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In the 60 seconds others use to advertise a car wash or dining spot on the radio, Lon Solomon gives listeners something else: a cultural comment tied to the Christian Gospel that is intended to spur deeper thought.
Mr. Solomon started in 1997 on WJFK-FM, then the radio home of Howard Stern and now a sports-talk outlet. The 75-year-old retired senior pastor of McLean Bible Church, who said he has “the perfect face for radio,” has delivered pithy pitches for Jesus referencing songs by Simon & Garfunkel, the Eagles and Madonna.
Quoting Simon & Garfunkel’s classic “America” and its line “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why,” Mr. Solomon tells listeners, “I was that way, too,” before finding faith in Christ and beginning a 50-year-old Christian journey.
Surprising listeners doesn’t faze him. He no longer speaks weekly from the pulpit in McLean, but millions still hear his voice, which is the goal of the minutelong “Not a Sermon, Just a Thought” radio spots.
While many retirees work on their golf games or take up pickleball, Mr. Solomon is working to expand his “Not a Sermon” advertising reach. Each quarter, his nonprofit Lon Solomon Ministries funds a 13-week “flight” of spots in two American cities, such as Seattle and Portland, Oregon. The goal is to rotate the placements and cover the nation.
“We’ve already done Chicago and Atlanta,” he said.
Mr. Solomon, who describes his former self as “a secular Jewish person on drugs” living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as a college student, said neither he nor “my drug buddies” would have entered a church. Although someone eventually reached him with the Christian message, he said, a larger world needed to hear it. But how?
“As I thought about it, I thought, you know, it’s real simple,” Mr. Solomon said. “I have to stop asking these people to come onto my turf. I have to go on there and meet them where they are and talk to them where they are.”
Thus was born the “Not a Sermon” ads, 46 seconds of original material with a 14-second standard message on how listeners can learn more from his ministry’s website.
Media specialist Phil Cooke, a veteran of the Christian market, said Mr. Solomon’s concept is “a great strategy because you can place a short commercial spot like this in front of a far bigger audience than a 30-minute program,” the customary format of Christian stations.
Mr. Cooke said brevity is essential when reaching a postmodern audience that may be ignorant of the faith’s basics.
“Today, we live in the most distracted culture in the history of the world,” Mr. Cooke said through email. “The average person today sees as many as 10,000 media messages daily, and studies indicate we touch our phones an average of about 245 times a day. So with that overwhelming barrage of media, it’s tough to get a secular audience to watch a 30-minute or more program to listen to your message.”
Mr. Solomon has a template for his messages: “Give them one verse of Scripture. Say something from current events or personages that would illustrate the point of the verse. And just say to them, ‘You know what, you should think about this.’”
The ads originally aired during shock jock Howard Stern’s program, and they worked. People came to McLean Bible Church, even though Mr. Solomon said that wasn’t the ad campaign’s primary aim.
“It was not to push McLean Bible Church,” Mr. Solomon said. He would mention that he was the pastor there so listeners would know the congregation’s name.
“Not a Sermon” isn’t the only short spiritual thought broadcast to area radio listeners. Bishop Michael Burbidge of the Catholic Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, delivers one-minute spots on WTOP-FM. The diocese has been reaching out to radio listeners for many years.
Mr. Solomon got the idea in the 1980s, nearly a decade into a 38-year run as senior pastor of the Northern Virginia congregation. Yet he couldn’t move forward until 1991, after McLean Bible Church’s membership split over the level of evangelism toward their secular neighbors.
“We had a vote of confidence in me that I won by eight votes,” Mr. Solomon said. “Then most of the people who really didn’t want to have that kind of an outreach approach left, and [that] really cleared the decks.”
His other challenge: finding a memorable catchphrase that listeners would grasp quickly.
“I couldn’t think of a tagline to save my life,” he said. “I mean, it has to fit with secular society. It’s got to have some double entendre about the Gospel.”
He said the answer came to him at a conference in Colorado Springs.
“I’d been praying about this, thinking about this, I was driving myself crazy,” he said. “I was in bed one morning, and it was like somebody whispered in my ear, ‘Not a sermon, just a thought.’”
He credits God with the inspiration. He said to his church leaders, “I’m telling you, the Holy Spirit whispered in my ear. … It was not me. I did not come up with this. I’m as surprised by it as you were.”
The general manager at WASH-FM initially questioned whether church-state separation issues would apply, he said.
Mr. Solomon told the executive, “Unless [the ad is] obscene, it’s a First Amendment issue — and WJFK is doing it.” The station relented, as did WTOP, where he said executives also balked at first.
He still faces occasional opposition. One radio chain recently turned down his request to buy airtime in San Francisco, but outlets owned by another broadcast group said yes.
Mr. Solomon said that conveying an evangelistic call remains the center of his effort.
“This wasn’t about the church,” he said. “This was about Jesus, bringing people to Jesus. I didn’t care if they ever came to church, but I cared if they came to Christ.”
Correction: A previous version of this story had an incorrect spelling of Lon Solomon’s surname.
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
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