Consuming is the quintessential American activity. It has even caused the church to be perceived of as less of a worshiping people on mission and more of a business that dispenses religious goods & services to consumers who are “church shopping”…
Edward Song writes, ‘A wider range of goods are being bought & sold and market-talk is being applied to areas where it had previously been foreign. Virtually anything can become a commodity now, and nothing is unaffected by the market’s logic & categories of thought’…
Consumerism isn’t just a behavior, but it is an outlook, an ideology, and a religion.
Doctrine by Driscoll & Breshears, p. 403
As a culture, we breathe the air of consumerism moment by moment. When an ideology is as deeply embedded in a culture as consumerism is in the U.S., it becomes invisible & almost un-discernable, even by the church. Consumerism, though the church in the U.S. may condemn it with sound words from a strong Biblical foundation, is an unquestioned philosophical assumption that determines church leadership decision-making and the day-in-day-out lives of church members more often than we might think. We don’t intend to, but that’s what it means to be deceived.
Too often, I fear the church in the U.S. is building a kingdom unwittingly (I hope) based on the precepts & practices of consumerism rather than the person of Jesus Christ (along with His precepts & practices). God alone builds His true kingdom, and He does it in ways that seems foolish to this world in order to shame all that this world calls “wisdom” for His glory and the good of His children.
I am longing for and praying for God to create worshiping people on mission that are “foolish” enough to believe in the person & work of Christ and to live out His ways from the overflow of who He is, what He’s done, doing, & will do—a worshiping people on mission characterized by sacrifice more than strategy, by humility more than the grandiose, by His words more than ours, by trusting more than training, by giving more than gaining (or worse, borrowing!), by prayer more than planning, by seeing & savoring His work more than ours, by pursuing faith in the Redeemer & Restorer more than financial resourcing, etc., etc.
The point here is not to create false dichotomies. The point here is to create a tension of emphasis and priority that is common place for the suffering, under-resourced churches globally that can too often seem to have no place in our stuffed but under-nourished churches in the West, the U.S. in particular.
We would never say this, but it is often the moment-by-moment practice (that often reveals where true belief lies) of the church in the U.S. Namely, why fast & pray when you have finances & planning? Why seek the ability of God when we have plenty to get the job done? The reality is that we desperately need God, regardless if we have much or little.
We must heed Christ’s warning to the “rich young ruler.” We can say whatever we want, but if the stuff of this world ultimately supplants Christ and His kingdom, then our religion is consumerism and we are in very real danger of revealing we don’t actually have a relationship with Christ—that He is not our Treasure because of the fact that our hands are just too full of everything else this consumeristic culture is pushing.
