In Search of Kingdom Living

Reordering the Cosmic Powers:
Turning the Tables at the Stone Table

Metzger uses a metaphor lifted out of Chronicles of Narnia to illustrate the “deep magic of Christ’s atoning work, which serves as the foundation stone for breaking down divisions between God and us and between us and others – including consumer divisions between different races and classes – and making us all one” (p. 68)

I found this chapter to be quite helpful (and hopeful) about the current state of evangelical churches. In one particular section entitled ‘ Dying to the Law of Consumerism and Rising to New Life’, I really like the following blurb:

Today the American church’s division between groups of people involving ethnicities, classes, and the like is also often religious, even legalistic, though not in the same way. Rather, it is a legalistic division based on consumer selection: people have the God-given right to choose or select what churches they wish to attend based on preference and taste. (p. 79

This directly relates to the following:

The way churches today cater to the market forces of homogeneity and upward mobility inevitably leads them to exclude from their fellowship the poor and those on the fringes of society, partly because they have made such outsiders feel uncomfortable with the insider crowd of “our kind of people.” Dehumanizing freedom of infinite choice and personal preference inside and outside the church replaces the law of enforcement and impersonal rule, and that reinforces the race and class divide. Today’s problems of race and class in America are not rooted in torture or oppression, but in liberated choice and pleasure: they are bound up with the subtle law of consumer preference. p. 80

In one sense, our modern society has liberated the self – allowing each individual to every right of freedom and happiness. Of course now we have seen all the pendulum has swung all the other way. We are smothered by the sheer amount of freedom and are frozen within the confines of market/social forces which compels us towards upward mobility and race/class divisions.

Once again I find myself wondering whether my own compulsion to find a like-minded, missional church is based on a desire to correct these glaring mistakes. Or by leaving my local church, am I just spreading the problem?

Darryl Dash – Transforming the Consumer Church

Scot McKnight – Chapter 3 Review