If You Ask Me/By Martha Knight

Do you find it annoying when some company sends you mail disguised to look like something from the government? Sometimes it looks like a notice from the Social Security Administration or the IRS.

Then there are the calls from telemarketers impersonating the billing or customer service departments of utilities. They want to speak to the person who is responsible for paying the Penelec bill. Or they have good news for the person who pays the gas bill.

A good number of us will cop to being the person who pays the electric bill (maybe not Penelec, exactly, but we know we paid Penelec for years, so it seems reasonable to agree with that identity).

The caller is hoping to get us to switch to another electric company, as we are entitled to do in Pennsylvania, if we can find one offering a deal we like. Why not say so? Well, why does anyone resort to trickery? In many instances, it is because the seller, or the candidate, or the agency, or the cause, or the company, is convinced that there is some weakness in its arguments and some strength in our sales resistance. The seller’s mantra is not “Honesty is the best policy,” but “Caveat emptor”: Let the buyer beware.

Years ago I was a part-time World Booker for a while. We sold sets of encyclopedias, often complete with their own little book case. Where we could, we also sold Child Craft. Some were in economical bindings, some in the Aristocrat style. And there would be annual updates in the form of year books. Payments could be as low as a dime a day.

A bunch of us from Western New York were invited to attend an event called Set Credit University, at Pocono Manor, in Western Pennsylvania, where we stayed at a resort for three or four days, and attended classes and were instructed by sales experts as to the most effective pitches to use, to get those signatures on sales agreements and earn “set credits.”

Then we were grouped in fours and sent forth into assigned neighborhoods in the surrounding area, with our sales kits, to cold canvass for three or four hours before reporting back to SCU.

The recommended approach was to target families with school children, know their names if at all possible, imply that we had a connection with the school, and explain how the reference materials would help the students improve their grades. And incidentally, we would explain how World Books would do this better, more easily and affordably, than Americana, Grolier, Britannica or Flunk and Wagnell.

The pitch tailored to “school families” had been demonstrated and role-played repeatedly in the classes. We even had directories telling us names of residents and showing us which residences contained students.

But I chose my team members with an eye to using a radical approach: being utterly straightforward concerning our mission, and whom we represented.

Mostly in pairs, we rang or knocked and then told the adult who came to the door that we represented Field Enterprises, and were telling people about World Book Encyclopedias and other education related materials. In case our prospect had heard the other pitch sometime, we stated up front that we did not have a connection with their school; but World Books were in the local school. Shouldn’t they be available in the home, too? One of us also had the miniature World Book bank in his hand, and we had placed a big World Booker sticker on each attaché case.

More times than not we were invited in. Some of those times we sold some “package.” When the teams reported back we had about 50 percent more set credits than any other teams,. So that evening when there were awards, we were invited to have our team demonstrate one of our “winning” sales calls.

Until then we had not told any of the other participants that we had deviated from the recommended pitch. When they heard the first sentence of our “entry,” the get-in-the-door explanation for our presence, they were shocked.

Instructors in particular were aghast. But what they could not argue with was that we had won the trust of more prospective buyers than gimmickry and subterfuge had.

I did not continue long with Field Enterprises, mainly because of transportation difficulties. But so long as I was in touch with other World Bookers in our area, I kept hearing that the honest pitch still worked better than deceptive ones.

We would not expect a church to fudge its identity, would we? It isn’t even deceptive, anymore, when people show up at the doorstep, two or more, offering literature from their publisher, omitting mention of the name of their group. We all know who they are, and we are interested or we aren’t.

But what about a denomination, a well-known connectional church, that denies its connection? Do Lutherans or Methodists or Catholics or Baptists pretend that they aren’t? Or that they have no connection with the synod, or session, or conference, or assembly of which they are a part? I don’t recall seeing them act skittish about their identity.

The Free Methodist Church in this country has Regions, such as the North East Region, and within regions, Conferences and Districts. The Conference (the one in our area is headquartered in Batavia, N.Y.) has some staff headed by a superintendent, and the traditional apparatus for governance. The Conference owns the real estate: church buildings and parsonages and some campgrounds. The Conference, through committees and boards, ordains, appoints ministers and receives reports and “fair share” apportionments.

I can think of many faithful Free Methodists who have been part of a Free Methodist Church locally, built and maintained the buildings, paid the bills, taught the classes, worshipped together. A portion of their givings supported the Conference operation, not the other way around.

The Conference closed the Port Allegany Free Methodist Church a year or so ago, for reasons never clearly explained, but planned to wait a while and then do what it calls a “re-launch.” Currently, for local consumption, it is using the term “launch” to describe its effort to reestablish a local congregation.

I can think of no good reason for anyone “in charge” to refer to the church building as a “former Free Methodist Church,” or eschew use of the denominational name. The recent Annual Conference (Keystone Conference) raised an offering to help fund the relaunch. The Conference still owns the buildings here, built with local sweat and toil and funds, and has authority over the local ministry.

For that matter, Open Arms Church in Bradford is a Free Methodist Church on the very same basis, and was a relaunch of the Tuna Valley Free Methodist Church. Not an independent, community-based church, but part of an established denomination, a connectional system. Why imply otherwise?

Peace.

Drymar@gmail.com. 642-7552.