Off The Shelf Christianity [Part II]

What’s the difference between: a young kid who wants the latest LA Galaxy Beckham shirt, a young girl who wants the latest Maria Sharapova tennis outfit, the overweight couch potato who wants that Super-Ab-Crunch Machine he’s just seen on the infomercial, a woman who wants the latest JLO celebrity perfume and a pastor who wants the latest 40 Days of Whatever DVD Deluxe kit? Well not much really.

The woman smells real good but they all subliminally think that success is something that can bought, or at least infused from having a token of it.
Few of us are exempt from the pulling power that a lot of advertising has. We develop desires to have the things that smack of success. Whether that is the latest pair of top flight training shoes, the right kind of car or the right kind of grooming product, we seem to have a desire to want to have things that at the very least make us look like the success we desire.
There is a fine line in church growth between servanthood and narcissm. Size DOES matter to pastors, and our relative success or failure is measured in the size of our congregations which is seen as indicative of our ‘success’. [I am regularly hounded by a persistent marketer from a large Para church organisation who wants to sell me their latest tool for world evangelism domination. Part of his spiel is that when he was a pastor, he "‘took' his church from ‘x' size to ‘X' size in just ‘x' years".]

Consumerism is now firmly a part of the Christian psyche, and certainly very much a part of our ministry make-up. At least one large church in Australia generates millions of dollars each year [Hillsong] from album sales. Their songs are ubiquitous. Walk into just about any evangelical or Pentecostal church from Brisbane to Perth and you are likely to find most of the songlist dominated by this one church. Some would argue that this is due to the quality of the music. That is in the ear of the beholder. My personal view is that much of it is saccharine and the lyrics have set us back decades by turning the focus onto us.
I think a primary driving force is not necessarily the music but a desire to emulate the ‘success’. Part of that success is numbers and very large economies of scale.

Now that their reach is global stardom comes into play a lot. I listen to the talk amongst our youth & young adults when they return from visits to such places and its all about the various Christian celebrities they saw, and worryingly, extends to the children of these Christian celebrities.
When we buy off-the-shelf flatpack products from Willow Creek or Saddleback, are we not simply hoping that the ‘success’ of these mega-churches will somehow rub off on us? Are we not like the people who jumped on planes and flew to Toronto to ‘catch’ the Toronto blessing to take back to their respective countries?

The trend of using celebrity flatpack solutions has created a consumer monster amongst believers. I had an entire family ‘temporarily leave’ our church, to attend another church up the road because “they are doing 40 Days of Purpose and we aren’t”. That same church within two years of completing the course had imploded and splintered into 3. Safe to say the flatpack didn’t quite have the mojo for them.
I am asked by various people within our church if we are doing the latest and greatest program that ‘all the other churches’ are. In replying in the negative I am aware that I am cutting against the grain of consumerism. I am not giving the consumer what they want, and may pay the price. If I give in I sell my soul, if I don’t I pay a price. I’m happy to pay it.
I’m sure the providers of these flatpack solutions have the best intentions [although the pricing these days suggests otherwise?]. They cannot be held to account for inappropriate ways in which others consume their product and for the illusions projected onto these products by the buyers. They are ‘riding the wave’ though, and they must be cognisant of the consumer trends of believers. Christianity is big business these days. If you want to make a buck why not start with a people group whose heartstrings are easiest to pull, and whose purses and wallets are easiest to open?

Getting back to the main point, could it be that despite the relative value of the various off-the-shelf products, we are just suckers for success. Could it be that we are seduced by the nebulous notion of ‘success’, particularly that image of it projected by mega-churches? Could it be that you were never meant to be a mega-church and whatever you can buy from them will never be relevant to your part of the vineyard?