Consumerism, Competition and Celebrities
This is a series on church planting in the city. While I am no expert, I hope this series will ask the hard questions about consumerism vs. discipleship, money, contextualized mission, race and the future of American cities. Every Monday a new topic will begin with further posts on that topic posted throughout the week. You can see a rough schedule of these posts here. Links are provided to the rest of the series at the bottom of the post.
Let me begin with an apology. I wrote on Monday that I would post again on Wednesday, however yesterday was my birthday and between being bi-vocational and celebrating with my wife, I didn’t get around to posting. Ok. Here is a quick recap on Monday: I summarized various sources, including Tim Keller, who believe that the city has shifted dramatically in the last 10-15 years and part of that shift has been an influx of what I am calling evangelical suburban tourists. “Evangelical” because they would self-identify as church goers at one of the many non-denominational megachurches (50 percent of churchgoers attended the largest 10% of congregations – 350 regular participants and up) or large conservative mainline denominations (PCA, etc). “Suburban” because this is their place of origin, where they were raised and most likely where they went to college. In fact, I can think of only a handful of evangelical seminaries in cities and only one on the “other side of the tracks”. The suburban way of life (personal space, reliance upon cars, monoculturalism, definition of time, etc.) is vastly different than the urban life. And finally “tourists” because an extremely large portion of these individuals and families are moving to the city for a short period of time, anywhere from 1-5 years on average (and subsequently fail to really engage with the city, but instead engage marginally). Overall, cities have increased in their young adult population (18-34), but have shrunk in what is typically the age of adults who have school aged children (35-45) (studies found here). Now obviously there are many systemic factors at play (education being a major one), but the fact is that many of these individuals are not moving to the city to set down roots, raise a family and eventually die – even though there is extremely compelling evidence as to why living in the city is advantageous.
Yet I left Monday’s post by saying we still need to plant churches in urban areas and we do for a number of reasons. First, since 2007 more than 50% of the world’s population resides in cities and many estimate by 2050 it will be close to 85%. Second, cities are the arteries of our country. The best way to change a region is to first change the major city (see the book of Acts). Third, the two most unchurched regions of America (Northeast and Northwest) are home to major cities that have influence over the entire nation. While I hate to give statistics, I am certain that under 20% of Bostonians attend any sort of church on Sunday. Finally, there is indeed a lot of systemic change that is needed in our cities and our calling as Citizens of the Kingdom demands that we push (with humility) to enact those changes. The problem is that if we continue to plant temporary holding pens for suburban, evangelical tourists we will fail to ever engage our city.
Before I go on, let me offer a caveat. I love the suburbs, grew up in the suburbs, and think the Gospel is doing some amazing things in the suburbs. But the devil is also doing some amazing things in the suburbs and some of those things are affecting the culture of the American Church(Note: These things are affecting the culture of the city as well, but I am talking here about their suburban manifestations with are being immigrated into the city). Three of these things are consumerism, competition and celebritism. If you do a simple Google search for the church and these three things, you will see plenty (and I mean plenty) of articles and blog posts about them, so I’ll be brief in diagnosing the problem. These three things are not simply endemic of the church, but of the American culture in general. Our whole society is built upon consuming, competing and making celebritism the end goal in life. This is then manifested in the church as members view Sunday as the main event in which they drop something in the basket and obtain an experience in return (of course we always talk about not wanting to be this, but if we were realistic often times this is what the church becomes especially in the fight of the business of the city). Churches are then encouraged to compete with each other to see who has the bigger building, the larger staff, the flashier website and the most sermons downloaded or books sold. This then means that pastors become celebrities who can say no evil and do no evil. In fact, the goal of many individual members is to become a celebrity themselves by singing on stage or becoming a “leader” in the church. Sound hopeless? Well it’s not.
What if we planted churches that engaged the city on the city’s terms? What if we planted churches that looked like its neighbors, that had local leaders and that sought to affect systemic change? What if these churches, in turn, transformed these suburban tourists into disciples and they, in turn, moved back into the suburbs with a radically contagious faith?
This is where we are going because my purpose in this series is to do more than diagnose, but to propose a way forward. However, one more diagnosis has to be made…and that is on contexualization. See you Friday…
Posts in this Series
Sex in the City: Do We Still Need Urban Church Plants?
Consumerism, Competition and Celebrities
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