The book by Vincent Miller has been a significant challenge to me as much as it has been a profoundly and theologically structured. What struck me most was part of its title “Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture.” I related this with our Quaker Christian Faith and Practice, and one of the essential values of the Quakers is Simplicity. This is a value that teaches all members of the Quaker community to live a life of responsibility and never to extravagantly use the resources available for one use. Always know that there is someone somewhere in the world going without certain amenities. Reading this book made me reflect on this Quaker theological reasoning among its followers since the late seventeenth century when it was established is seen as addressing what has come to be an eyesore in the world community.
\nSometimes I find myself completely lost when I read some books like this one from the eyes of an African who lives in communities that do not understand the meaning of consumerism. I live in the community of scarcity and Africa will for a long time be a community of scarcity and consumerism sound like telling a story of an affluent community somewhere on this continent. Every year Kenya among many other African countries are always appealing for food to some communities facing hunger. The hunger is sorted by just having a simple basic meal of beans and corn, which is donated. Multiple cultural dynamics are not closer to the globalization process is worrying the Africa nations in competing with the well-developed structure of modern capitalism. As much as I understand from what position Miller was writing this, I do not see where he is addressing some cultural differences especially Africa in this process. African people are surviving from hand to mouth; the western capitalism that was introduced to the continent through religion is many years ahead of the continent that is struggling to be on the same level playing ground.
\nConsumer culture forms people in consumerist habits of use and interpretation, which believers, in turn, bring to their religious beliefs and practices. It has been a practice in many parts of the African states since the time of colonialism and missionaries that thrived on the colonial model, people still believe in waiting to be given aid to survive. When the African states got independence, they adopted the old colonial style of leadership where they saw it as the leader takes it all and the poor continue to remain poor and serves the rich who is in power. Religious leaders are not exceptional either. This has now graduated to a very high level of corruption which is looked at as \u201ceverybody for themselves but God for us all\u201d is now the concept of massive looting of their resources and keeping them out of their place to somewhere. However, Miller raised a similar concern in this book when he said: Our analysis has shown that the danger of cultural erosion in globalizing, capitalism is not something faced by only fragile, dominated cultures; it also endangers the Western traditions at the heart of the societies that have originated and profit from globalization. I tend to disagree with Miller\u2019s analysis, simply because, the effect of this is to the cultures that have been forced to adopt a culture that is not part of its DNA and the Western cannot imagine being in the same challenge. There is a joke that has been on for some time now that says; “When the missionaries came to the African communities and were welcome, they gave the African the Bible and they took other resources and while the Africans concentrated on praying while closed their eyes. Moreover, when they opened their eyes they had lost all the resources but told God would restore to them in due course.\u201d As much as this is not true but when discussing consumerism in Africa, is like abuse when there is nothing to consume but just enough and sometimes not enough. That is why Tourish in his book The Darkside of Transformation Leadership: Acritical perspective recommend Spirituality at Work that would promote spiritual management and leadership development. It is in the same spirit that Meyer wrote in his book The Culture Map that; Good communication is all about clarity and explicitness and accountability for accurate transmission of the message is placed firmly on the communicator. Therefore, the Christian Faith and practice of the Quaker church value on Simplicity was developed to counter the ideology of consumerism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The book by Vincent Miller has been a significant challenge to me as much as it has been a profoundly and theologically structured. What struck me most was part of its title “Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture.” I related this with our Quaker Christian Faith and Practice, and one of the essential […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":120,"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":[],"class_list":["post-21778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","cohort-lgp9"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21778","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\/120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21778"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21779,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21778\/revisions\/21779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}