Crucial Distinctions: Community vs. Consumption
Last week, I took my daughter to the basketball games at her middle school. Where we live, sixth graders are not eligible for sports, so until next year, watching and cheering is all she gets to contribute. This has created some interesting dynamics for us as we both watch from afar and plan for the future.
To say the girl’s basketball team at her middle school is having a rough season would be a profound understatement. We have attended three games. In two of them, they scored zero points in the first half. In one game, the score was 24-0 at halftime. In the other, it was 19-0 at the end of the first quarter. Not only have they not won a game, they have very little chance of even being competitive in one all season.
The school is a large (roughly 1000 students), diverse school in an area with plenty of public and private sports leagues. Objectively speaking, there seems to be no valid reason for their not to be a collection of kids at the school with some background and experience in basketball. Nevertheless, most of the girls on the team have never played before. It’s not just that they’re undersized or outmatched athletically. It is that most of the girls don’t even know basic concepts of the game (pivot foot, defensive stance, shooting form, etc.).
The first time we attended a game, after about a quarter and a half, my wife leaned over to me with a concerned look on her face and said, “I don’t know that I want her playing for this team next year.” To be sure, I knew where she was coming from and felt that same tension. No matter how good an individual player is, the quality of their team has a profound impact on their experience. We want our kid to experience adversity. We don’t want her to always be on the best team and only learn how to walk the path of least resistance. But we also don’t want her to become demoralized and start to resent the game because of an overwhelmingly negative experience.
I felt the tension deeply, but I looked at my wife and said, “But that’s precisely how this happens. When things go badly, all the kids who are good enough to help opt out. And then it never gets better.” We still have nearly a year to make a final decision, but as of now the plan is for her to play for her school. And the conversations we are having in preparation are, “What can you do between now and then to be able to help your team?” And, “Who can you reach out to to join you in this journey and help turn things around?” (Because I know there are kids walking those halls that can do it. They just need to be convinced to be part of the solution, rather than opting out because of the problem.)
Middle school girls’ basketball is, of course, a trivial example, but this serves as a metaphor for all of life. Every day we are faced with the question of whether we will approach life as consumers or contributors. It is no secret that we live in a consumer culture, and every day this impulse grows. Our economy is built on consumption. Many experts estimate we are exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 advertising messages a day, all designed to make us look inward at our own needs and desires and make choices about what will fulfill them. In our church community we talk frequently about Neuroplasticity, the idea that our habits, the tools we use and the stimuli we are exposed to shape our brains into their own image. If this is the case, the image our culture is constantly shaping us into is that of the discerning consumer.
There are two problems with this, though; one theological and one practical. First, theologically speaking, consumerism is antithetical to the Gospel. Jesus (who “came to serve rather than be served”) said, “Take up your cross and follow me.” It is difficult to reconcile that with a consumerist worldview. Second, on a practical level, the problem with the consumer mentality is, nothing ever improves. How do you make a collective enterprise (like a team, church, or community) better when people assume it has to be better before they participate?
To put this another way, one of the central choices we have to make in life and in church - and it is a subtle choice that you often don’t realize you are making - is between Consumption and Community. Consumerism says, “Make things the way I want them to be, and I will show up.” Community says, “I’m going to show up and make things the way they need to be.”
Consumerism dooms all imperfect organizations to negative feedback loops. (Like the girls basketball team at my daughter’s school. A bad season caused some girls to opt out, which made the next season worse, which made more kids opt out. And so on and so forth until the whole program feels beyond redemption.) Community, on the other hand, creates the constant opportunity for renovation and revitalization. Consumerism exhausts and isolates leadership. Community creates an ever-growing sense of shared leadership.
And, if I might be so bold, Consumerism destroys Community… and vice versa.
Like Grace vs. Earning and Gratitude vs. Scarcity, Consumption vs. Community seems to be a definitive decision for all organizations, one that will impact all that follows. This is especially the case for churches. The quality of the music, the cogency of the sermons, the energy of the social events, only matter to the extent that they are layered on top of a commitment to be a Community church and not a Consumer church. When we make decisions about attending on Sunday mornings, about giving, about investing in community, about our young people’s investment and participation, this is the decision before us. Will we be (and teach them to be) Consumers or Community builders.
We hope we will choose the latter, because that is what has and always will change the world!
*****
A Slightly Deeper (& Less Comfortable) Dive:
Sometimes being a Community church requires naming some hard truths. If you want to take a deeper dive into some of the practical implications of this for our community (Ekklesia), keep reading (at your own peril!). Here are just a few more specific thoughts:
Church attendance: We’ve talked about this many times before. Countless churches in our culture have long used guilt and shame to enforce church attendance. At Ekklesia, we believe guilt and shame are antithetical to the Gospel. Unfortunately, when you create an environment in which people will not be shamed for missing church, people miss church fairly consistently.
Often people come to church when they themselves feel a personal need for church. (I had a rough week so I need church today.) And when they don’t feel that acute need, or when some other opportunity/activity arises on Sunday morning, they don’t show up. The sad irony of this is, it feeds the false dichotomy that the only reasons for someone to show up to church are (a) avoidance of guilt or (b) personal need. But that is not why we show up to church. We show up to church because we are part of a community (a body) that needs our participation. The question for us should never be, “Do I need to show up at church today?” The question should be, “Who at church might need me to show up today?”
We know that 100% church attendance will never be a reality. But we have often lamented the struggle to gain momentum because of the inconsistency in attendance. If we could simply get 80% of our people to show up for a month straight, people would look around and go, “Wow, it’s really great what is happening here.” But that reality has been elusive. We strongly believe that if we could just take a small step in the right direction (people who come once a month step up to twice; people who come twice, step up to three times, etc.), we would find an exciting new wind at our backs.
Giving: We are incredibly grateful for the generosity of our church family. We have survived nearly ten years as a church, which, though we often take it for granted, is a remarkable feat. One that many churches never experience. That being said, most of the previous conversation applies to giving as well.
Many of us have been in church communities in which guilt and shame were used to enforce giving and in which resources were used primarily to strengthen the organization within rather than the community without. Ironically, our observation is that churches that run in those ways are often very good at inspiring consistent giving, whereas churches like ours (that eschew strategies of pressure and use resources to serve our community) are not.
Richard Rohr frequently says, “The best critique of the bad is the practice of the better.” Many of us were burned by giving faithfully for years to something we now see as unhealthy. However, the response (at least in the long term) should not be ceasing to give. It should be giving to something healthy. Once again, we have often felt if we could just get everyone to step an inch deeper (people giving nothing start giving 1%, people giving 1% start giving 2%, etc.) we would see our resources increase and our limitations decrease dramatically.
Youth & Children’s Ministry: We have some amazing leaders and volunteers investing in the young people at Ekklesia (including both of our lead pastors). And we have a growing, vibrant group of young people at our church. But, in moments, we have observed some discouraging things, which we think have less to do with the kids and more to do with us as parents.
Raising children is challenging, and this is particularly the case in the teenage years when navigating the tension between parental authority and the developing autonomy and agency of our kids is a nebulous process. That being said, we think it is really important that we always remember that our job as parents and a church community is to raise adults (i.e. to equip our kids to one day navigate the world and faith without us), and in order to do that we need to make some decisions for the family and set expectations for our young people.
Many of us were raised in church environments in which attendance was forced (sometimes more times a week than is healthy) and where we felt pressured to believe everything we were told without thinking for ourselves. As a result, we developed unhealthy understandings of faith and/or walked away from church when the choice became ours. Now, many of us have such fear of imposing the same fate on our children, we are shying away from making them commit to ministries and allowing them to opt out of anything they don’t like. (Some youth don’t come into the service before the kids/youth dismissal because they “don’t like the music.” Or we simply sit out our Family worship days, because they don’t like sitting through the sermon.)
This fear is not a bad thing. We need healthy correctives to some of the unhealthy patterns of the 20th century church. However, we don’t think that allowing kids to opt out (or participate without the expectation of learning and respecting the teachers) is the right corrective, particularly because it is teaching them a consumeristic mode of engaging with church and faith. It affirms the mentality of “if you make church (or a ministry) what I want it to be, then I will come,” not the mentality of, “I will show up and help this become what it should be,” which is not what we want to be teaching our kids in any area of life.
This does not mean we want kids to show up and believe everything we say. In fact, quite the opposite. What we are trying to create at the wider church level is a space and community in which people know they are loved and belong, even if they don’t know 100% what they think. We are trying to send the message that church is a place where you can build community, be supported, and find Love, while you figure out what you believe. I suspect everyone feels this strongly within our adult community and greatly appreciates it.
That is essentially what we want to create in our Youth and Children’s ministries as well, and that is what we believe will help them develop into adults with healthier understandings of church and faith. But we cannot achieve that if our young people are allowed to opt out if their preferences are not immediately met or because “they’re not sure if they believe what you believe (mom and dad).” In fact, that is precisely when we should strongly encourage them to continue to participate, because that is the only way they will ever learn church is a safe place while you’re deciding what you believe. Ironically, when we let them opt out because they’re “not sure what they believe,” we’re unwittingly reinforcing the message that church is a place you either swallow everything whole or leave, which again runs against everything we’ve ever been trying to create as a church community.
Conclusion: Because the church has far too often used guilt and shame to control behavior, it is difficult to name hard truths or challenge people without immediately jumping to guilt and shame. But hopefully at this point you all know us well enough to know that is not where we’re coming from. The truth is (search your feelings) we (as leaders) are far more likely to get run over than to become domineering.
Naming our weaknesses (or unintentional bad habits) isn’t about guilt or shame. It’s about growth, community, and spiritual vitality. As we’ve discussed many times before, spiritual health is usually paradoxical. Hope, joy, love, peace, freedom, inspiration, Life (with a capital L) come most often from the road less traveled, not the path of least resistance. They come from investment, discipline, service, vulnerability, self-sacrifice, etc. So if from time to time we’re not willing to challenge ourselves, we’ll never find the narrow path that leads to Life!
We come by our consumerism honestly. We’re surrounded every minute of every day with messages that tell us life is about Consumption, but that is why the Church exists. To show the world a better way… To be a sacrament of the world’s possibility; a sign of what the world can be (Luke Timothy Johnson). And perhaps the sign it needs more than anything right now is that in an increasingly consumeristic world, real Community still exists.
To say the girl’s basketball team at her middle school is having a rough season would be a profound understatement. We have attended three games. In two of them, they scored zero points in the first half. In one game, the score was 24-0 at halftime. In the other, it was 19-0 at the end of the first quarter. Not only have they not won a game, they have very little chance of even being competitive in one all season.
The school is a large (roughly 1000 students), diverse school in an area with plenty of public and private sports leagues. Objectively speaking, there seems to be no valid reason for their not to be a collection of kids at the school with some background and experience in basketball. Nevertheless, most of the girls on the team have never played before. It’s not just that they’re undersized or outmatched athletically. It is that most of the girls don’t even know basic concepts of the game (pivot foot, defensive stance, shooting form, etc.).
The first time we attended a game, after about a quarter and a half, my wife leaned over to me with a concerned look on her face and said, “I don’t know that I want her playing for this team next year.” To be sure, I knew where she was coming from and felt that same tension. No matter how good an individual player is, the quality of their team has a profound impact on their experience. We want our kid to experience adversity. We don’t want her to always be on the best team and only learn how to walk the path of least resistance. But we also don’t want her to become demoralized and start to resent the game because of an overwhelmingly negative experience.
I felt the tension deeply, but I looked at my wife and said, “But that’s precisely how this happens. When things go badly, all the kids who are good enough to help opt out. And then it never gets better.” We still have nearly a year to make a final decision, but as of now the plan is for her to play for her school. And the conversations we are having in preparation are, “What can you do between now and then to be able to help your team?” And, “Who can you reach out to to join you in this journey and help turn things around?” (Because I know there are kids walking those halls that can do it. They just need to be convinced to be part of the solution, rather than opting out because of the problem.)
Middle school girls’ basketball is, of course, a trivial example, but this serves as a metaphor for all of life. Every day we are faced with the question of whether we will approach life as consumers or contributors. It is no secret that we live in a consumer culture, and every day this impulse grows. Our economy is built on consumption. Many experts estimate we are exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 advertising messages a day, all designed to make us look inward at our own needs and desires and make choices about what will fulfill them. In our church community we talk frequently about Neuroplasticity, the idea that our habits, the tools we use and the stimuli we are exposed to shape our brains into their own image. If this is the case, the image our culture is constantly shaping us into is that of the discerning consumer.
There are two problems with this, though; one theological and one practical. First, theologically speaking, consumerism is antithetical to the Gospel. Jesus (who “came to serve rather than be served”) said, “Take up your cross and follow me.” It is difficult to reconcile that with a consumerist worldview. Second, on a practical level, the problem with the consumer mentality is, nothing ever improves. How do you make a collective enterprise (like a team, church, or community) better when people assume it has to be better before they participate?
To put this another way, one of the central choices we have to make in life and in church - and it is a subtle choice that you often don’t realize you are making - is between Consumption and Community. Consumerism says, “Make things the way I want them to be, and I will show up.” Community says, “I’m going to show up and make things the way they need to be.”
Consumerism dooms all imperfect organizations to negative feedback loops. (Like the girls basketball team at my daughter’s school. A bad season caused some girls to opt out, which made the next season worse, which made more kids opt out. And so on and so forth until the whole program feels beyond redemption.) Community, on the other hand, creates the constant opportunity for renovation and revitalization. Consumerism exhausts and isolates leadership. Community creates an ever-growing sense of shared leadership.
And, if I might be so bold, Consumerism destroys Community… and vice versa.
Like Grace vs. Earning and Gratitude vs. Scarcity, Consumption vs. Community seems to be a definitive decision for all organizations, one that will impact all that follows. This is especially the case for churches. The quality of the music, the cogency of the sermons, the energy of the social events, only matter to the extent that they are layered on top of a commitment to be a Community church and not a Consumer church. When we make decisions about attending on Sunday mornings, about giving, about investing in community, about our young people’s investment and participation, this is the decision before us. Will we be (and teach them to be) Consumers or Community builders.
We hope we will choose the latter, because that is what has and always will change the world!
*****
A Slightly Deeper (& Less Comfortable) Dive:
Sometimes being a Community church requires naming some hard truths. If you want to take a deeper dive into some of the practical implications of this for our community (Ekklesia), keep reading (at your own peril!). Here are just a few more specific thoughts:
Church attendance: We’ve talked about this many times before. Countless churches in our culture have long used guilt and shame to enforce church attendance. At Ekklesia, we believe guilt and shame are antithetical to the Gospel. Unfortunately, when you create an environment in which people will not be shamed for missing church, people miss church fairly consistently.
Often people come to church when they themselves feel a personal need for church. (I had a rough week so I need church today.) And when they don’t feel that acute need, or when some other opportunity/activity arises on Sunday morning, they don’t show up. The sad irony of this is, it feeds the false dichotomy that the only reasons for someone to show up to church are (a) avoidance of guilt or (b) personal need. But that is not why we show up to church. We show up to church because we are part of a community (a body) that needs our participation. The question for us should never be, “Do I need to show up at church today?” The question should be, “Who at church might need me to show up today?”
We know that 100% church attendance will never be a reality. But we have often lamented the struggle to gain momentum because of the inconsistency in attendance. If we could simply get 80% of our people to show up for a month straight, people would look around and go, “Wow, it’s really great what is happening here.” But that reality has been elusive. We strongly believe that if we could just take a small step in the right direction (people who come once a month step up to twice; people who come twice, step up to three times, etc.), we would find an exciting new wind at our backs.
Giving: We are incredibly grateful for the generosity of our church family. We have survived nearly ten years as a church, which, though we often take it for granted, is a remarkable feat. One that many churches never experience. That being said, most of the previous conversation applies to giving as well.
Many of us have been in church communities in which guilt and shame were used to enforce giving and in which resources were used primarily to strengthen the organization within rather than the community without. Ironically, our observation is that churches that run in those ways are often very good at inspiring consistent giving, whereas churches like ours (that eschew strategies of pressure and use resources to serve our community) are not.
Richard Rohr frequently says, “The best critique of the bad is the practice of the better.” Many of us were burned by giving faithfully for years to something we now see as unhealthy. However, the response (at least in the long term) should not be ceasing to give. It should be giving to something healthy. Once again, we have often felt if we could just get everyone to step an inch deeper (people giving nothing start giving 1%, people giving 1% start giving 2%, etc.) we would see our resources increase and our limitations decrease dramatically.
Youth & Children’s Ministry: We have some amazing leaders and volunteers investing in the young people at Ekklesia (including both of our lead pastors). And we have a growing, vibrant group of young people at our church. But, in moments, we have observed some discouraging things, which we think have less to do with the kids and more to do with us as parents.
Raising children is challenging, and this is particularly the case in the teenage years when navigating the tension between parental authority and the developing autonomy and agency of our kids is a nebulous process. That being said, we think it is really important that we always remember that our job as parents and a church community is to raise adults (i.e. to equip our kids to one day navigate the world and faith without us), and in order to do that we need to make some decisions for the family and set expectations for our young people.
Many of us were raised in church environments in which attendance was forced (sometimes more times a week than is healthy) and where we felt pressured to believe everything we were told without thinking for ourselves. As a result, we developed unhealthy understandings of faith and/or walked away from church when the choice became ours. Now, many of us have such fear of imposing the same fate on our children, we are shying away from making them commit to ministries and allowing them to opt out of anything they don’t like. (Some youth don’t come into the service before the kids/youth dismissal because they “don’t like the music.” Or we simply sit out our Family worship days, because they don’t like sitting through the sermon.)
This fear is not a bad thing. We need healthy correctives to some of the unhealthy patterns of the 20th century church. However, we don’t think that allowing kids to opt out (or participate without the expectation of learning and respecting the teachers) is the right corrective, particularly because it is teaching them a consumeristic mode of engaging with church and faith. It affirms the mentality of “if you make church (or a ministry) what I want it to be, then I will come,” not the mentality of, “I will show up and help this become what it should be,” which is not what we want to be teaching our kids in any area of life.
This does not mean we want kids to show up and believe everything we say. In fact, quite the opposite. What we are trying to create at the wider church level is a space and community in which people know they are loved and belong, even if they don’t know 100% what they think. We are trying to send the message that church is a place where you can build community, be supported, and find Love, while you figure out what you believe. I suspect everyone feels this strongly within our adult community and greatly appreciates it.
That is essentially what we want to create in our Youth and Children’s ministries as well, and that is what we believe will help them develop into adults with healthier understandings of church and faith. But we cannot achieve that if our young people are allowed to opt out if their preferences are not immediately met or because “they’re not sure if they believe what you believe (mom and dad).” In fact, that is precisely when we should strongly encourage them to continue to participate, because that is the only way they will ever learn church is a safe place while you’re deciding what you believe. Ironically, when we let them opt out because they’re “not sure what they believe,” we’re unwittingly reinforcing the message that church is a place you either swallow everything whole or leave, which again runs against everything we’ve ever been trying to create as a church community.
Conclusion: Because the church has far too often used guilt and shame to control behavior, it is difficult to name hard truths or challenge people without immediately jumping to guilt and shame. But hopefully at this point you all know us well enough to know that is not where we’re coming from. The truth is (search your feelings) we (as leaders) are far more likely to get run over than to become domineering.
Naming our weaknesses (or unintentional bad habits) isn’t about guilt or shame. It’s about growth, community, and spiritual vitality. As we’ve discussed many times before, spiritual health is usually paradoxical. Hope, joy, love, peace, freedom, inspiration, Life (with a capital L) come most often from the road less traveled, not the path of least resistance. They come from investment, discipline, service, vulnerability, self-sacrifice, etc. So if from time to time we’re not willing to challenge ourselves, we’ll never find the narrow path that leads to Life!
We come by our consumerism honestly. We’re surrounded every minute of every day with messages that tell us life is about Consumption, but that is why the Church exists. To show the world a better way… To be a sacrament of the world’s possibility; a sign of what the world can be (Luke Timothy Johnson). And perhaps the sign it needs more than anything right now is that in an increasingly consumeristic world, real Community still exists.
This needed to be said. Thanks for taking the time to clearly articulate it.
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