Friday, June 15, 2007
There Are Career Moves, And Then...
Out Of Ur published an interesting and brief interview with a guy that "moved from a career in advertising to pastor a Mennonite church." Now that is what I call a career shift. In the interview the guy tries to analyze the whole mega/emerging thing in terms of consumerism and identitifes three types of consumerism, quoting
We keep on asking the wrong questions. We keep on looking in the wrong places. We keep forgoing the face of Christ for the face of the church. An ambassador that does not spend more time in contact with the home country than the nation which it represents is in danger of "going native." Which is the start of a great example.
The problem is, I am not sure the ambassador metaphor is the most appropriate. An abassador was enculturated by the nation he represents. We, on the other hand, are born into the foreign nation and encultured in it. We are more like the ambassador's children, coming "home" only after growing up native. We are discovering our true culture for the very first time.
Will we hold to some of the customs of the native? Of course, but we will need to figure out how to do so as citizens of our home nation. We cannot afford to define ourselves in terms of the nation into which we were born. We must define ourselves in terms of home.
Related Tags: consumerism, mega-church, emergent, ambassador, children, sanctification
- One is mainstream consumerism; the dominant hegemony that happens in our culture. Mainstream consumerism is mega.
- Then you have counter consumerism, which is savviness. They are aware that Walmart and [Microsoft] Windows are trying to dominate, and they resist just like they resist mega-churches. But the odd thing is they’re no less consumers. They’re just counter consumers.
- The third type is anti-consumerism. That is what I would call my context. Mennonites resist both the hip Apples and the hegemonic Windows. They would rather not have a computer.
What I find most fascinating in this is that he still defines his third type in terms of consumerism. Of course, he does start out by saying
We are a consumer culture. I am a consumer. I understand that it’s insidious and dangerous, but I am still a consumer. That’s just how we’re shaped. That’s the cultural currency.This set me to wondering, I don't think Christ can be described as "mainstream," "counter" or "anti" consumerism or a lot of other things for that matter. Christ came to sanctify - that's it. We can be sanctified regardless of where we fit in the consumeristic stream. The problem with the mega-church is not that it is consumeristic, but that it forgoes the totality of the transformative gospel for the sake of consumerism. The same can be said for the emerging church; simply substitute "counter-consumerism" for consumerism.
We keep on asking the wrong questions. We keep on looking in the wrong places. We keep forgoing the face of Christ for the face of the church. An ambassador that does not spend more time in contact with the home country than the nation which it represents is in danger of "going native." Which is the start of a great example.
The problem is, I am not sure the ambassador metaphor is the most appropriate. An abassador was enculturated by the nation he represents. We, on the other hand, are born into the foreign nation and encultured in it. We are more like the ambassador's children, coming "home" only after growing up native. We are discovering our true culture for the very first time.
Will we hold to some of the customs of the native? Of course, but we will need to figure out how to do so as citizens of our home nation. We cannot afford to define ourselves in terms of the nation into which we were born. We must define ourselves in terms of home.
Related Tags: consumerism, mega-church, emergent, ambassador, children, sanctification
