There’s a story about a woman who was driving in the Gallup area, where we used to live, and
noticed a lone Navajo woman hitchhiking out toward the reservation. The white woman stopped and
picked her up. They rode in polite silence for a while, when the driver noticed that her passenger
was glancing curiously at the grocery bag between the seats. The driver said, “I noticed that you’ve
been looking at the shopping bag. If you’re wondering what’s in it, it’s a big cut of filet mignon. I got
it for my husband.” After a few moments of reflective silence the Navajo woman replied, “Good
trade.”
It seems that human beings are almost wired to value a good deal. That we’re always discerning a
good buy, or trying to assess how our money can bring the best return. You know, the best bang
for the buck. I think this is especially true in a country in which free enterprise makes it possible for
us to have an amazing variety of possessions.
This morning I’d like us to look at how this model of looking at things relates to our life in the church.
I first want to acknowledge that today we have kind of a strange juxtaposition. It’s our third Sunday of
the stewardship campaign, it’s Ministry Emphasis Sunday and also the First Sunday of Advent. I
tried real hard to bring all these things together in my sermon, but the connections are pretty loose.
The best I could do is to point out that, as we look ahead to the coming of Jesus, which is a central
theme in the First Sunday of Advent, how we as a church are keeping ourselves ready for Him
involves some practical issues.
Really, it’s about keeping our eyes on the Lord. Making sure He’s the central focus of our whole
church life, and doing what we can to assure that, if Jesus were to return tomorrow, what we’re doing
and the way we’re doing it are pleasing to Him. And this has very much to do with the ministries we
do, because really this is one of the absolute main points of being church. As the church we’ve
inherited the legacy and responsibilities of Jerusalem herself. In this morning’s Old Testament
reading Isaiah writes this: “People will say, ’come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the
house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’ For
out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” Our church life is all
about teaching the Lord’s ways and walking in His paths.
As you may recall, Jesus held a pretty dim view of capitalist enterprise in the house of God. This is
probably our first clue that the things of the church are supposed to be done a little differently. This
morning I want to flesh this out a little, and talk about how we in the church really are supposed to be
a counterculture—an alternative to the ways of the world. Specifically, I’d like to focus on the way
many of us have been trained to think in consumerist terms when it comes to our view of the
church. I hope to show that this is not the lens through which God wants us to see His church.
Church scholar Diana Butler Bass has written on this in a helpful way. She distinguishes between a
consumer church and a missional church, or what I’m inclined to call the countercultural church. I
invite you to listen closely and see if you hear the distinction.
First, perhaps the main feature of the consumer church is that the church is seen, maybe even
unconsciously, as a “dispenser of religious goods and services. People come to church to be fed, to
have their needs met through quality programs, and to have the ‘professionals’ teach their children
about God.”
Now at first blush that may not sound half bad. I’m certainly fed and enriched by Sunday services,
and I hope you are, too. And I think many needs are being met through the programs here at
Hope. Children and adults are being taught about God and His ways and His love here. That’s all
fine and good, and I hope that people do expect these things from a church. So where’s the
problem?
Well, the problem’s kind of a subtle one. It’s a problem of attitude as much as anything. I think it
comes from that perception of the church being the “dispenser of religious goods and services.” Do
you hear the overtones there? It’s almost a bit mechanical. Kind of like, I put a coin in the slot and
the religious product comes rolling down the shoot. The religious product might be the music, or the
youth group, or the sacraments, or even the good feeling I get from Sunday worship. And
everything’s OK for a while. Insert your coin and a product appears.
That may all be fine and good until I don’t get exactly the product I want. My eyes are set on the red
gumball, and a green one comes rolling down the shoot. I don’t like the way the green ones taste.
So what do I do? I re-evaluate this whole thing. Is this machine still worth “investing” my coins in? I
might grow suspicious of the motives of the gumball company. And I’m really not so sure any more
that the machine’s giving me customer satisfaction. And you know what? Occasionally the gumballs
get stuck in the shoot and nothing comes out. Oops. We all hate it when that happens. The
gumball company usually hears about that.
Anyway, do you see how the consumerist approach to church kind of fosters a shopper/vendor
mentality? If I like the product, I pay for it, and if I become dissatisfied with it in some way, I stop.
And there’s another problem. When the church buys into the consumer approach, it may try to feed
people what it thinks they want, rather than trying to discern what God wants for all of us. You know,
the idea that the customer’s always right. The cross over the altar is offensive to 12.5% of our
clientele? OK, we’ll get rid of it.
Or even worse, the church may manipulate consumer demand to pay its way. The Church of the
Middle Ages fell into this trap in a big way. It got so bad at one point that the Church was actually
selling indulgences with the promise of reducing peoples’ time in purgatory, that hellish waiting room
where people work off unrepented sins before being allowed into heaven. There was a saying at the
time: “When coin in coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.” Or as my Church History professor,
Les Fairfield, put it, “You had to pay your fee to get granny off the griddle.” When the church gets
into the business of simply dispensing services to pay its way, it invites problems.
So what’s the alternative in a culture that seems to demand that we scrutinize like a shrewd buyer
and go for the best deal? A culture that encourages the church to behave like a merchant, and
encourages the churchgoer to behave like a shopper? Well, Butler Bass offers the older paradigm
of the missional church, a countercultural church, which I think is much more in step with the biblical
view of things. She describes this model of the church as: “A body of people sent on a mission who
gather in community for worship, encouragement, and teaching from the Word of God that
supplements what they’re feeding themselves throughout the week.” Not Sunday Christians, but a
people steeped daily in a Christian life, who come to church not as individual consumers, but come
together joyfully as the living body of Christ fulfilling the Great Commission of spreading the Good
News of Jesus Christ throughout the world, beginning with our local community. These are people
who realize that the church is not just about getting our individual needs met, but instead about
giving glory to God and offering hope and love to our fellow human beings. Do you hear the
difference? It’s not about what I can get, but about what we can do.
I hope you and I will see a day when all the parts of the church body are working in coordination with
each other, like a trained athlete, to love and serve God and our neighbor. It’s not easy, but
through God it is possible. The book of Acts shows us a remarkable picture of this. St. Luke
describes the working of the early church after the coming of the Holy Spirit. He writes: “All the
believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but
they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the
resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. There were no needy persons
among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money
from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.
This account gives us a vision of how it can be when, through the Holy Spirit, we’re working in
concert with each other. You see, selflessness is not simply one of many Christian virtues, but it’s
an entire outlook on life. It’s a matter of saying each day to God, “Not my will, but yours be done.” It’
s a matter of seeing a need and responding to it without hesitation. The early church in Acts caught
this vision, and it’s still remembered as a golden time.
We’ve seen that the consumer church is geared toward satisfying people. By contrast, the missional
church, the countercultural church, is geared toward changing people.
When, on a day-to-day basis we give ourselves to God, studying His Word, praying, and coming
together as a body of people sent on a mission, we absolutely cannot help but be changed. And
God will reward each and every one of us for this kind of faithfulness.
God’s reward provides a much, much deeper satisfaction than mere “things” can provide. I think
there are many here who can attest to the fact that, when the people of Hope come together to
learn, worship, and do God’s work, it’s like we’re clicking on all cylinders. It feels like this is the way it
should be. In the consumer church, the attitude is “I go to church.” In the missional church, the
attitude is, “I am the church.” Or maybe it’s better to say, “We are the church.”
Even though we’re looking a little ways down the road to having a beautiful, new church building, it’s
good to remember the words of Rick Warren, the author of The Purpose- Driven Life, at the Hope
and a Future Conference in Pittsburgh a couple years ago: “Church is the people, not the steeple.”
The building is simply a vehicle for us to come together and serve God and our neighbor. But I
have to say, it’s going to be a very useful vehicle.
Getting rid of our unconscious consumer view of the church frees us to work together. It frees the
ordained orders of ministry from having to act like vendors, and it frees the lay orders of ministry
from having to act like customers. If frees us to talk with each other rather than about each other in
solving the day-to-day problems we face. And it frees us to go about the joyful business of being
the church, offering our talents, our gifts, our resources, and most importantly, ourselves, our souls
and bodies, to the greater good of Christ’s body and its supremely important work.
May each of us, each and every day, more fully discern how we can give ourselves to God, and in
so doing, to fulfill His great plan for us here at Hope Church.
Amen.
noticed a lone Navajo woman hitchhiking out toward the reservation. The white woman stopped and
picked her up. They rode in polite silence for a while, when the driver noticed that her passenger
was glancing curiously at the grocery bag between the seats. The driver said, “I noticed that you’ve
been looking at the shopping bag. If you’re wondering what’s in it, it’s a big cut of filet mignon. I got
it for my husband.” After a few moments of reflective silence the Navajo woman replied, “Good
trade.”
It seems that human beings are almost wired to value a good deal. That we’re always discerning a
good buy, or trying to assess how our money can bring the best return. You know, the best bang
for the buck. I think this is especially true in a country in which free enterprise makes it possible for
us to have an amazing variety of possessions.
This morning I’d like us to look at how this model of looking at things relates to our life in the church.
I first want to acknowledge that today we have kind of a strange juxtaposition. It’s our third Sunday of
the stewardship campaign, it’s Ministry Emphasis Sunday and also the First Sunday of Advent. I
tried real hard to bring all these things together in my sermon, but the connections are pretty loose.
The best I could do is to point out that, as we look ahead to the coming of Jesus, which is a central
theme in the First Sunday of Advent, how we as a church are keeping ourselves ready for Him
involves some practical issues.
Really, it’s about keeping our eyes on the Lord. Making sure He’s the central focus of our whole
church life, and doing what we can to assure that, if Jesus were to return tomorrow, what we’re doing
and the way we’re doing it are pleasing to Him. And this has very much to do with the ministries we
do, because really this is one of the absolute main points of being church. As the church we’ve
inherited the legacy and responsibilities of Jerusalem herself. In this morning’s Old Testament
reading Isaiah writes this: “People will say, ’come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the
house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’ For
out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” Our church life is all
about teaching the Lord’s ways and walking in His paths.
As you may recall, Jesus held a pretty dim view of capitalist enterprise in the house of God. This is
probably our first clue that the things of the church are supposed to be done a little differently. This
morning I want to flesh this out a little, and talk about how we in the church really are supposed to be
a counterculture—an alternative to the ways of the world. Specifically, I’d like to focus on the way
many of us have been trained to think in consumerist terms when it comes to our view of the
church. I hope to show that this is not the lens through which God wants us to see His church.
Church scholar Diana Butler Bass has written on this in a helpful way. She distinguishes between a
consumer church and a missional church, or what I’m inclined to call the countercultural church. I
invite you to listen closely and see if you hear the distinction.
First, perhaps the main feature of the consumer church is that the church is seen, maybe even
unconsciously, as a “dispenser of religious goods and services. People come to church to be fed, to
have their needs met through quality programs, and to have the ‘professionals’ teach their children
about God.”
Now at first blush that may not sound half bad. I’m certainly fed and enriched by Sunday services,
and I hope you are, too. And I think many needs are being met through the programs here at
Hope. Children and adults are being taught about God and His ways and His love here. That’s all
fine and good, and I hope that people do expect these things from a church. So where’s the
problem?
Well, the problem’s kind of a subtle one. It’s a problem of attitude as much as anything. I think it
comes from that perception of the church being the “dispenser of religious goods and services.” Do
you hear the overtones there? It’s almost a bit mechanical. Kind of like, I put a coin in the slot and
the religious product comes rolling down the shoot. The religious product might be the music, or the
youth group, or the sacraments, or even the good feeling I get from Sunday worship. And
everything’s OK for a while. Insert your coin and a product appears.
That may all be fine and good until I don’t get exactly the product I want. My eyes are set on the red
gumball, and a green one comes rolling down the shoot. I don’t like the way the green ones taste.
So what do I do? I re-evaluate this whole thing. Is this machine still worth “investing” my coins in? I
might grow suspicious of the motives of the gumball company. And I’m really not so sure any more
that the machine’s giving me customer satisfaction. And you know what? Occasionally the gumballs
get stuck in the shoot and nothing comes out. Oops. We all hate it when that happens. The
gumball company usually hears about that.
Anyway, do you see how the consumerist approach to church kind of fosters a shopper/vendor
mentality? If I like the product, I pay for it, and if I become dissatisfied with it in some way, I stop.
And there’s another problem. When the church buys into the consumer approach, it may try to feed
people what it thinks they want, rather than trying to discern what God wants for all of us. You know,
the idea that the customer’s always right. The cross over the altar is offensive to 12.5% of our
clientele? OK, we’ll get rid of it.
Or even worse, the church may manipulate consumer demand to pay its way. The Church of the
Middle Ages fell into this trap in a big way. It got so bad at one point that the Church was actually
selling indulgences with the promise of reducing peoples’ time in purgatory, that hellish waiting room
where people work off unrepented sins before being allowed into heaven. There was a saying at the
time: “When coin in coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.” Or as my Church History professor,
Les Fairfield, put it, “You had to pay your fee to get granny off the griddle.” When the church gets
into the business of simply dispensing services to pay its way, it invites problems.
So what’s the alternative in a culture that seems to demand that we scrutinize like a shrewd buyer
and go for the best deal? A culture that encourages the church to behave like a merchant, and
encourages the churchgoer to behave like a shopper? Well, Butler Bass offers the older paradigm
of the missional church, a countercultural church, which I think is much more in step with the biblical
view of things. She describes this model of the church as: “A body of people sent on a mission who
gather in community for worship, encouragement, and teaching from the Word of God that
supplements what they’re feeding themselves throughout the week.” Not Sunday Christians, but a
people steeped daily in a Christian life, who come to church not as individual consumers, but come
together joyfully as the living body of Christ fulfilling the Great Commission of spreading the Good
News of Jesus Christ throughout the world, beginning with our local community. These are people
who realize that the church is not just about getting our individual needs met, but instead about
giving glory to God and offering hope and love to our fellow human beings. Do you hear the
difference? It’s not about what I can get, but about what we can do.
I hope you and I will see a day when all the parts of the church body are working in coordination with
each other, like a trained athlete, to love and serve God and our neighbor. It’s not easy, but
through God it is possible. The book of Acts shows us a remarkable picture of this. St. Luke
describes the working of the early church after the coming of the Holy Spirit. He writes: “All the
believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but
they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the
resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. There were no needy persons
among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money
from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.
This account gives us a vision of how it can be when, through the Holy Spirit, we’re working in
concert with each other. You see, selflessness is not simply one of many Christian virtues, but it’s
an entire outlook on life. It’s a matter of saying each day to God, “Not my will, but yours be done.” It’
s a matter of seeing a need and responding to it without hesitation. The early church in Acts caught
this vision, and it’s still remembered as a golden time.
We’ve seen that the consumer church is geared toward satisfying people. By contrast, the missional
church, the countercultural church, is geared toward changing people.
When, on a day-to-day basis we give ourselves to God, studying His Word, praying, and coming
together as a body of people sent on a mission, we absolutely cannot help but be changed. And
God will reward each and every one of us for this kind of faithfulness.
God’s reward provides a much, much deeper satisfaction than mere “things” can provide. I think
there are many here who can attest to the fact that, when the people of Hope come together to
learn, worship, and do God’s work, it’s like we’re clicking on all cylinders. It feels like this is the way it
should be. In the consumer church, the attitude is “I go to church.” In the missional church, the
attitude is, “I am the church.” Or maybe it’s better to say, “We are the church.”
Even though we’re looking a little ways down the road to having a beautiful, new church building, it’s
good to remember the words of Rick Warren, the author of The Purpose- Driven Life, at the Hope
and a Future Conference in Pittsburgh a couple years ago: “Church is the people, not the steeple.”
The building is simply a vehicle for us to come together and serve God and our neighbor. But I
have to say, it’s going to be a very useful vehicle.
Getting rid of our unconscious consumer view of the church frees us to work together. It frees the
ordained orders of ministry from having to act like vendors, and it frees the lay orders of ministry
from having to act like customers. If frees us to talk with each other rather than about each other in
solving the day-to-day problems we face. And it frees us to go about the joyful business of being
the church, offering our talents, our gifts, our resources, and most importantly, ourselves, our souls
and bodies, to the greater good of Christ’s body and its supremely important work.
May each of us, each and every day, more fully discern how we can give ourselves to God, and in
so doing, to fulfill His great plan for us here at Hope Church.
Amen.
The Consumer Church vs. The Missional Church
First Sunday of Advent
First Sunday of Advent
December 2, 2007
Fr. Dan Tuton
Fr. Dan Tuton