• Archive of "consumerism" Category

    The Arrogance of Christendom Theology

    September 29, 2010 // 8 Comments »

    Though I love the words of my friend Jason Coker in his parable, “The Death Rattle of Christendom,” Dave Fitch is right in saying that, “Christendom Ain’t Done Yet.”  But man oh man, I for one wish it would hurry up and die already so that we can stop having these painfully ridiculous arguments!

    Do you catch the underlying assumptions in this conversation?

    – Where there is talk of missiology, it’s church growth, and not God’s Kingdom mission that takes center stage.

    – Where there is talk of ecclesiology, it’s the (male) preacher/act of teaching, and not the call on a community to make disciples that takes center stage.

    These are both hallmarks of a Christian system which thrives on the power and privilege afforded it by Christendom.  But I say, “woe to us” when we think that leveraging the kind of “influence” that is talked about here has anything to do with what God would have us be about.

    Mega and Multi-Site (thinking here of the video venue sort) churches, “work,” on account of our infatuation with celebrity and our predisposition to the passive consumption of information.

    We must, must, must ruthlessly rip out of our heads the notion that our supposed giftedness gives us license to build our own personal church-kingdoms around it/us.

    Christendom is not a neutral cultural condition, it perverts and distorts and the theology which under-girds this conversation is evidence of it. With no regard for the way in which the message we mean to impart is always embodied in the medium through which it is communicated, we are destined to continually miss the whole point of Jesus’ call to make disciples whose lives are consumed by a desire to fully participate in God’s mission in the world.

    And let’s lay aside the distorted paradigm in which this conversation is even taking place for a minute.  Is anyone else concerned about the stark distinction between the ways in which Driscoll and MacDonald come across and carry themselves when compared to Dever.  I don’t know a ton about Dever, but his humility in contrast to the arrogance of Driscoll and MacDonald is evidence enough that what he has to say is bound to be more meaningful.

    I watch stuff like this and I wonder to myself, “What will become of us when our power and privilege is stripped away?  What happens when there aren’t enough church-goers to shuffle around and we lose the illusion of all the influence we once believe we had?”

    Posted in christendom, consumerism, corporate worship, culture, discipleship, post-christendom, preaching/teaching, spiritual formation, theology, video

    Alan Hirsch – Making Missional Marketable

    March 31, 2010 // 22 Comments »

    I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Alan Hirsch.  The book he co-authored with Mike Frost, The Shaping of Things to Come, was the first I read that began to help me understand the angst I felt with the attractional model of church so prevalent in the US.

    This is why I was so thrown a few days ago when I read that Alan Hirsch had asserted that American Christianity is the great hope for the Church in the West.  He made comments to this point in the opening remarks of his talk at a conference called “Verge” in Texas.  You can view the video (Session 2) here.  At one point he said,

    If we don’t win the battle of the decline of the church here in the states, then it’s not going to come from anywhere else.  We will win or lose the battle over here in the states.

    His rationale seemed to be that 1) the Church is the rest of the West is all but dead and 2) that Americans have a built-in entrepenurial (apostolic) sort of spirit.

    On this count, I was surprised and disappointed on 2 levels.

    First, he seemed to communicate a latent assumption that “the West” maintains a position of superiority in terms of global Christianity.  He admitted that Christianity is growing in non-Western parts of the world, but never suggested that our hope might lie in learning from what God is doing there.

    Secondly, he referenced the American entrepreneurial spirit as the key factor in our ability to “win the battle of the decline of the church.”  I was blown away!  I was immediately reminded of a quote by Einstein, which, even more surprisingly, he referenced later, but totally misused,

    We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

    It is American entrepreneurialism that got us into the mess of creating a church system predicated on the cultural values of individualism and consumerism.  Relying on the same characteristic is hardly a promising solution.

    Over and above all these disappointments comes a more biblical/theological one, namely, that putting our hope in anything except for a willingness to sacrifice what is most dear to us, to listen to the voices of those on the margins, and to trust God with our future (which may very well mean the increasing marginalization of the church), is, in any sense, in keeping with God’s desire for the Body of Christ.

    There was a 2nd major part to Hirsch’s presentation that really made me nervous.

    He made the claim that the dominant expression of church in America, that of the seeker-sensitive/attractional model, has a market appeal to about 40% of the American population.  This yields what Hirsch called a “strategic problem” and a “missionary problem.”

    The “strategic problem” is that 95% of the churches in the US are seeking to become the kind of church that appeals to this same 40% of the population.

    The “missionary problem” is that 60% (and growing) of our population is being virtually ignored.

    So far so good, but at one point Alan was commenting on attractional types of churches that are “reaching” the 40% of the American population and said, “Those who do this well should strive to do it better.”  Not change what they are doing, just do more of the same, better.

    In affirming an attractional (or what he is now calling ex-tractional) model of church simply because it succeeds in drawing a crowd, he fails to critique the most devastating reality, namely, that these churches, on the whole, don’t make disciples. By and large, they facilitate the already pervasive nominal christianity that pervades at least 40% of the American population.

    Let me try to summarize my push back on what I am hearing and seeing from Alan Hirsch as of late.

    1) Putting our eggs in the basket (Easter week!) of the American church is futile, if not sinful.  This is exactly how we got where we are and trying harder ain’t gonna cut it.  It may very well be that God is at work killing off a defunct ecclesial trajectory and we would do better to repent and ask for mercy than to rely on any ability we think we possess to save the day.

    2) Alan is right, there is a descent portion of the American population that has some natural affinity with the sort of church which thrives in Christendom.  But, merely because people will respond to an attractional model of church does not make it ok.  A pragmatic victory is almost never a biblical one.  Attractional models of church are built on the cultural values of individualism and consumerism and, save for the grace of God, are incapable of yielding the sort of disciples the world desperately needs.

    I have a serious and growing concern regarding the temptation to make missional marketable.  The temptation is especially seductive to those who, like Alan, have a deep love for the church as the Body of Christ and want to see it thrive.  But, if God means for missional theology/ecclesiology to benefit the church, it will remain an invitation to repentance, sacrifice, and death.  This sort of invitation has never had much market appeal, especially in the US.

    Posted in christendom, church, consumerism, culture, discipleship, individualism, missional, theology, western culture

    Christmas Video Comment Extravaganza Winners!!

    December 15, 2009 // 7 Comments »

    Click through to the site of you don’t see the video announcing the winners of the Better World Books gift certificate and Live by Giving donations.

    Posted in blogging, consumerism

    Make a Video, Win a Prize, Do Lots of Good

    December 10, 2009 // 5 Comments »

    Lifeasmission Readers,

    Just a quick reminder of the video comment extravaganza I posted about last Sunday. So far we’ve got just two video comments – from my friends Ben and Joel (be sure to check out Ben & Joel’s blogs).

    If you have a webcam or a way to make a short video, you can participate. You can get all the details in the short video below, but here’s the gist of it.

    1) In the original post, leave a video comment (or link to a video) where you’re mentioning some way in which you are trying to make God’s desire for this season more important that the world’s.

    2) As long as you leave the comment by midnight (CST) this Friday, you’ll have a chance to win 1 of 3 Christmas gifts that benefit others.

    3) You’ll make my Christmas merrier by convincing me that this blog is not TOTALLY self-serving ;)

    Don’t forget, you are can make comment here if you want, but leave your video comments for this “contest” over on the original post.

    Peace.

    Posted in blogging, consumerism

    Christmas Video Comment Extravaganza: Post & Win!

    December 6, 2009 // 17 Comments »

    If you don’t see the video, click through to the site for the lifeasmission Christmas video comment extravaganza!

    Posted in blogging, consumerism

    Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: The Fruit of the Problem

    November 17, 2009 // 6 Comments »

    Previous Posts in this Series:

    Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem

    In my last post I made the claim that our current model of theological education, in assuming a Christendom context, is better-suited to train managers of Christian religious institutions than it is to prepare missional leaders.  If the root of the problem is Christendom, the binding of Christian witness and mission to systems of coercive power, we do well to ask what the fruit of the tree of our current system of theological education has been?

    The version of Christianity which is bound to systems of coercive power within modernity has been powerless to resist the trajectory of that era.  Thus, features like individualism, consumerism, and reductionism have been uncritically adopted by local churches and systems of theological education alike and have had mutually related effects.  On top of this, there has emerged a rift between theological education and the ministry of the local church.

    I’ve talked up a storm on this blog about what this has meant for the structure and ministry of local churches, but what about our systems of theological education?

    Individualism.

    For the most part, people make individual decisions to attend seminary and they are trained as individuals.  I’m not saying you can’t experience community in seminary education or benefit from peer interaction, but largely, you choose your courses as an individual, study as an individual, get assessed as an individual, and then decide where to go and what to do as an individual.  Not very good training for people who will then go on to be part of a staff team!  Even less conducive to a truly missional ecclesiology in which the theology, spiritual practices, and Christan life are all rooted in community.

    Consumerism.

    Seminary is freaking expensive!  I know I got some amen’s on that!  That’s because there’s a market for it.  Think about that for a second… There is a market (a system of coercive power if there ever was one) for being trained as a Christian leader.  Now, make sure you’re not hearing what I’m NOT saying.  I’m not saying it’s wrong for people to earn a living from educating others.  Nor am I saying that buying and selling is in and of itself a bad thing.  I am saying that this business of people needing to spend (or worse, go into debt) huge amounts of money to get a religious credential at an accredited institution is not only unsustainable as Christendom unravels, but has a negative effect on Christian leaders and those they lead.

    Reductionism.

    There are a number of ways we could go with this dimension of modern Christendom, but what concerns me the most is how we have reduced theology to information and the leadership of local churches to those best able to convey it.  How else are we able to account for a theological system so heavily slanted toward lecturing, book reading, writing, and testing?  It’s nearly all about the grasping and repeating of concepts.  I’m not saying at all that there’s no place for this, but this feature of Christendom-based theological education has resulted in a form of Christianity that lives as though it’s possible to really believe something without embodying it.  The Bible knows nothing of disembodied belief, but this is the very thing that our current system of theological eduction allows for.

    These are a few of the most obvious fruits of theological education rooted in Christendom that I am thinking of.  Are you thinking of more?  What are the angles and nuances that you see from your perspective that I’m missing?

    In my next post, I aim to take a stab how a missional vision of theological education differs from one rooted in Christendom.

    Posted in christendom, church, community, consumerism, culture, discipleship, individualism, leadership, missional, modernity, reductionism, spiritual formation, sustainability, theological education, theology, western culture

    « Previous Entries