped they couldn’t move or talk, let alone read, write or play.

And over each of these beds stood Mother Teresa’s Sisters and their helpers, holding these kids’ hands, wiping up their dribble, rubbing their arms and legs, turning them over to prevent bed sores, holding and cuddling these humans who would never be able to offer thanks or, in some cases, even recognise them.

Why?

Radical ethicists like Princeton University’s Peter Singer say children like this don’t need to live. They are ‘non-persons’ since they have no capacity to be rational or self-conscious. Like a cabbage or a chicken, they are replaceable. Why, then, do these Missionaries of Charity bother?

Similar questions could be raised about the elderly—those with dementia or Parkinson’s disease. Why care for them when they can no longer offer anything back to society?

The reason is this: every human being, even in their most broken and undignified state, is made in the image of God. ‘God created man in his own image,’ Genesis, the first book in the Bible, tells us; ‘male and female he created them.’

Merryn and I visited a large market a couple of weekends ago. Out the front of the market was a guy who could cut out a silhouette of you on black card in 2 minutes for two dollars. So, we gave it a go. With tongue hanging out this guy went to work, cutting out a silhouette of Merryn and me. He was brilliant! Two minutes later he handed us the card.

There was our silhouette, the outline of our faces side-on. He’d included the wisps of Merryn’s hair and my overly-high forehead (thanks very much). It certainly looked like us. But some of our features weren’t quite right. My chin was a little pointy and my nose a bit too round. Funnily enough, Merryn’s chin and nose were the same. I looked back at the artist—and saw the same chin and nose! He’d created us in his image!

In the same way, God has drawn us, crafted us, cut us out in his image, placing his features on us. What exactly those features are have kept the theologians discussing for centuries, but at the very least we know where our abilities to live, love, relate, choose, feel, decide, reason, imagine, create, and even laugh, come from. They’ve come from God who has all these qualities and more.

Human beings are image-bearers, from their conception to their old age. This belief has been the foundation of western society’s emphasis on human rights. As our politicians decide whether to allow therapeutic cloning, and whether embryos are valuable only for the stem cells they can give us, let’s remember this. Humans are not things. Embryos are not commodities. People are not products. Humans are not valuable for what they can do, but because of Who they reflect.

It was this conviction that kept Mother Teresa serving Kolkatta’s poor and ignored. It’s the same conviction that keeps her Missionaries of Charity wiping dribble from severely disabled children.

And it’s a conviction I hope we can urgently recover too.