the discipleship opportunity

We live in a consumeristic world. Consumerism is not just in the air that we breathe; it is the air that we breathe.

The implication of this is that we’ve all been shaped into perpetual consumers conditioned to expect comfort, convenience, and choice everywhere we go and in all that we do.

As a result, it’s no surprise that this ethos has also seeped into the church.

Just consider this powerful insight on this dilemma from Eugene Peterson’s Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity,

If I receive my primary social identity as a consumer, it follows that my primary expectation of the people I meet is that I get something from them for which I am prepared to pay a price. I buy merchandise from the department store, health from the physician, legal power from the lawyer. Does it not follow that in this kind of society my parishioner will have commercialized expectations of me? None of the honored professions has escaped commercialization, so why should the pastorate? This has produced in our time the opprobrious practice of pastors manipulating their ­so-called flocks on the same principles that managers use to run supermarkets.

The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper’s­ concerns— how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.

Gosh. No wonder it’s so easy to slip into viewing upset congregants as “customers,” and then as “shopkeepers” to become consumed with “shopkeeper’s­ concerns—how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.”

How dangerous this is.

When I was writing The Discipleship Opportunity, there was one chapter in particular that was both the easiest to write and the most convicting for me personally. It was the one where I addressed this spirit of consumerism in the church.

On the one hand, it was the easiest chapter to write because I’ve seen and experienced how the spirit of consumerism has infected and afflicted the church, first-hand. From the way people judge and evaluate our ministries and programs, to how critical people can be about coffee, to how some people can be more focused on our song selection and volume levels than on Jesus, and to the positive, negative, and passive aggressive emails that I get about my sermons, as a pastor it’s so easy to slip into the culturally expected role of being a “shopkeeper.”

On the other hand, writing this chapter was the most convicting because God helped me realize that as much as our congregation may act as “customers” and thereby try to force me into becoming a “shopkeeper” (which I am actually pretty good at doing because I have a lot of previous work experience doing just that), this is incredibly dangerous because it is pastoral malpractice. Our congregations aren’t customers—they are sheep. And as pastors, we aren’t shopkeepers—we are shepherds.

If you view your congregation as customers, it’s easy to either adopt a philosophy where you act like Disney or the Ritz-Carlton, striving to meet their consumeristic needs at all costs, OR act like the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld and say—perhaps too often—”No soup for you!”

But the fact of the matter is that our congregation aren’t customers. They are sheep! And sometimes sheep bite.

I don’t have any tattoos, but I do have lots of scars.

Early on, when I got my first scar bite from a fellow sheep (and this wasn’t when I was a pastor), my natural inclination was to get away from others and try to follow Jesus alone. But as it’s so clearly outlined throughout the Scriptures, we can’t actually follow Christ alone. And we can’t actually experience God’s love as he intends for us to unless we learn to love others. “Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another.” (1 John 4:11 CSB)

And as a pastor, as I have nursed and bandaged the many scar bites that I’ve received from the sheep that God has entrusted me to shepherd, I have many times wanted to throw and kick those sheep to the curb, yelling “No soup for you!!” In fact, that’s why I wanted to originally title the chapter “Screw the Consumers.” (In the end, my publisher won the discussion, and I went with their suggestion, “Challenging the Consumers.”)

But as I’ve reflected on our calling as Christians, and my calling as a pastor, I have realized that, as much as sheep might bite, we are called to shepherd and challenge the sheep who are in our care. To remind them of who they are in Christ. To remind them of our holy calling in Christ. And to remember that:

So, friends, let’s remember that our congregation aren’t consumers. They are sheep. And sometimes sheep bite. And thanks be to God that we have a great and good shepherd who promises to be with us as we lead the flocks that he has entrusted to our care (Psalm 23).

To dig deeper into this content, see chapter 6 of my book, The Discipleship Opportunity: Leading a Great-Commission Church in a Post-Everything World.