What has changed most dramatically, I believe, in this last quarter
of a century is that when I first arrived here we were at the end of the
post war period when evangelical faith was being doctrinally framed and
today, for the most part, it is not. Or at least, not obviously so.
What shaped the Church then, far more than it does now, was theological
conviction about its character and purpose. What shapes it now, far more
than it did then, is a marketing ethos. In one sense, this should not
be surprising at all. Americans are nothing if not consumers, consumers
of images, of relationships, and of things, You perhaps will have seen
some of these figures that have been assembled in recent years. We have
7% of the world’s population but we consume 33% of the goods and
services. Every year in America, 12 billion catalogs are sent out to see
if some unwary consumers can be attracted. The average child watches 20
thousand advertisements on television every year and on an average day
you should see 1,600 advertisements. Our whole society has been
transformed into a consumer’s heaven and we are nothing if not a nation
of buyers, thoroughly at home in, and thoroughly a part of, the life of
commerce. We move in and out of it much like fish do through water. It
is in this commerce that we live and move and have our being. So the
Church’s willingness to adapt to the marketing model for thinking about
itself really is not remarkable.
But in adapting itself to this culture, the Church, far more than was
the case twenty-five years ago, is having its character, and its
purposes, and the way it functions, defined for it. There’s nothing
wrong with commerce per se, but I am going to argue that there is
something profoundly wrong in trading Christ, or in thinking that
religion is the commerce of the soul. Now this adaptation to this kind
of culture I see taking place in three very important ways in the
evangelical world. Read it all HERE
