When Christians with a consumer consciousness try to wrap their imaginations around such a large undertaking [as the Great Commission], they will automatically think about products or corporations that have impacted the world and emulate the same methodologies. So we ask, how does Coca-Cola impact the world? How does Disney impact the world? How does Starbucks impact the world? And we forget to ask the only question that really matters: How does Jesus impact the world?

We have incorrectly made the scale of our methods conform to the scale of our mission. We have assumed that the magnitude of the ends should be proportional to the magnitude of the means. And in the process we’ve revealed how captivated our imaginations really are to consumerism. Gregory Boyd points out the error: “We are to transform the world. That’s the call. But the way you do it from a kingdom perspective is very different from the way you do it from the world’s perspective.”
…
We may not use the sword to advance the church’s mission anymore, but the sword is no longer the conventional instrument of power and influence. Today the church emulates the methods of corporations and business, and most of us never pause and ask whether such tactics are consistent with the ways of Christ. Like the Crusaders, we seem content to leave such judgments for future generations whose vision will be sharpened by history.

Skye Jethani, The Divine Commodity, page 169.

Hospitality was never about changing oneself to fit the desires and expectations of the guest, but rather about loving and honoring the guest by welcoming her into the reality of one’s life and community with open arms. But this view has been radically changed in our consumer culture. Today, the goal of hospitality has become making the best possible impression upon a guest even if that impression is a false one. We do not wish for guests to see us as we really are, but as we wish we were. The goal is to keep their attention fixed on the commodified goods and experiences that form he façades of our lives.

In my congregation, I have recently been put in charge of organizing and directing our community groups. Over the summer, one of my goals is to think through this idea of biblical hospitality in light of how we open our homes to one another, especially those whom we might not initially commune with, for whatever reason.

Chapter 8, “Around the Table” is a great primer on hospitality – one that I will be quoting from when I instruct our leaders in how to be hospitable. Hospitality is a welcome weapon against the consumer christianity of our time.

These pastors [who encourage church leaders to "embrace entertainment"], representative of so many contemporary Christians, believe that God changes lives through the commodification and consumption of experiences. If our worship gatherings are energetic, stimulating, and exciting enough then people will attend, receive what’s being communicated, and be spiritually transformed. The justification for this approach is simple – people won’t come to a church that’s boring. And what qualifies as boring is defined by our consumer/experience economy. But the moment we believe transformation occurs via external experiences, the emphasis of the ministry must adjust accordingly. Manufacturing experiences and meticulously controlling staged environments become the means for advancing Christ’s mission. And the role of the pastor, once imagined as a shepherd tending a flock, now conjures images of a circus ringmaster shouting, “Come one, come all, to the greatest show on earth!” In Consumer Christianity, the shepherd becomes a showman.

Skye Jethani, The Divine Commodity, page 75.

This is one of the dangers of the attractional church. Even if the attractional model is a legitimate one, we run the risk of simply providing worship experiences rather than worship services. We turn the preaching of the scriptures into a product that has to be packaged just the right way to make sure people come back. We are tempted to ask questions like, “do the sacraments scare people away?” It is a dangerous cycle.

Over the next week, I’ll be posting a few quotes from the book that helped me to think through the issue of consumer christianity and how to combat it.

As negative attitudes toward conservative Christianity among the unchurched increased in the late ’90s and early 2000s, most large-congregation growth efforts became more focused on the churched consumer, even as their written and spoken vision remained focused on the unchurched. And these star performers became masters at what the churched wanted. They raised the bar several times over for what could be expected out of a Sunday morning experience, and they worked tirelessly to develop the high quality, practical programs the churched now demanded. Having excelled at making theirs the best churched experience on the market, they were perfectly positioned to absorb the windfall of disgruntled attendees from dwindling mainline congregations and failed, contemporary start-ups.

Read more at Allelon.

I believe a host of problems in American evangelicalism originate in our disregard for community. Indeed, our hyped up attractional approach to church has put the individual first in such a way that community becomes an afterthought which creates problems for discipleship, catechesis of our children, as well as evangelism. We seek to draw the individual in, sell him/her a message, and then provide communities. Community by definition becomes commodified. Instead of an individual being grafted into the Body of Christ as the very foundation of his/her salvation, this individual becomes a consumer of what kind of community best suits the kind of Christianity he or she can fit into her life. The ramifications for discipleship are disastrous.

Read the entire post if you get a chance.

My remedy is that we take what some might consider a negative and make it a positive. Killing your advertising? Tell your congregation that you’re doing it and why you’re doing it. Make it a group rallying cry that you’re going to eschew Madison Avenue and embrace relationships based upon love and respect. There’s a better way to introduce people to our churches.

Here’s another take that I heard while I was in Dallas a few months ago:

Do you know why you can’t get coffee here? Because I’d rather you pick it up on the way in where you know your barista’s name.
-Matt Chandler

That’s what Christians ought to be doing. Go to Starbucks or your local coffee shop of choice and tip well. Don’t sign up for the “church fitness center”; join a real gym and get to know people. Let your kids play sports through the YMCA instead of the church league. Cut the fluff out of the church for the sake of your congregation being involved in their community. Don’t just say, “we don’t do that stuff,” instead, have a reason why you don’t do that. There’s something better than letting our churches turn into yet another hyped-up consumer enclave.

So, I ended up going over to Tommy’s house last night and hanging out with him. Yes, I know he’s got a girlfriend. Anyway, we watched a movie and toward the end, he leaned over and he kissed me! It was so sweet! Yes, I know he’s got a girlfriend. Do you think it means anything? Do you think he’ll break up with her and go out with me? We would be perfect together! I’m going to go back over there tomorrow night. Which dress do you think he’d find the cutest? I look really hot in the blue one. Alright! I know already, he’s got a girlfriend. What do you mean he’ll cheat on me too? It’s totally different. If you knew her, you’d know why he wants to be with me. It is totally different. Totally.

That’s most church marketing.

If we’re honest, we’ll admit that we’re going for the same pool of consumer Christians who want to be impressed by the hippest, newest thing in the religious world. Non-christians and people who have been burned by the church want nothing to do with hype-driven Christianity – and for good reason.

In thinking about hype, one of the ways that we allow hype to get into our churches is in the adjectives we use. I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. We have exciting new ministries. We have powerful worship services. We have creative, inspiring, and insightful sermons. We have life-changing songs. Really? Really?

It’s part of the continual push to be newer and better. We might not believe it, but with our rhetoric we’re saying: “Those old ministries are passé, check out these new exciting ministries!” “Those old churches are staid and boring, we’re relevant!” And even if it were true, even if the new things were ten-times more exciting and creative, it doesn’t do us much good in the long run anyway. Why? Because the only people who really care if things are that much more exciting are Christians who already go to other houses of worship who want to be a part of the newest, the latest, the greatest thing.

It’s just too much.

What if we saved the word exciting for things that are truly exciting like the Gospel or a new church being planted or someone returning to the church after years away or a baptism or a first communion? That’s exciting. It is exciting to know that my sins, though they are countless, are not counted against me. It is exciting to know that the Holy Spirit is active in my life, uniting me to Christ. It is exciting to see hearts that were once dead in sin like mine made alive in Christ. The Gospel should be what truly excites us – not a bunch of promotional junk surrounding yet another church program.

The greatest singer in rock and roll
Would have to be Romeo
His vocal chords are made of gold
He just looks a little too old

Wilco, “The Late Greats”

I pray that my church (and I) would never get to the point that the Gospel just “looks a little too old”.

Advertising doesn’t work. None of that stuff really works anymore. Secular people see it as nothing more than hype.

The quote has haunted me because it intersects with where I live. I follow a lot of blogs; most of them are very much pro-advertising the church. They endorse methods like billboards and monthly mailers to the community and TV ads and carnivals and radio spots and, well, you name it. One of the things that I appreciate about most (if not all) of them is their zeal for telling people about their faith and their local congregation. I find a lot that is laudable in their planning and desire to connect people with the local church to connect them to Jesus. The only problem is, I don’t really think it works in all contexts. Though they’re becoming more similar, a college town in the midwest is different than a beachfront community in Florida. A city in the deep south is different than a suburb in the Pacific Northwest. Even here in the Houston area, The Woodlands is very different from the Heights which is itself very different from the Third Ward.

I live in the ruins of the Bible Belt. We’re not a completely secular culture here in Houston. Though there are people from every corner of the globe and every faith under the sun here, there’s also kind of a cultural echo of Christianity. To put it in clearer terms, there are a lot of people here who have been burned out of the Christian church, many of them for reasons quite unrelated to the Christian Gospel. Billboards here don’t call out to people, “Come, see Jesus, the man who told me everything I ever did! Could this be the Messiah?” like the woman at the well in John 4. They scream, “We’ve got something to sell you!” whether it’s the minister or the programs or the lifestyle of contemporary (predominantly white) wealthy evangelicalism.

Maybe the best and most responsible advertising we could do would be to say something like this to our churches:
“We’ve decided to eliminate the line-item for advertising in our budget. That’s right. Not one dollar will go to billboards or commercials or anything like that. That money is for church planting; that’s where lives are changed, not by a slogan on a freeway. Now it’s your job to get to know people around you and bring them with you to church. We’re not looking for people who go to other churches; we want you to get to know people who aren’t Christians and don’t share our beliefs. We want you to bring them here. We promise that this will be a safe place for them to hear about Jesus without all of the extra junk that so often goes along with it. We’re not going to sell ourselves to anybody. We’re not going to treat human beings as mere consumers. We’re going to be respectful; we’re not going to lie and tell people that we’ve got everything figured out. We’re going to worship God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

How’s that for a marketing campaign?