It is a plague that seeks to devour our churches, a spiritual disease as old as Adam and Eve. It is a sickness of the soul. It is a sleight of hand, a slick replacement of God with something that resembles him but is not him. Consumerism of the Christian kind is a making of God into our own likeness, wanting him on our own terms. At its most crass level, clearly evident in the North American Christian landscape, consumer Christianity is taking and never giving in return. It is a worldview, a way of living out our life that seeks to control God.
We shop for a church the way we hunt for the best cup of coffee. We look until we find a worship style or preacher that suits our fancy, a place that addresses our particular need and want.
We hunt for a church that scratches our spiritual itch, not comprehending our search is for God. I won’t be surprised if one day scientists discover a gene that somehow reveals this God-given appetite for him. “He has also set eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). But our hunger for God is easily suckered into settling for cheap imitations. That’s what happens to shoppers. We sometimes go for pizzazz rather than preeminence.
The problem is not that we want choice. I agree with Marshall Shelley, “Consumerism and choice: this is the spirit of our age. It’s not that buying and selling things is bad. Or that an abundance of choices is evil. These are inescapable facts of life. The problem is not the choices, but the basis on which we decide them” (“Are You Buying In?” Leadership Journal, Summer 2006, p. 3).
All of us are consumers. God, in his enormous grace, has granted human beings dominion over creation. Scripture reminds us the whole earth belongs to God. “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it” (Psalm 24:1). The kind of consumers we are depends upon our view of God. Exodus 20:3 is a sobering reminder God is not a commodity that exists to make us feel better. The church, his bride, was not birthed on Pentecost to serve as our spiritual mall.
Is there a way out of this muck of consumer Christianity? I believe so.
Read more at http://christianstandard.com/2014/01/consumer-christianity-idol-for-destruction/