I think consumerism particularly bites hard against God’s plan for a church made of people who share little in common other than Jesus Christ. The fact is that we have the gospel at work in our lives, and we want to show it off. It’s like you have the special edition Camaro. You don’t want to drive it twenty-four miles per hour in a subdivision. You want to take it on the track. You want to see it go.

Love Takes Work

Particularly as Western Christians, we need to understand that we’ve been steeped in consumerism our entire lives. It is all through our hearts. I think one way we see that is in how we think about church.

So often we look for a church like we shop for a car. We’re asking, Does it have the options I’m looking for? Does it meet my needs? Does it give me any trouble? Is it going to make me look good?

The challenge with that is that as we think about church as consumers, what are we going to do with the unconsumer-like traits of churches made of people like the Jewish and the Gentile Christians of the New Testament?

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