Thursday, July 12, 2007

Christianity Is Selling Death

I've grown tired of both the church shoppers and the church marketers of our day. When I hear someone ask, "What does your church have to offer me or my family?" it's about all I can do to not have my head explode. It's not like it's anything new, Jesus had to put up with the same kind of self-centeredness, but that doesn't make it easier to take.

What consumer benefits a church might offer has nothing at all to do with whether or not it is the place God desires a believer to be in order to grow and serve. God has a divine appointment for each of us, and finding it should be our goal. Then with patience and grace, serving God and our brothers and sisters there should be our occupatiion until (and only if) God appoints us some place else.

We certainly have no right to treat our brothers and sisters as disposable and divorce ourselves from their fellowship because we've decided we can get a better deal someplace else. God is the one who has made us parts of the body and he alone gets to appoint us to our place in the body. What business does any church leader have, then, of dangling a carrot, trying to coax a believer to make a decision about where they belong on a basis other than God's appointment? 

Churches solicit suitors like Tamar enticed Judah, and then wonder why, when it's time to pay the piper, church folk are as a fickle and disloyal as the rest of our hedonistic, consumer-driven society. In an effort to chase down new, and to keep existing attenders, churches spend inordinate amounts of time and resources trying to hit the next big thing. They adjust their programming like a streaming service trying keep an audience. But if we tickle the flesh to get them in, or keep them in, we'll get nothing but a giggle from them when they're called upon to stand and be counted.

The gospel is good news and needs to be heard by everyone, but the often unspoken stark truth about it is that embracing it means buying into your own death. The old-fashioned notion of fire and brimstone is unpopular these days because it's just not marketable. I don't care for it myself, it doesn't reflect biblical preaching in my mind, but the biblical message isn't any more comfortable. The message Jesus preached to potential followers: "deny yourself, take up your cross daily and follow me." Perhaps he didn't realize that would be a hard sell.

I'm dumbfounded amidst a church world that doesn't understand it's own message. I mean, really, how can such a thing as church marketing can even exist? It's not just oxymoronic, it's plain moronic too! No, it's even worse, it's faithless, and it's ruining the heritage of God. Let the self-centered consumers and ravenous church hawkers beware, you will reap what you sow

Go on and build cathedrals of wood, hay and stubble, selling emptiness to the empty-headed if you wish, but if you want to do what Jesus did, then what you actually sell will be death.