The Affiliate oxygen was so thick with promise a few years back, you could slice it with a butter knife.
Our contagion has spread, and with it came new ventures, endearing friendships, and posers, box posers.
Haven’t you heard, selling community as a commodity is the latest trend in fitness? Coaching has traded places with social media and lone wolf affiliates and true believer box goers are no longer the only lighthouses on a dismal coast. Everyday the coast gets brighter with more supporters, and unfortunately, more bottom feeders.
photo credit: DUCKMARX via photopin
Jesus saw this coming centuries ago, remember what he said in Luke 9:50? “Don’t stop him. For whoever is not against you is for you.”
In the end the goal is exactly the same as in the beginning: reach more people, educate more humans, do box programs as you see fit no matter who else may be doing it next to you.
I know that some gyms across the street from me aren’t telling the story straight, and I hate it. I know that some box members bad mouth other box members and it makes me want to climb to the top of their highest ropes and hang the Jolly Roger so that everyone will see them for the poison they are. But, who would that help? My job, my purpose, the only purpose of every member who really cares is to do no harm, to make people and community better.
True apostles let believers and sinners sell God, and so should we.
Paved roads and flashing lights surround me as I type this. Horns shake my windows, screeching tires scare pedestrians and church bells seem to say, “everything is normal, everything is as it should be.” The particular bell I just heard was in a cathedral across the street from my East facing window. If I turn and look to the west, I will see another cathedral with another bell. I feel like a needle on a compass with churches my as cardinal points literally a stones throw away from one another. Why?
I can’t say I know the hearts of the pastors that crowd the street corners near me today, but I bet a lot of them fell in love with God and wanted a place to worship and practice in a way they felt was just. Conversely, I bet a few of them are total Jack Smacks quicker to steal from their own collection plates than sacrifice a dime.
But none of that matters. My motives matter. My heart matters. My integrity matters and so does yours.
It doesn’t matter what the preacher down the street does in his church, it matters what you do in yours.
What matters is that I wanted to open my very own slice of heaven, I wanted to call it an Affiliate program and I did. If we take that chance away for fear of poisonous growth, we become box Communists.
By supporting, by educating, by reaching out to even the worst examples we create something within ourselves, something that says I am a true believer, not just a box poser.
Our community is already a commodity. The gap will continue to widen between truth and nonsense, and the believer will occasionally be overshadowed the louder voice of a poser. And I say AMEN.
That means we are doing our job. That means our waves are getting bigger and that we are changing many lives.
That means all we have to do is have faith, box programs, and heap coals.
– Josh Bunch | Practice CrossFit
Your reading the bio of someone that values change. Someone that understands that today, he is an unforgiving zealot, and tomorrow he will be a demanding hypocrite. Josh Bunch understands that to grow, means to say, “I was wrong”, more than you say, “I know”. Josh Bunch values the fact that to become more, everything must change and we can never be addicted to “our” way, we need search for “the” way. Like Emerson said, “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Oh, and jb is a professional writer, long time CrossFit affiliate owner, and 12 year exercise educator, with a background in nutrition.