Famine of Community Can Be a Feast of Consumerism
I’ve never had the pleasure (if one could call it that!) of church-shopping. But if I did, I know exactly where I’d start: the internet. (To be clear, I would ask people I know and trust for recommendations, but only after conducting a solid few hours of my own research via Google.) Beliefs, leaders, gatherings, sermons, articles: no virtual stone would be left unturned and no hyperlink left unclicked on any church’s website. Before ever setting foot inside an unfamiliar gathering space, my goal would be to have a robust idea of who that church is, what makes them tick, and what to expect. But that doesn’t mean I’d actually know the church.
The substance of any local church isn’t its catalog of content. This might sound weird coming from a church who just recently redesigned its own website and is known for churning out a new Google Doc every five minutes. But the growing stacks of digital documents we have at our disposal aren’t what make or legitimize a body of believers. There’s only one collection of manuscripts that every church needs, and those were compiled for all of us to share in common a couple-thousand years ago.
And that compiled canon - the Bible - tells us that the substance of the church is personal. The person of Jesus builds the church with himself as its cornerstone. Around him, the Father poured the Prophets and Apostles as the church’s foundation. And from the bottom up, the Spirit stacks disciple next to disciple, local church on top of local church, indwelling and empowering each and every believer as a living stone in a spiritual house. The church is built upon, surrounded by, made up of, and commissioned to reach people. To know a church truly is to know a church personally.
Fast-forward to The Great Quarantine of 2020. While live-streaming gatherings, producing podcasts, and interacting online are by no means new, our almost exclusive dependence on impersonal technology to commune and communicate right now certainly is. Tech-savvy churches with the means to change have nimbly adapted to this temporary disruption. Other churches aren’t able to be so agile. But the biggest potential setback isn’t in the way some churches have to do things now or in the way others can’t for a short time. It’s in the way we choose to feed or starve the cultural idol of consumerism that is prowling like a lion, lying in wait with the hope that we’ll slowly begin to substitute personal gospel community with impersonal Christian content.
For 10 years, The Village has actively fought against this kind of consumerism in the church:
Sermons are 45-minute, line-by-line expositions through weird and tough texts.
Group leaders aren’t spoon-fed questions or cookie-cutter outlines for the gatherings they lead.
Teams are built and trained by volunteer servant leaders.
Members commit to certain expectations, reevaluating their commitment every autumn.
Conflict, disagreement, and hard conversations are welcomed.
Our gathering space is literally buried underground.
The call to make, mature, and multiply disciples is regularly articulated as an all-church thing.
And we regularly say that not only will our church disappoint you at some point in some way, but that if you find yourself unable to trust us, then you should find another church body you do trust.
But by definition, the battle against Christian consumerism can’t be fought for you. You have to fight it yourself. Simply being part of an anti-consumerist church doesn’t mean you’re not a consumer. In fact, our flesh loves to take the good news that we’re justified by the work of Another and trick us into believing that we can outsource the work of sanctification, too. Resting on the laurels that The Village may strive to be a gospel-centered, mission-minded, disciple-making church says nothing of us if we’re unwilling to dig and live in those trenches ourselves. And rest assured, the order to shelter-in-place has us all living behind enemy lines.
This single stretch in American Christianity has set two things in front of every heart: a community’s famine and a consumer’s feast. Some of us will come out the other side of this with our hearts hungry, longing to return to a fuller expression of Christ’s interpersonal, interdependent, other-centered nature of the church. And some of us will come out of this with our golden calves fattened, convinced that every spiritual craving can be satisfied at the 24/7 on-demand buffet of Christian content that we can pick and choose from as we please and on our own. The difference in how we experience this isn’t in our circumstances; it’s in the appetites of our heart.
There’s something missing in the life of the church at this moment, and we can’t binge it back into existence. It’s not something we can catch up with by watching last week’s livestream. As much as I love seeing faces on Zoom calls, streaming Scattered Worship live on Sundays, and listening to the Gathered Songs for Scattered Souls album, they leave me dissatisfied. And that’s okay. They should. I don’t want to be satisfied with pixels and playlists. And that doesn’t mean I’m dissatisfied with the Lord; it means I refuse to be satisfied by screens when he made us to be next to other living stones.
Sometimes starving our idols leaves us hungry for the things of God. And that’s a much better place to be than having full spiritual stomachs with little-to-no appetite for the Lord. What are the appetites of your heart in the midst of all this? What are you hungry for? Has the disconnected, impersonal nature of this season been a little too easy for you? How are you starving the temptations towards consumerism and cultivating your personal connection with Christ and community as often as you can?
A future feast is coming. It’ll be one in which we get to commune with Christ in a new way; in fact, he’s waiting to break bread and drink wine until we’re able to join him in person at the table. And we’ll get to commune with one another in a new way, too; we won’t merely all be sitting next to one another, but we’ll be experiencing a new kind of togetherness in new bodies, on a new earth, under a new heaven, and absent of every sin and sadness. We will know the church truly, because we’ll know the church personally - and perfectly.
This present distance makes me long to be present with the church again. Heck, some of us might even think the Passing of the Peace is looking pretty good right now! But more than that, it makes me long for this future feast. My prayer is that this separation would make us all hungry - not merely for things as we knew them to be and a return to normal life, but for the things of God that we can’t even yet describe and the return of Christ our King.