"Healthy Spiritual Consumerism"

Is there such a thing?

Fuller Theological Seminary president Richard Mouw thinks so. In a recent Christianity Today article entitled, "Spiritual Consumerism's Upside: Why church shopping may not be all bad," Dr. Mouw argues that doing a little church shopping isn't such a bad thing. He offers several anecdotal examples of positive church shopping before offering a an analogy that bears further scrutiny: Dr. Mouw argues that church shopping for Protestants is akin to the Roman Catholics discerning a spiritual vocation (to, say, the Jesuits, a Benedictine monastery, the secular priesthood, or some lay ministry).

It is, at best, a thin comparison. Ideally, no Catholic is going to settle on a vocation without serious and in-depth spiritual discernment. Such discernment should involve rigorous spiritual direction with a mentor, prayer and contemplation, and (if entering a religious order) a time spent in some type of novitiate before permanent vows are made.

Your ordinary run-of-the-mill church shopping doesn't really work like that. It relies on the language of getting your spiritual needs fulfilled, which doesn't sound a whole lot different from the kind of "needs" that Wendy's, Wal-Mart, and Macy's want to fill for you. People hop from church to church based on lots of things, and not many of them are good: the quality of programs for their kids, the kickin' praise band they've heard about, or the hot new preacher. Now none of those things are bad taken on their own, but the problem is that they're not taken on their own. They are typically extensions of the mindset that our rapaciously consumerist economy nurtures in us in untold insidious ways everyday. You are the customer and every corporate or institutional body you encounter is put there to serve your felt needs. So when you run into a problem with your kid's youth minister, or when the praise band gets stale, or when the hot new preacher leaves to go minister elsewhere ... well, you kind of drift to the next church you find that can meet those good old "needs" you feel right down to the ground.

The issue Dr. Mouw never addresses in his article is one of permanence: When a Catholic chooses a vocation - especially if that involves either ordination or monastic vows - the idea is that the vocation is a lifelong one. Church shopping isn't lifelong at all. It can recur again and again over the course of a lifetime. And in that environment, the development of real, deeply-committed discipleship is impossible.

There are no solitary Christians. We have to be in a community to know Christ fully. And when we keep bouncing from community to community as spiritual nomads, we end up looking for exactly the wrong thing -- we look for the community that will serve us best, rather than the community where we can best serve Christ.