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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Consumerism leads to cheating on your church Andrew C. Thompson, Oct 15, 2007
Andrew C. Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson Special Contributor
Think about these possible reasons a friend might give you for leaving his wife:
“She’s boring.”
“She said something mean/hurt my feelings.”
“I need a wife who can have more interesting conversations with me.”
“I want a wife who thinks the way I think.”
If your friend sought a divorce for one of these reasons, you’d tell him he was crazy. Either he wasn’t serious when he made his marriage vows or else he must have literally lost his marbles.
And yet these are all common excuses given by people who decide to leave their church in search of greener pastures. They complain that the service (or the preacher) is just too boring. Their paper-thin skin gets bruised when someone makes a careless comment.
They skip a few Sundays in a row and get offended when no one from the church organizes a search party to find them. They want more exciting programming, or they want a community where everyone holds the opinions they do.
Sound familiar?
American consumer culture has so shaped the way we look at the world that we assume church shopping is natural. Like anything else in society—a restaurant, a cell phone plan, a magazine subscription—if we don’t like the product we’re getting, we opt for another one. That’s the consumer’s right, isn’t it?
Well, yes, it is the consumer’s right. But it is not the Christian’s right. When we make vows of church membership, we pledge to be loyal to both the universal church and the local congregation with our prayers, presence, gifts and service (United Methodist Hymnal, p.38). And because it is Jesus’ church, those are vows made to Jesus himself. They are at least as important as our wedding vows.
I believe there are only four valid reasons for a layperson to leave a church once vows of membership have been made:
* Death * Change of residence out of the area * Calling to a different ministry location * Outright heresy on the part of the church leadership
The first two circumstances make a membership change unavoidable. The third involves anyone who faithfully responds to the call of God. The fourth impacts one’s own salvation, and should thus impel all church members to either censure the heretical leadership or leave for the sake of their own souls.
But none of them is about personal preference.
(Note: I don’t include ordained clergy—deacons and elders—in this list because their church membership is held through annual conferences, not the local congregation. Obviously, their change in connection to local congregations would fall under the third circumstance.)
Ubiquitous church-shopping signals two things about our culture. First, the consumerist market mentality permeates even the most sacred aspects of contemporary life. Second, the church is experiencing a terrible poverty in the quality of its life together.
When pastors fail to teach their congregations that their connection to the church is the surest path to salvation, they do their church members a grave disservice.
When parents fail to teach their children that the church is the greatest repository of grace in this life, they hinder their kids’ sanctification.
And when the church fails to truly embody the community of Jesus’ friends, tied by vows of loyalty and love, it is robbing itself of the full joy of life in Christ.
Paul tells us that the church is the body of Christ and that we are its members (1 Corin. 12:27). Peter says that the church is a spiritual house and that we are its stones (1 Peter 2:4-5). Rip off a body part and the body is wounded. Remove a stone and the house can come tumbling down.
When we break our vows of membership to the church for reasons of personal preference we commit a form of ecclesial adultery. We cheat on our church.
Our common calling today is thus in learning to treat the church as a community instead of a commodity. Rather than something that merely exists for our use as individuals, the church is the place where we find our lives by losing them.
Andrew C. Thompson
