Great stuff.
Sallie McFague also provides a great critique of consumerism in Life Abundant.

Many Anabaptist traditions have provided excellent paradigms for living prophetically in a consumer culture.

Josh, great thoughts.

I’ve been struggling with a related issue lately, and that’s vocation. Specifically, vocation within the “religious industrial complex”. I am struggling with how to properly guide/encourage my students to pursue a kingdom-edifying career rather than being sucked into the culture, never to return. One of my kids wants to be a golf pro - not a professional golfer, but the guy that gives lessons at a country club.

Anyway, I think it’s all connected. It’s partly the church’s fault for not articulating the imminence and necessity of radical counterculture, and it’s partly the culture’s fault for catching the church in it’s web. I digress.

I am listening to Wintersleep and loving it, thanks to the podcast intro.

Oh, and I’m sucking a Testamint.

very poignant indeed. especially this time of the year. i can’t help but wonder how things might be different if the church allowed itself to actually be the church, that is a grassroots movement of healing and restoration rather than a dysfunctional, detached, bureaucratic institution.

lots people like to speak of the church as a sub-culture within western culture. in this area, i can’t tell the difference between the two.

[...] in sweatshops while handling an icon of the suffering body of Christ is quite striking.” See also, The Consumptive Church: The Religious Industrial Complex. Related PostsNo related [...]

You might be interested in this article, which is relevant to this discussion: http://blog.beliefnet.com/godspolitics/2007/12/bearing-the-cross-in-the-globa.html

howie. thanks for the tip. i’ll check it out. and i’m learning a lot about the anabaptist and quaker movements.

blake. i agree. this has been one of the weirdest christmas seasons for me so far. it could be because this year has been so odd for me as well. eugene cho has a great post (http://eugenecho.wordpress.com/2007/11/24/reservations-about-buy-nothing-day/) that i’m going do discuss in part 5 or 6 of this thing. talking about how we use stuff like buy nothing day to appease our guilt. i think that’s my biggest struggle. is that my critique against consumption is nothing more than an attempt to rid myself of guilt. without ever really questioning the roots of consumption.

jake. glad you like wintersleep. and trust me, more than i let on, i struggle with vocation. especially when i’m the one creating so much of the marketing that goes on for some of these conventional places. thats one of the things i miss about the church. being able to walk with students through some of these decisions. as much as i think some things are better on the outside looking in, i miss sharing with students. kind of hard to do that without a church community lest you be considered a weirdo. anyway . . . that’s what i found as my main challenge working with students. and ultimately why i quit my job. was that it was hard for me to try and help them see one thing when i was helping build the opposite. i certainly don’t think this is the case for all youth workers. however, in our church we were helping students to see some things only to have them be told the opposite in every other area of the church. it was a tough tension to be in for sure.

oh yeah. i saw that this morning jake. thanks for the tip. i meant to put in a link at the top of the blog. but now that you left it in the comments we should be good. thanks for sharing it.

Josh, probably one of the posts where we could agree the most on.

I understand the need for Christian books and music, but just about everything else in the Christian “bookstores” is useless crap. The trinket mentality reigns supreme.

I can tell you that much of this is what led us to pursue house church. That no matter what type of ministry I pursued, if we required a building and a fancy presentation, we would only be contributing to the consumerist, passive Christian mentality. It’s much more amazing to me to send my money to a mercy home in India than to help pay the mortgage for the church building I would be meeting in. If just half of North American Christians did something similar, we could eliminate many of the needs on this planet in poor and developing countries. And at what cost to us? Meet in our homes instead of fancy buildings.

Our politics might be different, so how we would envision some of this taking place might look a little different. That’s part of why unity is needed because it helps us find the appropriate balance. But there’s no doubt that the Bible never calls for a community of Christians to settle down and settle in. Build a big building. Pay pastors/elders a salary. It’s simply not there.

I think this is one of your most balanced posts….

It reminded me of the story Dan Kimball told in “The Emerging Church” where he got so disturbed that he ran out of the Christian bookstore.

The conservative Christian subculture can be a lot like a bad monastery…..

I appreciate your irony….very honest of you.

josh–i can relate. for the first (and last) time i actually went out on black friday this year. i did have an excellent excuse , but it doesn’t matter. the point is i like to critique what goes on just as much as the next guy, but in reality i’m not any different than anyone else. i’m just as guilty and just as hypocritical.

thanks for what you’re doing. i appreciate it, always a great read.

Amazing I agree with Josh 100%. You do a great job of identifying some serious issues. I find TBN, trinkets, holy oils etc… all very repugnant.

How should “Church” be done right. I want to go look at the first church that was created. Acts 2:42 The church then was based on sound doctrine, fellowship, prayer, worship, giving and communion. We have lost that today.

Our church which you guys would definitely consider a “fundementalist” church is concerned about all these things. The building we are in cost us $600,000 which is quite a bit less than most the homes in the area. You know So Cal has crazy home prices.

I think instead of looking for new ways of doing church is that we go back to the original church that was founded by the Apostles.

I like the home church idea. We try to promote the home church idea with our home bible fellowships, mens small groups, womens small groups etc…

wes. thanks for the comments. and good point about the price being relative to the housing market where you live.

i’m a little nervous when people talk about going back to a specific model. or some sort of recovery movement. while i understand the premise, i think it’s a bit naive for us to assume that the model practiced in the first 100 years is somehow binding from now on. or that it was somehow without it’s own inherent organizational flaws.

so i hesitate to use either/or language. even though this post probably promoted it inadvertently.

i think my critique has more to do with the larger consumpti0n narrative as a whole. i just used christian trinkets and the sub-culture to make the point and illustrate it.

my larger critique has to do with how christians live the same lives of consumption as everyone else. living almost exclusively in franchise world, running up credit card debt, not being good stewards of the environment, etc, etc.

does that make any sense?

Hi Derek,

Your last statement about “big” churches which I agree the mega church’s of today are a joke. But remember on the day of pentecost there were 3000 who came to Christ that day. So I think there is support for congregating large people together. But again real “church” happens in a much smaller setting.

Hence why I am involved in 4 bible studies with small groups of men and 1 couples study with my wife and I.

I do enjoy what you would call “corporate” worship because I have friends who I wouldn’t otherwise see on a regular basis.

Wes

Yep and I would agree with those statements. But here is my main point and I think this is where we separate.

I believe God has already communicated what it takes to have a good wholesome church. And I believe that is found in the word of God. So with that being said how would an Acts 2 church no suffice for people today? If we went back to the basics of it? Why do I need to reinvent something that God clearly communicated to us?

well i hate to stir the pot again with you wes, and i appreciate your much more generous tone. but i just don’t think god communicated some black and white concrete model for church via the book of acts. i don’t think that god sat down one day and told luke (or whoever) and controlled his hand like a robot to dictate the way the church should be from now on.

i think acts is the story of how people expressed their gatherings. it’s a recording of their specific, local, contextual story. so when luke wrote or whoever wrote acts tells the story, he’s not doing it to convey some concrete model that we should all practice. but rather to tell the story of the early church so that we can learn from their experiences and wrestling and practices.

Josh,

I am not taking offense you your ideas as you may seem to think and I don’t want to take your topic off its intended course. Anyways that was my 2 cents. Thanks for being cordial. I appreciate it.

no worries wes. i didn’t take offense. just pushing back a bit. appreciate your cordial tone as well.

i don’t want to take this any further than it already has because it’s off topic, but i think it should be pointed out everything wasn’t always nice and rosy in acts as we’d like to think. the “church” was just getting on its feet and they were a lot of problems. read any scholarly book about paul, peter, and james (or a commentary on acts) and you’ll see what i mean. it is misleading to assume that the early church always had it right and everyone was in agreement on everything.

ok, that was my tangent. sorry.

Wes, I said big building. Do you think the early Jerusalem church built a building big enough for those 3000 people? They were adding new converts daily. I heard some scholars estimate they grew to 20,000 in the first month (or something like that). A building would have limited them. They met in open, public spaces when they needed to meet together.

Josh, I think Wes’ question is worth considering - does the NT form of church address the consumeristic mentality that is all too prevalent in the church today? I believe it does. It shows an emphasis on people, not budgets or buildings. They shared what they had with each other, which requires you to understand others’ needs, and to understand when you have more than you need so you can give it away.

In any case, the comparison in well worth making. Not necessarily in adopting the exact form, but in understanding the underlying principles and values that drove it.

Blake,

Of course there “always” wasn’t agreement on things. Look at Barnabas and Paul arguing about John Mark. Or Paul and Peters disagreement. Because we as humans make mistakes. But what then do we base the church on?

But the basic concepts of the six items I listed above are where the focus of the church should be according to God.

Good thoughts though. I wonder what you think the solution to what at good church looks like. Identifying problems is the easy part. The solution is different story.

Derek,
We are in agreement.

derek. you make a very good point. would you be interested in writing a post for a guest blogging thing for one of the parts of this series? on that topic. the way the model in act subverted consumption?

and wes. i agree. griping is easy. what i try to do when i connect thoughts together in a series is to diagnosis the problem in the first part and then offer solutions in the latter half. so stay tuned. not sure how long this series will go cause i have a lot of thoughts. but eventually i’ll get there.

Josh - good conversation here. I agree with your points (as you probably would have guessed), and I think the one thing we could draw out more is the idea of excess. Industrialization and modernity more generally, as they are built on capitalism, and in the business of creating and hoarding excess.

How do we handle the excessive waste produced by our various industries? While consumerism is the driving force of what makes our country stay afloat, what the country is floating on is a huge trash heap. In order for capitalism to work, things have to be made and for things to be made energy and material are used and used up (excess), on the opposite side is the necessity for our televisions to stop working, cars to break down, PC’s to meltdown, and even clothes to fall apart. We need the products (that when made created so much waste) to themselves become waste. Now with that framework - think about what you said of the church.

We continue to create a sub-culture of waste (books, music, waste) because we work off the same principles of modernity. It is no surprise then that the church, and the Christians within it have homes filled with excess.

As one of your readers pointed out, how many of us will spend hundreds of dollars on excess/waste for Christmas?

Until we practice counter-consumerism can we become a community non-excess - or better yet a community that lives “give us this day, the bread we need” as we see Jesus instruct in his disciple-forming (Lord’s) Prayer.

wes–you’re right. and too many times i’m guilty of doing a great job of identifying the problem not bothering to offer any solution.

i’m not going to pretend to have “the solution.” i don’t even know if i have a solution. but here are my initial thoughts.

i tend to be pretty (very, at times) cynical when it comes to this. i hang on to hope for the most part, but at times i can’t help but think the american church has dug itself into too deep of a hole to recover. christianity has become america’s civil religion and the church’s ties with american imperialism run so deep, trying to rip them might result in the beginning of the end. which might be a good think, depending on how you look at it.

personally, i trace all of this back to constantine. once the church crawled in bed with the state the church’s interest became inextricably linked with the interests of the empire and the larger culture. theology changed. ethics changed. salvation changed. everything changed.

i said all that to say this. i think the church needs to somehow return to a grassroots movement of healing and restoration. a movement that rejects, subverts and transforms the status quo rather than a larger bureaucratic institution like what we have now. more about people and building relationships than building an institution that supports its host culture and upholds the imperial status quo.

Blake,
Amen, thats the whole point of going back to the Acts 2 church. That was the original plan but some how over the last 2000 years we have really made a mess of things.

I am excited to hear Derek’s new post he is going to do on it. (just trying to encourage you to do it Derek)

c. wess & blake. i couldn’t agree with you more.

c. wess. you stole my thunder for tomorrow’s post. thanks a lot. would you care to develop it more and i’ll let you guest blog your thoughts as well? we might as well make this a full collaborative affair.

and derek. i’m serious about the offer. my one push back to you personally, is that if you’re such a big proponent of decentralized house church and it serving as a counterpoint to the consumption of rome and the consumption that we have today . . . then how come you’re a big business, conservative guy in relation to capitalism? sarcasm implied. i just wouldn’t be able to live with myself unless i got a jab in there.

especially since there is so much love being spread around in these comments. i have to get back to being cynical and a jerk. don’t won’t to hurt my rep.

[...] other insights into another idea on religious consumption (more financial), see what Josh Brown has to say. [...]

“and derek. i’m serious about the offer.”

Very well, then, I accept. E-mail me any particulars, it’ll probably be tonight before I can get started on it.

“my one push back to you personally, is that if you’re such a big proponent of decentralized house church and it serving as a counterpoint to the consumption of rome and the consumption that we have today . . . then how come you’re a big business, conservative guy in relation to capitalism? sarcasm implied.”

I wouldn’t say I’m pro-big business. I’m largely anti-government. Not quite anarchist, because government is essential for securing a free market - once you have a guarantee of basic property rights, which is one of the most important functions of government, a free market can emerge. And given the right controls against corruption and deceit, the free market can solve just about anything better than government can, because it creates the incentives for people to be productive and innovative, seek out problems, and provide solutions.

There are definitely pros and cons to big businesses. We know many of the cons. But there are services and products that makes people’s lives better that are only possible because of big business. Without cars, for example, our environment would actually be hundreds of times worse off because of all the horse manure laying around. Cars are not something that can be effectively produced by a “small” business. Yet people who rail against “gas guzzlers” rarely consider what the alternative was 100 years ago and how rancid city streets were before the introduction of the automobile.

I think we are moving towards a society that will act as a check against big business. The amount and accessibility of information is vastly superior to what we had just 10 years ago. As our generation gets older, and a larger percentage of people are concerned about the practices of the businesses they interact with, and have access to more accurate information about how products are created and distributed, it will be harder and harder for big businesses to act irresponsibly. This is one way I see technology improving things over time.

“i have to get back to being cynical and a jerk. don’t won’t to hurt my rep.”

Don’t worry, we’ll always get back to something we can disagree on.

fair enough. i’ll email you the details in a bit.

the only problem though, is that while cars are a better option. maybe even cleaner.

the fact that they are in cahoots with the oil biz to limit the higher mileage capacities gives me reason enough to yell at them both.

One of the reasons why capitalism is actually important. Without capitalism, government becomes the primary (and possibly only!) source of capital. Could you imagine the corruption if it was the government conspiring to keep high mileage cars from being produced to keep oil demand higher?

Under capitalism, it’s easy for a new company, like Toyota did in the 70’s, to come out with cheap, fuel-efficient vehicles, and force the other companies to create similar products due to the competition. Because people can pool their money, create a corporation, and seek to fill a need, the free market can provide a solution. In a system where government controls capital, that type of innovation is rare.

And of course, now we’re way off topic…

nice post. way to articulate your thoughts.

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[...] By the way, you might also like to meet Josh Brown, who after his own exodus calls the corruption of Christianity “the religious industrial complex.” [...]