Why Consumerism Harms Church Discipleship
What if church were different? What if we disciple instead of entertain? I recently read this striking description of church: “Sunday services are essentially a bunch of people gathered to sing along with a worship cover band.”[1] But church was always meant to be much more than an entertaining sing-along.
Jesus talked about the cross yet we encourage and support consumerism. Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Lk. 9:23). What if the church growth method of coddling Christians is backfiring? Perhaps our emphasis on entertainment over discipleship is partially at fault for this startling statistic: “51% of Churchgoers Don’t Know of the Great Commission.”[2] Clearly, being a churchgoer is not the same as being an apprentice of Jesus.[3]
It seems like at least many of the biggest and brightest churches across America are the most successful vendors of “religious goods and services.”[4] As Kenneth Woodward said, “Some of the least demanding churches are now in the greatest demand.”[5] Yet, as has often been said, “What you win them with, is what you win them to.” Of course, most churches will not be able to compete with the world when it comes to amazing entertaining experiences, but “even if we could produce cool church events, we would create a generation of Christian consumers who look to the church to entertain them.”[6]
Plus, the church has what the world can never duplicate. We foolishly put the emphasis on the wrong thing if we put it on entertainment. America is drowning in entertainment. We are “amusing ourselves to death.”[7] We have the bread of life, if the world has butter, why are we offering more butter?! They need bread! They may not know it, but they’re desperately hungry for substance.
Further, when we entertain and coddle Christians, is it any wonder why Christians don’t want to take up their crosses as Jesus commands? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in The Cost of Discipleship, said, “When Jesus bids a man, He bids him come and die.” We, instead, offer entertainment and amusement. The church often tries to compete with what the world offers all the while Jesus is calling us to put to death what is earthly in us. I’m not saying all entertainment is wrong, but entertainment as a church growth model is problematic for discipleship.
Christ tells us to take up our cross but we’re often worried about our coffee. Jesus tells us to lay our life down but “the sermon didn’t really speak to me.” This mindset is problematic and prevalent. And it’s been bred in our churches in America. Alan Hirsh has said,
Ninety percent or more of the people who attend our services are passive. In other words, they are consumptive. They are the passive recipients of the religious goods and services being delivered largely by professionals in a slick presentation and service. Just about everything we do in these somewhat standardized services and ‘box churches,’ we do in order to attract participants, and to do this we need to make the experience of church more convenient and comfortable. It is the ultimate religious version of one-stop shopping-hassle-free. But alas, all we are achieving by doing this is adding more fuel to the insatiable consumerist flame. I have come to the dreaded conclusion that we simply cannot consume our way into discipleship. Consumerism as it is experienced in the everyday and discipleship as it is intended in the scriptures are simply at odds with each other.[8]
We have so distorted the radical call of Jesus that the standard for Christian faithfulness has become somewhat frequent church attendance or checking out the church’s livestream. It is such the norm for pastors to pander to the middle classes’ desire for safety and security, comfort and convenience, that it’s hardly ever seen for what it is. It’s just the way it is, the way it’s always been. Pastors will run themselves ragged, be chewed up, and spit out, all the time catering to the church’s perceived “needs.” The pastor can feel good because he sacrificed himself—and probably his family—for the “good” of the church. But what if “good of the church,” is equal to “sufficiently coddled and entertained”?
A major threat to the viability of Christianity in America is consumerism. Revelation warns Christians of the beast and Babylon. Perhaps American Christians are unaware that one of the evils of Babylon is its consumerism. Consumerism and following Christ are contradictory, they are positive and negative magnets, they repel each other. Again, “We plainly cannot consume our way into discipleship.”[9] In part, because “The task of the church is not to make men and women happy; it is to make them holy.”[10]
Entertainers provide popcorn and reclining chairs. Coaches provide water to replenish sweat and bandages to stop bleeding. Fans sit in their seats and buy hot dogs. Players lay it all on the line on the field. When we entertain we make fans. When we coach we make players. Fans may not sweat and bleed from the stands but are often overweight and unhealthy.
When we overprotect and provide, we stunt growth. In this way, people and plants are both byproducts of their environments. Biosphere 2 was built in Arizona to test the possibility of creating an ecological system that would support plant and human life in outer space. Everything was thought of; everything was perfect—too perfect. The trees in Biosphere 2 appeared strong and healthy until they collapsed.
The trees did not experience the stress of real life outside their perfectly designed environment. There was no wind, which resulted in a weaker cellular structure and roots that did not grow as deep. Perfectly curated environments hinder actual maturity. In the same way, an emphasis on entertainment is antithetical to an apprenticeship with Jesus. Curated comfortable environments can curb our conformity to Christ.
Notes
[1] Justin Sarachik, “Everybody Loves a Good Cover,” 48 in Common Good
[2] https://www.barna.com/research/half-churchgoers-not-heard-great-commission/
[3] Being a disciple of Jesus is much more than knowledge but what we believe is very important. When we look at the beliefs of “evangelical Christians” there is much reason for concern. The 2022 Ligoniers State of Theology found that 43% of evangelical Christians agree with this statement: “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God” and 56% agree with this statement: “God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam” (See https://thestateoftheology.com).
[4] Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 110.
[5] Charles Colson and Ellen Vaughn, Being the Body, 22.
[6] Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Everyday Church: Gospel Communities on Mission, 49.
[7] See Neil Postman’s book with the same title: Amusing Ourselves to Death.
[8] Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 110.
[9] Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 45.
[10] Colson and Vaughn, Being the Body, 26.
Rethinking Church: From Invitation to Evangelism
What if church were different? What if we evangelize instead of invite?
Admittedly, this is an old study, but in 1988 George Barna found that
Despite the fact that churches and para-church organizations have spent billions of dollars on evangelism. More than 10,000 hours of evangelistic television programming have been broadcast, in excess of 5,000 new Christian books have been published, and more than 1,000 radio stations carry Christian programming. Yet despite such widespread opportunities for exposure to the Gospel, there has been no discernible growth in the size of the Christian body.[1]
Could it be because invitation has replaced evangelism, and inviting people to the Christmas program has replaced dinner in our homes? The church was always supposed to incarnate the good news of Jesus and show the lived reality of His reign through Christian love. Francis Schaeffer went as far as to say that the love of Christians must be visible, for it is “the final apologetic.”[2]
Perhaps we must take a different approach than the church growth experts have promoted for decades. Instead of watching the neighbor’s kids, who is a single mother and in need of a lot of help, we are exhausting ourselves in the nursery supporting the church service. What if we did the opposite?! What if we didn’t serve in nursery, and instead knew and helped our neighbors? The church was never meant to be for itself. It exists to love Jesus and love others like Jesus.
The Bible tells us to “go and tell.” It doesn’t instruct us to “invite people to a building.” We are to be the church, not invite people to a building we’ve falsely labeled “church.”
“Letting our light shine” was never meant to become: “gather all the lights in the same building and keep them from the dark.” Too often, Christian life circles around propping up and keeping the institution of the church afloat. It becomes a vicious cycle. The church needs people at the “church” to keep the “church” going, all the while taking the church out of the world.
People often ask me, “Why is the world such a dark place?” Could it be, in part, because the church—the light of the world—has left the world and gone into a building? Sadly, churches are notorious for taking people out of actual outreach to put them on an outreach committee.
Further, we’ve hamstrung ourselves by encouraging and facilitating invitation over evangelism. Instead of the whole body being deployed in specific contexts where different people are specifically equipped to contextually share the good news of Jesus, we’ve allowed the onus to fall on professional clergy. Inviting someone to church is now the faithful thing to do. We’ve essentially taken an army off the frontlines where they are desperately needed and given a weapon to one person to wield from the stage.
UPS delivers packages to us, typically Amazon packages. What if UPS went around town and told us we could go to the distribution center one day a week between 9 and 11 AM and pick up packages? First, that’d be bizarre. Second, it would be very unhelpful and UPS wouldn’t be in business very long. Third, it would be a lot like our “evangelism” in America. Yet, as Bill Hull has said, “There are no commands in Scripture for non-Christians to go to church, but there are plenty about Christians going to the world.”
Instead of being missionaries, we expect those who would be part of the church to become missionaries. The responsibility is on them to cross boundaries and learn a new vocabulary. Instead of crossing the thresholds into people’s homes and inviting them into ours, we’re inviting them to a sterile church building. We’re inviting them to a strange and foreign institution. Jesus and Paul sought out people where they were, they didn’t invite them to a church service.
Jesus who is the good news, brought good news. He did not merely call us up to heaven. He came down from heaven—to walk, dine, and die for us—to bring us up. And Jesus said, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (Jn. 20:21; 17:18). He has sent us not to merely invite people to a church building, but to compel people into the Kingdom.
Notes
[1] George Barna, Marketing the Church (Navpress, Colorado Springs, CO, 1990), 22.
[2] Bryan A. Follis, Truth with love: the apologetics of Francis Schaeffer, 58.
[3] Luke 14:23 says, “Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled” but the context (note v. 15) informs us that the parable is about the Kingdom, and not any one church. It’s certainly not about a church building.
The Bible Shows the Worth of Women
The Bible over and over again shows the worth of women. This is in great contrast to the culture of its time. At the time of the writing of the New Testament women did not have equality with men. For example, there was no approved public place for the self-expression of women, and women could be subject to the death penalty if caught in the stands at the Olympics.
Christianity was also different from the surrounding culture in that it demanded holiness and honor not just from the wife but also from the husband, and both partners had sexual rights. This was not the Roman way. Sexual loyalty was required of women but not men, but the Bible counter-culturally taught that both partners were to be exclusively loyal to the marriage partner.
The Bible shows and defends the value of women. It repeatedly defies the expectations of the surrounding society. Christians turned the world upside down in many ways, for one, it showed women have inestimable worth and so their names are written across the word of God.1 There are some 202 women listed in the Bible. This is significant, for example, because the Quran lists just one and the Hindu Bhagavad Gita lists none.
Women have worth not as sexual objects, not as carriers of kids, and not as cooks. Women have worth because God loves them and Jesus died for them. Christianity also teaches that women are not to be mistreated. That, however, was not the expectation in the culture from which Christianity sprang. We see the contrast between Christianity and the culture of the time when we compare the contemporaries Plutarch, the philosopher and historian, and the Apostle Paul.
Plutarch allows husbands to have sexual relations outside of their marriage. It was actually expected that married men would have sexual relations with other women, such as prostitutes, female slaves, or mistresses from lower social classes. Demosthenes even famously said, “Mistresses we keep for our pleasure, concubines for our day-to-day physical well-being, and wives in order to bear us legitimate children and to serve as trustworthy guardians over our households.”
Paul, by contrast, calls for loving marital commitment for both the husband and the wife. Plutarch does not let wives speak in public, but Paul does. Plutarch says a wife should follow the religion of her husband. Paul says both spouses should love their spouse regardless of their religion. “For Plutarch, it is the husband who takes the initiative in sexual matters. For Paul, both partners have mutual obligation and should act in agreement.”2
Plutarch said husbands should rule their wives “as the soul rules the body.” Whereas Paul says in Ephesians 5 that “husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh.” What Paul and Plutarch say about how husbands are to live with wives is very different. Paul’s instructions to the churches he wrote to were subversive. He showed love and respect for both women and wives and told others to do so.
When we read the New Testament we see “Women were among the early churches’ most active and respected members.”3 The Bible shows women in high roles of leadership, compliments them, greets them, and considers them fellow workers in the gospel. Jesus spoke to and cared for the outcast Samaritan woman at the well. Even Jesus’ disciples were surprised. “They marveled that He was talking to a woman” (John 4:27). Yet He was. Jesus loved and cared for women. Of course, He loved women. He created them. And He created women as part of His good design to image Himself through humanity.
The Bible is emphatic that women have worth. Women are precious and made in the image of God. Women do not have less worth than men. Sadly, this has not always been understood or communicated as it should be. But thankfully Jesus once and for all communicated it on the cross when He bled and died for precious women. He never treated them like meat to fulfill His pleasure but died like meat to provide salvation.
Photo by Joel Muniz
- Romans 16 mentions 29 people and 10 of them are women. Here is the list of the females mentioned: Phoebe (Rom. 16:1-2), Priscilla (Rom. 16:3-5), Mary (Rom. 16:6) Junia (Rom. 16:7), Tryphena, Tryphosa, and Persis (Rom. 16:12), Rufus’ mother (Rom. 16:13), Julia and Nereus’ sister (Rom. 16:15). That may not seem like a lot but it is very significant for the time that over one-third of the people Paul greeted were women. Women were valuable colaborers in the early church. Here are some other women Paul mentions in his letters: Claudia (2 Tim. 4:21), Priscilla (Acts 18:25; 1 Cor. 16:19; 2 Tim. 4:19), Chloe (1 Cor. 1:11), Nympha (Col. 4:15), and Apphia (Philemon 1:2). ↩︎
- Benjamin Marx, “’Wifely Submission’ and ‘Husbandly Authority” in Plutarch’s Moralia and the Corpus Paulinum: A Comparison,” 88 in Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism. ↩︎
- Sarah Ruden, Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time, 86. ↩︎
10 Quotes from Jonathan Pennington’s book, Jesus the Great Philosopher
I appreciated Pennington’s book. He did a good job showing that “Christianity is more than a religion. It is a deeply sophisticated philosophy” (Jonathan T. Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher: Rediscovering the Wisdom Needed for the Good Life, 159).
Here are 10 quotes that stuck out to me:
“When we try to live without knowledge of physics and metaphysics—how the would is and how works—then we are foolish, not wise, living randomly, haphazardly, without direction or hope for security, happiness, or peace” (Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher, p. 23).
“The Bible is addressing precisely the same questions as traditional philosophy” (p. 53).
“The Old and New Testaments teach people to act in certain ways, knowing that cognitive and volitional choices not only reflect our emotions but also affect and educate them” (p. 120-21).
“Without intentional reflection, we will live our lives without direction and purpose. Or worse, we will live with misdirected and distorted goals” (p. 124).
“Relationships aren’t an add-on to life, they make up our life” (p. 134).
“Jesus himself emphasized that his kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). This does not mean Christians are free to ignore this world, but instead it frees Christians to relate in a gracious and humble way, knowing their citizenship is ultimately something more and greater and different” (p. 166-67).
“The reason Jesus was so infuriating to both religious and government leaders was not because he was taking up arms and trying to overthrow governments but because his radical teachings were so subversive to society. Jesus was subversive because he sought to reform all sorts of relationships. In his teachings and actions, Jesus continually subverted fundamental values of both Jewish and Greco-Roman society” (p. 172).
“Christianity is a deeply intentional and practical philosophy of relationships” (p. 173).
“Unlike sitcom relationships, the reality is that our lives are broken through sin—the brokenness not only of sin that has corrupted creation itself but also of personal acts of evil, foolishness, and harm. Thus, the Christian philosophy’s vision for relationships within God’s kingdom is not naive or idealistic” (p. 181).
Who is Jesus?
Who is Jesus? That is the all-important question. That is the hinge on which history hangs.
That question has been a question for centuries. John the baptizer even said, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matt. 11:3). Islam says Jesus is a prophet. Jehovah’s Witnesses say Jesus is a mighty being, even a god. But not God. They do not believe in the Trinity.[1]
So, who is Jesus?
For us to answer that question, it’s important that we consider what Jesus Himself said. So, who did Jesus Himself say He was? Jesus is asked about His identity in the Gospel of John. People asked Jesus, “Aren’t we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?” (John 8:48).
The Coronavirus and the Christian
How should Christians think about and respond to the coronavirus? Here are some initial thoughts…
Plague and the Problem of Evil
Christians see the world in a way that makes sense of the world. We have an understanding of why plagues and the problem of evil exist.
That leads us to acknowledge something else that’s super important to focus on: Jesus. Jesus did not leave us to our problems. He did not leave us to simply wallow in plagues. Instead, He Himself plunged headlong into our sorrow.
“The God of The Bible becomes completely human and hurts in every way that we do—from physical pain to social rejection, misunderstanding, hatred, violence, and death. He endures it all. And because he suffers all of this with us, he can empathize with our sorrow and pain. Even more amazingly, Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection are the avenues through which he overcomes all evil, pain, and misery and is able to offer us the promise that disappointment will give way to joy, brokenness to eternal healing, and evil to good. Because of Christ’s agony, death will die and life will live on forever.”[1]
Therefore, even in the midst of plague and the problem of evil we can point people to Jesus. We can point people to hope, no matter what happens. Therefore, Christian, continue to worship Christ as Lord and always be ready to tell everyone the reason you have hope even in the midst of the chaos of the curse and the coronavirus (1 Pet. 3:15).
Ash Wednesday
It is when we weep and howl in the agonies of distress that our rescue is all the more rejoiced in. When we see the contrast of our mourning turned into dancing and our ashes replaced with a crown, it gives us a picture of where we came from and what we deserve and what we get through the free salvation of Christ Jesus.
Ash Wednesday is a day of penitence but it leads to a party—new life in Jesus! We see our dire state and we see our sweet salvation!
Ash Wednesday is a type of looking down. Looking at ourselves, the state that we’re in. But we look down so we can have the right perspective as we look up and out to Jesus.
Ash Wednesday is a tangible and powerful symbol of our need. And when we know our need we rejoice in the One that comes for the poor and needy.
Is there a basis for Human Rights?
“The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe. When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The communist torturers often said, ‘There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.’ I heard one torturer say, ‘I thank God, in whom I do not believe, that I lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.’ He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners.”[3]
Jesus, Rebel With A Cause
Jesus was a rebel. But not like James Dean; not a “Rebel Without a Cause.”
Jesus had a cause. Actually, we might say He had a lot of causes. Of course, if we left off thinking Jesus was merely a rebel with a cause we’d be gravely mistaken. He’s much more than that. It is, however, still important that we not forget that He was indeed a rebel.
How was Jesus a Rebel?
This is an important question to ask, in part, because “People didn’t get crucified for being gentile or spiritual or for saying their prayers. They got crucified for being understood to be rebels.”[1]
Jesus was a rebel because…
Why are we facing times of difficulty?
Paul tells us in his letter to Timothy that “Times of difficulty will come” (2 Tim. 3:1). Why? “For people will be…” People will be a lot of things… There are nineteen descriptions given.
It’s interesting to note that four of the nineteen descriptions are compounded with love. People will be “lovers of self, lovers of money,… not loving good,… lovers of pleasure” than it says, “rather than lovers of God.” These people love but it’s the wrong love. “What is fundamentally wrong with these people is that their love is misdirected.”[1]
When people are “proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, treacherous, reckless, and swollen with conceit” it is because of a worship problem. It is because they love themselves and not God.
in X 