When I was a student in seminary the Texas state lottery was at 800 million. I was curious if the pastor at the church I was interning at would accept a tithe from this if someone in the congregation won the lottery. In my head the good that money could do through ministry was mind blowing. When was the last time a church received a check for eighty million dollars without strings attached? Then he blew my mind, he said he would not accept such a thing because of where it came from. It was not about gambling and the like being an issue, although we did talk about the damage that can do to a person, it was about accepting money that was received from a program that inherently damages people who play it. My father once called the lottery a “tax on people who can’t do math”.<\/p>\n
In his book,\u00a0Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practices in a Consumer Culture<\/em>, Vincent Miller does an outstanding job of tracing the roots of a consumeristic society and how that affects religion. I loved his first line in the introduction. “This is not a book about religion against consumer culture; it is a book about the fate of religion in consumer culture.” [1] This speaks to the heart of my problem, why is the church so self-centered? What causes churches to turn this way?<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s in it for us?\u201d<\/i>\u00a0is the prevailing principle of decision-making for too many churches. Denominational leaders and professional fundraisers know that to be successful in their promotions, they have to convince churches that this project will reap great rewards for them personally.[2] When you read this over and over in different publications, from different denomination points of view. The church looks exactly like the world when it comes to a me first attitude. Miller speaks to the consumer culture and the movement when he writes “industrial laborers, post-industrial service workers, and white collar office workers pour their lives into alienated labor, they will be inclined to seek just the sorts of shallow fulfillments that consumerism provides.”[3] So what is alienation, according to Miller it removes men and women from their creative power as human beings.[4] In other words the industrial revolution and its subsequent moving of the labor force from an agrarian focus and community focus, to one where the skilled labor force is, for lack of a better description, dumbed down to button pushers, they loose their creative ability. This causes them to search out other things to quench the inner desire for more and at that point a consumer mindset occurs. Instead of a person finding fulfillment in creating while they work, whether it is food, hand made tools, etc, they look for fulfillment in the things they own or purchase. In his review of Miller’s work, Darryl McKee says “In this postmodern consumer culture, practices that at one time had their own rules and standards (e.g., religion, friendship, art) are instead subsumed under the rules and standards of consumption. This consumption approach to all practices assumes a seed of dissatisfaction with the present and a continuing search for something better.” [5]<\/p>\n If you look in the church, this also seems to pervade the thought process. Congregations see other churches and what they have, and feel inadequate and feel they must spend more. Spend more on a new sanctuary, a new sound system, a new lighting show. These things, they tell themselves, will make their church a place where more people will come. In a way they are right, in his article Aaron Earls writes, “They want the church with the best preacher, with the best worship, closest to their house that makes them feel welcomed when they decide to show up.”[6] Pew research was quoted in the same article with these statistics,When asked what factors played a role in their choosing their new church home, Americans overwhelmingly pointed to four main concerns: quality of the sermons (83%), feeling welcomed by the leaders (79%), style of worship (74%), and location (70%). [7] So people change churches looking for the latest and greatest, looking to consume what they feel can fill them up the best. The problem with this lies in the fact that all churches seem to be doing is sheep stealing. I have watched youth ministers, at lunch in schools, “recruit” kids from other churches to come to their church because they have a better band or more giveaways than the other church they are attending. There is no focus on reaching out and finding people who are lost, who really need to hear the gospel.\u00a0 They pay lip-service to those things by giving to a cooperative program and sending people on short term mission trips, but when you look at their spending, you see where the focus is. When a church has a “green room” for the talent to relax before their performance, we are just putting on a show.<\/p>\n So where does the answer lie? I don’t know, how do you change a whole American mindset of I want to buy the latest and greatest gadget for my fulfillment. It does not matter that I just purchased a new 50″ 4k LED television, I just saw my next t.v. at Wal-Mart,\u00a0the bastion of consumerism. I feel maybe the answer lies somewhere in our past, smaller churches with a community focus.<\/p>\n [1]\u00a0Miller, Vincent Jude.\u00a0Consuming religion Christian faith and practice in a consumer religion<\/i>. New York: Continuum, 2013. 1.<\/p>\n [2] McKeever, Joe. “Is This Mentality Killing Your Church?”\u00a0OutreachMagazine.com. July 17, 2017.\u00a0<\/em>Accessed February 07, 2018. http:\/\/www.outreachmagazine.com\/features\/21777-selfish-church.html.<\/p>\n [3] Miller, Vincent Jude.\u00a0Consuming religion Christian faith and practice in a consumer religion<\/i>. New York: Continuum, 2013. 35.<\/p>\n [4] Ibid. 34.<\/p>\n [5] Clark, Terry. “Book Review.(Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture)(Book Review).” Journal of Marketing 69, no. 4 (2005): 264.<\/p>\n [6] “Why Do Americans Change Churches?” The Wardrobe Door. August 24, 2016. Accessed February 7, 2018. http:\/\/thewardrobedoor.com\/2016\/08\/americans-change-churches.html.<\/p>\n [7] Ibid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was a student in seminary the Texas state lottery was at 800 million. I was curious if the pastor at the church I was interning at would accept a tithe from this if someone in the congregation won the lottery. In my head the good that money could do through ministry was mind […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":102,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[834],"class_list":["post-16414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-consumer-religion","cohort-lgp8"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/102"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16414"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16415,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16414\/revisions\/16415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}