{"id":31573,"date":"2023-03-03T19:50:02","date_gmt":"2023-03-04T03:50:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=31573"},"modified":"2023-03-03T19:50:02","modified_gmt":"2023-03-04T03:50:02","slug":"commodities-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/commodities-church\/","title":{"rendered":"Commodities Church"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cAll your big givers are going to leave.\u201d That is what an older church member leveraged over the phone one morning – my day off, no less. I had made changes to the music and it was not received well by some. Enter the threat: if you do not change it back then all your big givers will leave. The threat, of course, is the market. If you do not provide a service certain people want, they will take their money to a church that does.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This reminded me of a piece of advice I had been given on numerous occasions – know what your church member gives. It has been a piece of pastoral advice that I have wrestled with in my ministry. Admittedly, knowing what a church member gives is a debated topic among church leaders. On the one hand, it is fiscally responsible to know what a person gives so that the pastor can properly govern the church. On the other hand, it makes members commodities. Even deeper is the issue of identity – whether the person was a giver or non-giver, particularity when they complain. These kind of issues make me wonder if the strongest definition of the church is a religious institution defined by embedded market forces?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 <\/span>These are the questions raised by the sweeping threshold work by Karl Polanyi called The Great Transformation<\/i> [1]. In it, Polanyi argues that the \u201cgreat transformation\u201d from the nineteenth century to our present day is a political and economic that gave rise to the self-regulating market (SRM) [2]. The political intervention of the market is what caused the shifts in society and the social structures impacted by it [3]. The impact of these shifts caused responses to the economic forces that were shifting in the emerging industrialized societies. The nature of these shifts and how embedded they are to ever-present social institutions is examined as part of the theses of Dr. Jason Clark. By considering the economic history offered by Polanyi, Clark is argues that people are not mere participants in the system but have contributed to the emerging capitalist schema by \u201cco-creation, co-option, and resistance\u201d [4].\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the more mind-bending implications is the observations that Polanyi offers is that capitalism and market forces result in people, land and labor to function as commodities. Polanyi writes, \u201cA market economy must comprise all elements of industry, including labor, land and money\u2026but labor and land are no other than the human beings themselves of which every society consists and the natural surroundings in which it exists. To include them in the market mechanism means to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market\u201d [5].\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While no church leader would ever admit it, the prevailing gravity of the day-to-day operations of the church are defined by market forces. Is there a way to separate the identities enough to allow identity formation apart from the ubiquitous capitalism in modern life? Granted, I would much rather hear a complaint from a person is not giving because I know they do not actually have leverage over the community if the conversation does not go their way. That is not true community, of course.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I heard the complaint and made some compromises that would satisfy the issues she raised. It worked for awhile, but she eventually transferred her membership to a smaller church that had a choir \u201cwith people her age.\u201d I suppose that is true market forces at work.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, Kindle.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Ibid., 3, Kindle.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Ibid., 4, Kindle.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. Clark, Jason Paul, “Evangelicalism and Capitalism: A Reparative Account and Diagnosis of Pathogeneses in the Relationship” (2018). Faculty Publications – Portland Seminary. 122. https:\/\/digitalcommons.georgefox.edu\/gfes\/132<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. Polanyi, 74, Kindle.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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