Why a Consumer Mentality Doesn’t Work at Church

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? There are people very different from us, where it takes a lot of work to love them because they’re not very easy to love, and we’re not very easy for them to love. And yet God is honored as we engage in that kind of love.

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.

We have the supernatural gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ at work in our hearts. We want to see it shown off with power. And it seems that a great way that we do that is not by acting as consumers at church but loving those that we would only love because of Jesus and discovering true, affectionate friendship in those relationships.

Jamie Dunlop is the author of Love the Ones Who Drive You Crazy: Eight Truths for Pursuing Unity in Your Church.

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