{"id":16417,"date":"2018-02-10T19:47:08","date_gmt":"2018-02-11T03:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=16417"},"modified":"2018-02-10T19:47:31","modified_gmt":"2018-02-11T03:47:31","slug":"16417-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/16417-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Chalko – Consuming Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

By far the biggest enemy of the American Church is consumerism, with a close second being that of selfish ambition. (Maybe it\u2019s selfish ambition feeding our consumerism?) Vincent J. Miller in his book Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture<\/em> explores the connection between consumerism and religion. Miller lays out in his thesis that our American consumer culture has changed \u201cour relationship with religious beliefs narratives, and symbols.\u201d Miller is not laying out a US vs. THEM mindset, as many have already taken then viewpoint and have written much about. Miller is saying that since even our culture has been commodified, where does that leave the current state of the church, and how should we handle it? Miller writes about \u201chow the habits of consumption transform our relationship to the religious beliefs we profess<\/em>.\u201d[1]<\/a> This is true.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I\u2019ve sat in far too many church staff meetings where the words marketing, brand recognition, and advertising were main topics of conversation. How about we just start with reading our newspaper and asking ourselves what are the needs of our city? \u00a0Where can we serve? Of course, this means dying to our second largest completion for the kingdom of God, Selfish Ambition. Too often our own ego, or desires to assure ourselves of God\u2019s love comes into play with our desire to grow the church.<\/p>\n

One of Miller\u2019s more interesting points to me was his observation that \u201cAs the twentieth-century print advertisements shifted from being primarily textual to include more illustrations. This shift served to support sometimes outlandish promises that often played more to the emotions than to common sense.\u201d[2]<\/a> — This is true! A crude example of this would be, when I\u2019m at a restaurant, I almost always order off of the pictures in the menu. Even though I\u2019ll read almost the entire selection, I have noticed I 90% choose something there is a picture of. Of course, the items that are pictured tend to be the more expensive items. And now, of course, we are being sold more than just premium Angus cheeseburgers in Red Robin and luxury land rovers in the auto malls. lifestyles designs from sponsored messages designed to look genuine are infiltrating our social media feeds. And in this complex marketing scheme, we are actually the commodity being sold to a company.\u00a0 It is Google, Instagram, Facebook all making their money by selling our information to companies so they can get their messages in front of us.<\/p>\n

And I think the biggest way our religion has been commodified is in the Sunday Morning experience. We find churches and mega-churches to meet our exact needs and expect to be as precise as if we can be as picky in choosing churches as we are in assuming we have the right to use Snapchat or Instagram as will. This is perhaps the most depressing topic I can think of when it comes to the state of our church today. It seems almost pointless to fight against. (Of course, today\u2019s church is not the sole culprit, even in the hymns of the good old days there seemed to be an appeal to the consumeristic side of us Americans. \u201cI got a mansion on a hilltop\u201d was not written by a Chinese underground church, nor does it reminiscent of the psalmist \u201che owns cattle a thousand hills.\u201d It is distinctly American. Even<\/p>\n

Megachurches will continue to exist and even become more prevalent because bigger churches offer a better product. Need children\u2019s ministry? Big churches got that! Need a 1:15pm service? Big churches have that option too! Need Children\u2019s church for 1on1 special needs, autistic kids? Only big churches already have that dialed in. That is a pretty good product, and for many reasons that are serving the church very well. On the other side, it conditions the believer to be a consumer just as much on the inside, as they were before they met Christ on the outside.<\/p>\n

To highlight this consumeristic Sunday morning mentality there have been many videos, but this is one of the most current and potent messages.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=nT70cA-7qMk<\/a> Consumerism is anti-gospel but it is not insurmountable. And some of it can be hijacked and repurposed for the Gospel. \u201cThe encounter with God always takes place within the structures of human social and political existence<\/em>.\u201d (164). Our people showing up, want a Sunday morning experience. I know of pastors whose titles are, pastors of Sunday morning experience.<\/p>\n

Pastorally, the book that really shaped my mindset on consumerism was a book called\u00a0 Renovation of the Church[3]<\/strong><\/a><\/em> which\u00a0 walked itself through the process of rejecting its own self-created culture of consumerism and in doing so lost over a thousand members who were now displeased with the lesser \u201cquality\u201d of the Sunday morning product which of course lead to significant church layoffs. However, the church\u2019s barometer was no longer attend, but life transformation and they were willing to sacrifice a larger flash in the pan for more significant growth to it\u2019s members. Secondly, the book MOVE[4]<\/strong><\/a><\/em>, put forth by the Willow Creek Association transformed my ideas of how seeker friendly has its significant limits. In MOVE, Willow Creek begins to deconstruction it\u2019s seeker-friendly movement that it had pioneered itself, once they realized their Christians were remaining nominal believers even after decades of church involvement.<\/p>\n

Both of these two books were published after Miller\u2019s and I wonder if they used Miller in their own research since they seem to have brought a deeper application from what Miller is starting to get at.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t think about this topic too long and not start to get restless working in a church. Honestly when I look into the consumerism of church people, and the consumerism of Christianity and house churches, I begin to see the waste all around. My own church building is a 2200+ seat auditorium built around the year 2000, and yet currently we have about 500-600 people on a Sunday morning. This is a huge turn around from 8 years ago, back when it could have been easily voted the most dysfunctional church in America, and there were maybe 120 congregants. This is an extreme example but the waste of a regular church is still there. I\u2019m getting to cynical now, but to build ginormous buildings to only be used once or twice a week, how is that good stewardship? Is there any real realistic hope for the home church? Alan Hirsch believes so[5]<\/a>, and Francis Chan resigned from his Megachurch many years ago now and has seemed to make it his life mission to ignite the home church movement within the US. And of course, there is Eugene Peterson who despite global name recognition pastored a congregation of under 200 for most of this adult life because that\u2019s about the number he believed he could realistically shepherd.<\/p>\n

And yet despite the waste and imperfections I still feel it is my greatest opportunity for significant impact in the Kingdom of God to go through this model of institutional church.<\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> Vincent Jude. Miller,\u00a0Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). \u00a0Pg. 11.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Vincent Jude. Miller,\u00a0Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Kent Carlson and Mike Lueken,\u00a0Renovation of the Church: What Happens When a Seeker Church Discovers Spiritual Formation<\/em>\u00a0(Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2011).<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Greg L. Hawkins,\u00a0Move: What 1,000 Churches Reveal about Spiritual Growth<\/em>(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016).<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Alan Hirsch and Ed Stetzer,\u00a0The Forgotten Ways Reactivating Apostolic Movements<\/em>\u00a0(Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2016).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By far the biggest enemy of the American Church is consumerism, with a close second being that of selfish ambition. (Maybe it\u2019s selfish ambition feeding our consumerism?) Vincent J. Miller in his book Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture explores the connection between consumerism and religion. Miller lays out in his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":94,"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":[374,1017,255],"class_list":["post-16417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-consuming-religion","tag-lgp8","tag-miller","cohort-lgp8"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16417","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\/94"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16417"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16419,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16417\/revisions\/16419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}