The Church as 'Consumer Goods'

We are reading and discussing Greg Ogden's book Transforming Discipleship in our Monday morning men's group at the moment. This morning we were discussing the author's thoughts on why there is not a clear focus on discipleship in most evangelical churches, even those that do some amount of talking about discipleship. We only got through the first of 8 potential reasons in the book today, but the discussion did help clarify some thoughts I have also wondered about in regards to why the megachurch has arisen in the past 25 years or so, and why more recently there have been changes to more of a 'worship' focus (I put 'worship' in quotes because the focus is mostly on music, and 'worship leaders' are music leaders; this strikes me as a very limited view of worship). In the book, one of the reasons for lack of discipleship in churches is that pastors have been diverted from their primary calling of' equipping the saints for the work of ministry. Rev. Ogden sees this issue as being that both pastors and members see pastoral care of the members as the top role of pastors. Our discussion this morning concluded that we in our small group felt this was true of an older generation (that fits with my observations of my parents generation); that my generation, though, has viewed preaching as the key role for pastors, and that my childern's generation sees worship as the key role for pastors. Not the only role, but the key role, for each of these.

It seems to me that the rise of preaching as the key role instead of pastoral care helps explain the rise of the mega-church. Smaller churches, such as my parents saw as the norm, were much better at pastoral care and were more accepting of mediocre preaching. My generation has been more demanding of excellent preaching, and then willing to accept the less personal pastoral care situation of a mega-church in return. My children seem much more interested in the worship experience.

None of this, however, makes discipleship the key role of the pastor and the local church. All of it, in all 3 of the generations mentioned, seems to be consumer oriented, though the targeted item for consumption has been changing.

One comment in the book hints at this when he observes that (p. 39 in my edition) 'in fact, the majority of participants in the (church) view their membership as optional, not a necessity for living by its principles'. That has also been striking to me in recent years; as churches become 'community churches', instead of specific denominations, membership is de-emphasized and viewed as optional. I see this 'church as optional' viewpoint more and more, first in my generation and more so in my children's generation, and this strikes me as another indication of our consumer mentality. The church is not a community of disciples depending on each other to be developing 'self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Christ' (his description of a 'disciple'), it is rather an optional consumer good. This has a lot of causes, from membership being devalued by accepting anyone who walks down the aisle as a 'member' to wanting to be 'seeker sensitive', but to me it also shows how very engrained the consumer mentality has become in all of us.

Of course, there are varying degrees of consumerism among people. Seeing Christianity as 'fire insurance' in which we seek to be 'covered' but only just enough to be be safe is a classic example. This often shows up as CEO Christians (Christmas and Easter Only). That is not my concern here. The concern is that most churches, even if they say that their mission is to make disciples, end up making preaching,worship, or pastoral care their focus. All of those miss the point of the Great Commission of Matt. 28:18-20.