Showing posts with label Consumerism. Show all posts

This is a video from a church in Orlando, Florida last month.  It gets at our individualistic and self-centered approaches to worship while spoofing some popular worship songs.



While this is extremely funny....  it calls the state of worship in some our churches into question. 

How to we make it less about us and more about God?

How do we move persons to make worship less about Sunday and more about life?

"We live in a culture that has replaced soul with self. This reduction turns people either into problems or consumers...[E]veryone we meet is either a potential recruit to join our enterprise or a potential consumer for what we are selling; or we ourselves are the potential recruits and consumers." 

--Eugene Peterson

(HT/My friend, Tim)

Image by ReillyButler via FlickrIn the morning I sort through my RSS feeds.  It's my "newpaper" reading for the day.  Lots of technology and Apple feeds.  Lots of religious feeds.  And, these feeds often feed my soul as well. 

It's not every morning that, as I sort through my morning RSS feeds in Google Reader that I pause and think to myself THIS IS IMPORTANT.  It's important for me.  It's important today.  I find lots of good stuff.  No doubt.  But it's kind of rare that something someone else writes on another website finds its way to me and immediately resonates with what I have going on inside of me and my concerns and my growing edges and touches on what I'm finding so important right here, right now. 

But this morning it did.

This morning I'm emotionally recovering from Sunday.  It was a day we started on a new sermon series called "Awkward Family Snapshots from the Bible."  We're looking at the very dysfunctional families in Scripture and seeing how messed up they were and yet God was still able to bless them and bless others with them.  We have some messed up families.  I know our folks are pulled in so many directions and lament that their plates are so full and yet they see no way out.  But I want them to hear how God still blesses and used them.

It was a day that we seriously looked at some of the economic struggles facing our church and wondered why people don't give more and our leadership discussed the benefits of having a full-time pastor at the church.  What would ministry and our finances look like with a half-time pastor?  In the end, it's a matter of priorities.  It's a matter of discipleship, we said.  And looking for a short-term fix for a long-term problem wasn't going to be the way out.  We need people invested in the mission and ministry of the church not merely with us to see what they can get out of it on occasion.  This conversation was a weighty one for our family.

It was a day that I spent with family, heading out to the "hand tram" up Crow Creek Road.

It was a day for grilling out.

And now I'm left here, in the coffee shop, trying to plan and to lead and to disciple.

That's when I saw this post from the Missional Church Network.  It's a long quote from Renovation of the Church: What Happens When a Seeker Church Discovers Spiritual Formation by Kent Carlson & Mike Lueken.  I've not read the book.  It looks great from the quote.

I don’t know how to say this in a gentle way, but we should not assume that those people who are attracted to our church have been captivated by the message of Christ and his alternative vision of life. In truth, most North American Christians are not riding courageously on warrior steeds with swords waving wildly in the air, crying out, “Let’s change the world for Christ.” Rather, they come in the air-conditioned comfort of their SUV or minivan with their Visa card held high in the air, crying out, “Let’s go to the mall!”

We should be more truthful with each other here. They come because their high-school kid likes the youth program, or because their children don’t get bored, or because they like the music, or because the pastor preaches the Bible the way they believe it should be preached, or because they happened to be greeted by a smiling face one day, or because the worship leaders looks like Brad Pitt.

This is the hard, raw reality of life in the North American church. The people who come to our churches have been formed into spiritual consumers. This is who we are. It is our most instinctive response to life. And you can hardly blame us. Almost everything in our culture shapes us in this direction. But we must become deeply convinced that this is contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ, the one who invited us to deny ourselves and lose our lives in order to find them. If we do nothing to confront this in our churches, we are merely putting a religious veneer over consumerism and nothing is changed. We offer no real, viable, attractive, alternative way of living. And what is worse, our churches become part of the problem. By harnessing the power of consumerism to grow our churches, we are more firmly forming our people into consumers. Pastors end up being as helpful as bartenders at an Alcoholics Anonymous convention. We do not offer what people really need.

We offer no real, viable, attractive, alternative way of living. And what is worse, our churches become part of the problem. By harnessing the power of consumerism to grow our churches, we are more firmly forming our people into consumers. Pastors end up being as helpful as bartenders at an Alcoholics Anonymous convention. We do not offer what people really need.

We offer no real, viable, attractive, alternative way of living...  Pastors end up being as helpful as bartenders at an Alcoholics Anonymous convention. We do not offer what people really need.

We offer no real, viable, attractive, alternative way of living....  We do not offer what people really need.

Not sure if it's entirely true...but my guess is there's a lot of truth here.

From over at Indexed.

Cover via AmazonThat's what Ross Douthat wrote in an op-ed piece for the New York Times.  And, he makes some interesting points:

Christmas is hard for everyone. But it’s particularly hard for people who actually believe in it.

In a sense, of course, there’s no better time to be a Christian than the first 25 days of December. But this is also the season when American Christians can feel most embattled. Their piety is overshadowed by materialist ticky-tack. Their great feast is compromised by Christmukkwanzaa multiculturalism. And the once-a-year churchgoers crowding the pews beside them are a reminder of how many Americans regard religion as just another form of midwinter entertainment, wedged in between “The Nutcracker” and “Miracle on 34th Street.”

These anxieties can be overdrawn, and they’re frequently turned to cynical purposes. (Think of the annual “war on Christmas” drumbeat, or last week’s complaints from Republican senators about the supposed “sacrilege” of keeping Congress in session through the holiday.) But they also reflect the peculiar and complicated status of Christian faith in American life. Depending on the angle you take, Christianity is either dominant or under siege, ubiquitous or marginal, the strongest religion in the country or a waning and increasingly archaic faith.

Image via WikipediaOK.  So, this isn't much of a "commentary."  I get it.  I think a lot of this just kind of speaks for itself.

First, we have a woman threatening to shoot her fellow shoppers at a Toys R Us in Madison, Wisconsin.  Says the report:

The TV news station has the incident report from the Madison Police Department that reveals "several hundred shoppers were waiting in line for the Toys "R" Us store to open when a 21-year-old woman attempted to move to the front of the line."

"She was confronted by numerous shoppers and in turn she made threats to retrieve a gun and shoot the shoppers."

The NY Daily News has a statement from a police spokesman.

"She's now spending her shopping money to post bond," said Madison Police Sgt. Erik Fuhremann.

Boynton Beach police said they arrested Christopher D. Scott, 49, just after midnight today in a checkout line at the Walmart at 3200 Old Boynton Road.

Scott is charged with three counts each of carrying a concealed firearm, carrying a concealed weapon, and possession of a controlled substance without a prescription.

Officers had been doing an extra patrol at the store because of the large crowd seeking early bargains.
A police log said Scott wore a .40-caliber Glock handgun with a 30-round magazine in a holster at his hip, as well as two concealed knives and a "pepper grenade."

Shoppers waited out in the cold wet weather for hours. When the doors opened at 4 a.m. the Black Friday chaos turned ugly.

Seconds after the doors opened, something went dangerously wrong.

Crazed Black Friday shoppers began piling up on each other.

"It went from controlled to a mob in less than five minutes and it just got nasty," said a shopper.

When officials heard the screams, they ran over right away to help.

Shopper Rich Mathewson said, "It was a lot of angry people just jumping in after we waited patiently for a long time. It actually started way before that, people started getting angry at everybody."

This is a good video as we look at Stewardship, which confronts consumerism in our culture...and, indeed, in our church.  This short video is also about how we get the church to avoid idolatry.


Confronting Idols & Making Disciples from Bill Kinnon on Vimeo.


(HT to The Blind Beggar for the Video)

Image by videocrab via Flickr

Image by Stathis Stavrianos (Stathis_1980) via Flickr

What does this tell us?  Is it offensive?  Is it true?  Why is the cross absent here?  Note some of the items in the shopping bags...Christmas items, presents, Disney, wine.