Christian Worldview & Consumerism Driven Church

Everyone has a worldview. A worldview is simply how someone sees the world. This may not be a well thought out idea that someone has and generally it isn’t. Someone’s worldview may just be what they have had handed down from their parents or respected teachers and adults in their lives through their formative years. Worldview may be constructed through a person’s experiences. Someone who has fought in a war would have a different outlook on life than someone who has grown up with a trust fund. It remains that each person has a way to interpret the happenings of life. This would be their worldview. This paper is to discuss what a Biblical worldview is and how that applies to consumerism within the American evangelical church.

A Biblical worldview would be a way to interpret life using what a person would find in the Bible. This process requires much Bible reading and study as well as time for personal reflection and trial. A person must be able to line up his or her actions with his or her ideals. If he or she is taking them from the Bible he or she must conform his or her thoughts and actions to the teaching of the Bible.

As a person studies the Bible themes should come out. The main theme that is posed by Nancy Pearcy in her book Total Truth is the theme of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. She states that a person needs to understand these three truths first and then he or she will begin to understand life.

A Biblical worldview would also require that a person is able to understand how the world is distorting world views. It seems that man has worked on making a dual reality, that there is the natural world that you can experience through your senses and that there is a supernatural world that would exist of god, gods, or other fairy tales. The process of developing a Biblical worldview is to understand what the Bible says and then relate that directly to everything that we see and process within our lives. There is nothing left out and there are no dark corners that we have not exposed to the truth found in the Bible.

I am applying my Biblical worldview to the topic of consumerism. I believe that consumerism is the newest weapon in the enemies attack on the Biblical worldview. Consumerism makes up much of what the average American spends his or her time and thought on. Consumerism has made its way to the forefront of the American evangelical church. Consumerism is a cancer that is eating away at the world that God has created.

Consumerism has shaped our lives. It is hard for us to break out of that mode. We are defined by what we have. We are taught from a young age that we need to do well in school in order to go to a good college. Then we are to do well in college and make contacts in order to get a good job. The good job is the basis for our lives. If you have enough money you can have a family, buy a house, and then work on accumulating more. We need to have the best we can now. We take out loans to buy the things that we feel we deserve.

The church is shaped by consumerism as well. Many churches offer as many programs as possible to attract as many people as possible to their church. Those churches then speak of people as giving units. I just read in the Christian Standard about some mid-sized churches. One of the ways that Christian Standard ranked them was on something they called the money-to-baptism ratio. It took in to effect how much their budget was based off how many baptisms they had that year. It seems it is to answer the question, “Are they getting the bang for there buck?” I sat in on a meeting about a new addition to a rapidly growing church in the Midwest. The well-known Christian architectural firm spoke of the church programs as products, the church people as customers, and the surrounding churches as competition. Consumerism influences much of life today.

Consumerism has even found its way into buying babies. In the BreakPoint newsletter article, Five foot two, eyes of blue, Chuck Colson tells the story of a clinic in Los Angeles that offers designer babies. A couple can go to this clinic and pick out the hair color, eye color, and sex of the baby. The baby will even be free from any genetic diseases that could be passed from the shoppers, I mean parents. The babies, in embryonic form, that don’t have the desired traits would be disposed of or sold for medical testing. In this case consumerism is debating the value of a human life.

A Biblical worldview permeates a person’s life. It’s an all or nothing type of thing. It is grounded in scripture and lived out in the mundane of every day life. The truth of the Creation, the Fall, and Redemption are the three pillars of Biblical worldview. The Christian sees this and processes all he or she sees through these truths.

The church is not fighting against consumerism. Church leadership books and conferences have become big business. The process for becoming a pastor at a well-known church and then writing a book and traveling the circuit has become the goal of so many well meaning people. Books on how to run a good company invaded Christian bookstores more than a decade ago. Books on customer service within the church came to popularity 5 years ago. Now books on marketing and advertising have become the rage in church library’s everywhere.

Consumerism may be making a case to become a full blown worldview. The ultimate goal of consumerism is to get the best that you can because you deserve the best. Is the church feeding this or fighting this? The church is feeding it. The church has been fighting the battle for souls and significance and has forgotten the battle for the mind.

If you are wondering - this is my paper for class and it got a 97%!