Our deepest need?

This post is about what I think Christians' greatest need is in the present. I am writing it in connection with my new column in the United Methodist Reporter.

I've been reading a lot the past couple of months about the Great Awakening and the birth of the modern evangelical movement in the 1730s and 40s. When you look at what people like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and John Wesley were focused on, there are differences related to each leader's personality and ministry setting. But there's one thing with which they were all concerned: the New Birth.

In "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Edwards warned about the dangers facing "unconverted persons" in the congregation. Whitefield practically willed others to experience the New Birth in his impassioned sermons. And Wesley was convinced that the revival in England was occurring because evangelical ministers were preaching a strong doctrine of justification by faith alone.

I mention this because I think that a strong message about the New Birth was exactly what the church needed at that time. The church had been under assault by Enlightenment rationalism for decades, and the latitudinarian attitude of many in the Church of England hierarchy didn't do much for nurturing a vibrant faith.

And us? My strong view is that the deepest need in the church at present is real community. Everything about our culture teaches us to be individualist consumers. When we go to church, we do it with the mindset of customers. When we engage in discipleship, we often do it as religious consumers looking for a return on our investment. The market mentality of American society pervades everything we do. It is so pervasive, in fact, that we often don't realize it is there.

Without the church, we have no hope. The church is the body of Christ. That means no church, no Jesus. And no Jesus, no salvation. Unless we learn how to overcome the fragmentation that plagues us at present, I fear for our future. I have no plan to offer, no easy solution for overcoming the whole freakin' culture. I do think it has something to do with re-learning what it means to be friends with one another. But that isn't as easy as it sounds.

Too many screens

Long day, lots of e-mails. The upcoming issue of the proposed changes to the charter of my alma mater, Hendrix College, has consumed me somewhat over the past few days. Through blogging, e-mailing, and telephone conversations, I have spent a lot of time on this issue. I'm really happy that people are taking notice and taking the time to get in touch. That's a good sign. On the other hand, I haven't been doing much else!

I want to take a break from the Hendrix discussion to point to my new column in the United Methodist Reporter. I've missed a couple of issues because of the Reporter's heavy coverage of General Conference, but Gen-X Rising returns in the newest issue with my piece on 'Bucking the TV tendency'. In this article, I look at the role that our connection to electronic screens plays in our day-to-day lives.

This might seem like a non-issue at first glance, but I think it has a pretty profound effect on the way we think about human relationships. Whether it is your cell phone, iPod, laptop, or whatever, the screen that you communicate with throughout the day is designed to make your life more pleasurable/convenient/ easy. But the thing about your interaction with screens is that you are always the master, and the relationship is always one-way (in the sense that you can control the screen you are using or turn it off when you want).

Because we are so formed as human beings by our daily habits, the role that electronic screens plays in our lives has repercussions for how we understand relationships in general. And that, of course, has a lot to do with how we think about our lives as friends of Jesus and friends of each other.

"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.

Quiet desperation

Our generation has a crisis of 'meaning.'

That is, we have become confused about where we should find meaning in our lives.

If you ask people, they will say that they find meaning in life in all sorts of ways - their families, their faith, their jobs, their hobbies, and their recreational interests, etc.

And on the surface, that is true. But our culture (and by that I mean 'consumer culture,' roughly understood) teaches us to find meaning in purely market-driven, materialistic ways. We are told that our happiness is directly connected to what we have the ability to purchase. Meaning is equivalent to the acquisition of certain commodities.

And this is more than just a straightforward process of the advertising industry convincing a consumer to buy a certain product. It is rather the culture that has developed where we are encouraged to constantly spend in order to consume, consume in order to spend more, and keep a wary eye on our neighbor to find out what we should be consuming next.

In this environment, a man's insistence that he finds meaning in his family is corrupted by the market's definition of how that meaning is construed. His understanding of value in the family is tied directly to the home he has bought, the car he drives, the vacation he is able to take, and the entertainment system he is able to purchase. The accoutrements surrounding the family thus become the litmus test of the family's 'success' or level of happiness.

I think Gen X'ers instinctively realize that there is something deeply flawed about this market-driven, consumerist value system. But because we are immersed in it all day, everyday, we don't always know how to escape. To fight misery, we adopt a number of different strategies. One is to surrender to the system, attempting to lose yourself in complete and total participation in it. Another is to find a chemical release, through alcohol, illicit drugs, or prescription drugs. Both approaches are attempts to avoid the deep spiritual illness that results from trying to find meaning in an ultimately meaningless system.

Where should we find meaning, then? Scripture is clear that the only proper locus of meaning is love. It is love of God, who has created us and desires our full redemption. And it is love of our neighbor, who reflects the very image of God to us. When the church is living as the church should, it is the place where we can learn about that love.

I know some of you might be rolling your eyes right now. Just another preacher who says that Jesus is the cure for everything. But look, we've all found ourselves staring obsessively at ads on television, salivating in some store at a shopping mall, and preoccupied with the idea of purchasing this or that product (which, of course, we really do not need).

When that happens, haven't you ever felt a vague sense of unease in your gut? And doesn't living in a world where you are manipulated into situations like that leave you feeling just a little like something is very, very wrong?

I write about this reality in my column this week. I welcome your thoughts.

Remember Who You Are

Of the many obsessions that are rampant in our culture, one of the most widespread is the "hunger for the new." We live in a consumer culture, where the messages that we are bombarded with everyday all try to convince us that newer is better. After all, Ford and GM aren't going to sell a lot of 2007 models if they can't convince us that they are better than the 2006 versions. And Burger King's profit margin is dependent on their ability to convince us that their new, high-fat, calorie-laden 'value meal' is better than the equivalent at McDonald's and Wendy's.

So what kind of 'value' does this kind of message really get us? A number of things in my life lately have convinced me that I have been completely manipulated by our culture's hunger for the new. And I want to make a change in my life, so that I am listening to God more and to the culture less. We all chase after false idols at times, but I think I have finally figured out that the most dangerous ones are the ones you don't realize are idols. God has given me a number of 'aha' moments lately that have helped me start to locate some of those hidden idols in my own life. And I think the consumerist fetish with newness, novelty, and innovation is behind most of them.

I write about this in my column in the Reporter this week. I know that this is only the beginning of my wrestling with this issue. But the first step I am taking is to look behind in order to look ahead. This world will keep us distracted for our entire lives if we let it. To keep that from happening, we need to dive into the wisdom that the church is offering us - a wisdom built up over the course of 20 centuries. I think it's a heck of a better 'value' than anything the world has to offer.