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My wife and I had the great opportunity to drop the kids at grandma’s house and celebrate a wedding anniversary last week. Because the kids are still so young, we aren’t yet able to take extended trips, but an afternoon out is a treat indeed for us at this stage of life. First, we took in some premium tacos at a favorite Mexican restaurant south of Atlanta, then we went shopping in the Atlanta Underground. But the real treat came when we decided to visit the World of Coke! For those of you living outside the Atlanta area, you may not be aware that Coka Cola was invented in Atlanta and there is a tremendous history museum in the Centennial Park district today that is well worth the sixteen dollar admission fee they charge for an adult visitor.

Not only were the employees at the WOC very inviting, hospitable, and helpful, but they all had a shared goal of making guests feel happy. The entire exhibit was actually a propaganda piece designed to create an association between Coke and happiness, but it was couched in enough memorabilia that I could tolerate the non-stop infomercial for the two hours or so that we enjoyed the display. WOC was full of signage from years back, advertising pieces that spanned more than 100 years of corporate history, interactive displays including a working bottling factory, and even a soda tasting room featuring Coke products from around the world. The word awesome comes to mind thinking about the entire experience. If you should find yourself in the Atlanta area, I would encourage you to visit at least once.

As fun as the day was, there were several important leadership reminders wrought by the presentation that I just could not ignore. I am sure that the Coke people did not intend to communicate these lessons, but they spoke to me just the same.

First, I was astounded by the initial history of the Coke brand. Coke was invented by Dr. John Pemberton of Atlanta who sold the drink in his community drug store. At its height, Pemberton sold nine Cokes per day and made a whopping $50 profit the first year of Coke. Unfortunately, his expenses to manufacture the drink left him $20 in the hole. In the second year of Coke’s existence, Asa Candler entered the drug store, bought a Coke from the soda fountain, and knew right away that the product was marketable. Candler bought the recipe and rights to Coka Cola for $2300, or approximately 47 times the annual revenues of the product. Candler’s expertise in marketing made the difference in success that Pemberton never discovered. The Pemberton strategy was to offer Coke as one of many products in his soda fountain, trusting in the physical location of his drug store to produce the sales needed to justify Coke’s being on the fountain menu. By contrast, Candler saw Coke as a commodity intended for a larger audience and not just the offering of a single store. To Pemberton, the drug store was the product, but for Candler, Coke was the product. I couldn’t help but think of this lesson from a church leadership point of view. Pemberton and Candler had the same product, and the same opportunities for success. What separated them was the strategy of getting the product to the customer. In our churches, the product (if you will) is the gospel. A church can choose the Pemberton approach and declare that the church is here for anyone who would like to come and get the product. The gospel is available to anyone who would come into the store and check it out. Rather, the Candler approach seems to be more in line with the great commission…taking the product to the people and using various strategies to create interest in the product. Like the spread in Coka Cola’s popularity, the reach of the gospel, and its return, is far greater if the church takes the gospel in some fashion into the community. Methods of gospel propagation vary, but the idea is to be Candleresque in recognizing the value of the product over the building where it is on tap, and to take the gospel to the people rather than expecting the community to come to the church. An attitude that says to the community…here we are with the gospel, if you are interested in learning about the gospel you can come and see about it in here…is sure to leave a large segment of the target unreached. There are people all around that don’t yet know that they are interested in the gospel, who may never set foot in our churches, but who would drink of the gospel and love it if it were brought to them.

The second leadership lesson that I learned had to do with the sudden sale of Pemberton’s product to Candler. Pemberton worked hard to develop the unique recipe that is Coka Cola, but sold the product in only two years. Could it be that Pemberton might have found success similar to Candler with the same product if he had only stuck with it? One of the great attractions at WOC stated that Pemberton was a great inventor, but not a good marketeer. That may be true, but Pemberton certainly could have made more of it with a greater commitment to success, a little more initiative, gathering of the right resources, and a little vision for what Coke could have become. So many times we sell out on an idea too soon, when we may be just a short step away from startling success. Likewise, we often fail to see the value of what is right before us and cheapen it in our own mind and hearts.

Finally, I learned a great lesson that was echoed by a ministry mentor years ago who said “maximize your victories and minimize your defeats.” I was eight years old when the Coka Cola company trashed their 100 year old formula for success and introduced to America a product called “New Coke.” New Coke was supposed to be an improvement to the original formula, but I remember tasting it as a child and realizing, even in my juvenile innocence, that New Coke was a bad idea. It didn’t take long for the customer base to react with negative sentiments towards New Coke, and the Coka Cola company realized that they had flopped in a big way. Here in the south…especially in Atlanta, people protested the new drink by pouring it out in the street in mass numbers. It took less than three months to return to the old formula, which had been completely eliminated from the market with the advent of New Coke, and to correct the atrocity by introducing the old recipe under the new name “Coka Cola Classic.” America breathed a sigh of relief. A little research about the New Coke fiasco will yield quite a bit of information to demonstrate just how big a deal this was in 1985. Peter Jennings even interrupted general programming to inform the country of the historic life changing news…that Coke was back! Yet for all that hype back then, the World of Coke had not a single piece of New Coke memorabilia…not a poster, bottle cap, empty can…nada, zilch, nothing. I was looking for it the whole time…and if it is there, I certainly did not see it. In our own lives, and especially in church life, we will do well to minimize our defeats and failures…and yes, we all have them. Every church, just like businesses, families, and individuals, has failures in its past. Zig Ziglar had it right when he said that “the road to success always goes through the valley of failure. Failure is an event, not a person.” If we allow ourselves, or our churches for that matter, to dwell on failures, then failure begins to define us. Coke did well to forget the New Coke quarter of its negative history, and focus on what it does well…creating joy and happiness for the customer. Part of creating happiness for us was their knowledgeable deletion of that historic failure of epic proportions called “New Coke.”