Dancing with Consumerism | Out of Ur | Following God's Call in a New World | Conversations hosted by the editors of Leadership journal

The way that I think about engaging it (consumerism) is…well, let’s look at how Jesus interacted with his culture. Jesus used three primary movements in every context. The first movement is towards. So he was incarnational. He entered. People like to use the word relevant for this. But Jesus also moved against the culture, he was resistant. He overturned tables in the temple and said “You brood of vipers.” So he was both relevant and resistant. And third, Jesus withdrew to quiet places. He was also distant, he moved away. So you have three rhythmic movements of toward, against, and away—relevance, resistance, and distance. And none of those can be static. They always have to be happening.

If you read my blog at all, you have noticed my recent rants on the consumeristic nature of our society. This article is by Shane Hipps, who wrote half of a great book, The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel, and Church. I say half because the first half was diagnosing the problem with the church's perception of electronic media (great), and the last half giving his ideas on how the church should change and adapt to the electronic culture - reject it (not so great). In any case, the quote above comes from an article that is very helpful in understanding how everyone is a consumer, and therefore we need to first understand what type of consumer we are (mainstream consumer, counter consumer, and anti-consumer). Then, we need to see how Jesus engaged the culture by entering it, confronting certain aspects, and distancing ourselves from it. Practically, as an anti-consumer, I excel at confronting certain aspects of consumerism. However, I am not as good at rejecting consumerism all together and engaging other aspects I do not prefer. I like apple computers and hate anything microsoft, but I still love computers way too much :) (not resisting them) so my goal is to take more "fasts" from computers so not to turn my anti-consumerism into the other extreme of mainstream consumerism. I guess....I should probably end this blog post and stop being a hypocrite :)

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