Consumerism Gone Homicidal

Consumerism (n.)- the belief that personal happiness is obtained through the purchase of material possessions. Homicidal (adj.)- capable of or conducive to murder. When does consumerism become homicidal you may ask? Well, by now I am sure that many of you have heard of the outlandish story coming out of Long Island, N.Y. where a worker was trampled to death by a stampeding mob ( read the full story.) During an annual rite known as Black Friday, a crowd of over 500 surged through the doors of a Walmart, scrambling for the holiday discounts. In the process, Jdimytai Damour was killed. But it gets worse. According to witnesses, the crowd continued to storm the building even as co-workers tried to rescue the man.

Friends, we are living in a culture where consumerism has become the common mantra. We are surrounded every day by media and technology which tells us that we are deficient or incomplete until we possess the next thing. Especially in this season, we are bombarded every day by advertisements that tell us we deserve to buy something for ourselves. The goal of each of these 30 second segments is to create some kind of need in us, the consumers, and then provide us with its solution. Or, to put it another way, the goal is to remind us we are in some kind of "consumer Hell" and we need this "savior product" to get us to "consumer Heaven."

We would be naive to assume that this phenomenon was happening only outside the church. Many times we view a strict dichotomy between the world and the church, as if what is occuring in the world will not inevitably effect the church. Thinking this way is dangerous. It causes us to constantly depict the deadly "isms" as something outside of us when really it is all around us. We, like Aristotle said, are as fish in water--we don't realize we are wet. The question is: how wet are we?

Let's just take one example: the corporate worship setting. Many of us see the corporate worship time as a place to go and be entertained. Like shopping for a new coat, we can't "put on" fellowship in a local church until we are convinced that it "feels good" and fits our "style." I have even heard someone tell me once that people "cannot believe until they belong." So we go to the worship time expecting to be pleased. Anything that does not aim first at entertaining must be discarded. Music can be entertaining (provided that it fits our preferred style, be it traditional or contemporary) but we must make certain to get professional vocalists for that to be the case. Sermons are anything but entertaining. They are old, doctrinaire and outdated. This means either we replace the sermon with something else altogether (i.e. as with dialouge in the emergent church) or we complement it with DVD clips, drama skits, and jokes. And by all means, we reduce the length. Everyone knows that the average American's attention span is twenty minutes (including commercials). We also eschew doctrines like repentance and hell because they do not have popular consumer feedback. Instead, we provide psychological pep talks which consumers love because we all need the ego coddled now and again. And finally, we provide two options for Sunday morning worship because, after all, consumers love choices! If all this fails, you can always go shop for another church. There are plenty around and most remember the cardinal rule: the consumer is always right!

Resisting the consumeristic frenzy of the culture, we as Christians must stand ready to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel will never be popular with the consumer. It is inherently offensive because it claims that Christ, not possessions, is the greatest reward. Rather than saying the consumer is always right, the gospel says the consumer is always wrong and desperately in need of the life-changing power of the sovereign grace of God. Let us be faithful in the task of the Great Commission. Soli deo gloria!