The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with a shopkeeper’s concerns – how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from the competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.
- Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles : p. 2.
6 Comments
May 14, 2008 at 3:39 pm
haha
awesome
May 15, 2008 at 9:18 am
Many critics of the emerging church movement (however you define it!!??) throw this one into the mix. Where many of their arguments focus on style and structure they do have a point. The consumer-driven church has usurped the neo-liberals who dispensed with preaching about sin and repentance. What many have done is learn how to give us the 15 second soundbites that make us feel really good about ourselves and forget about the cost. It really is reflecting the inability of society to mature, that finds us looking to be entertained. If church is entertaining enough we will go there or go to one more entertaining that the other. Marx may have been right in saying that religion was the anethema on the masses, however today he would subtitute entertainment (religious and non-religious).
Gets back to the question – What are we doing to distract ourselves from reality? Some of us are going to church!!
June 29, 2008 at 1:46 am
Hi all.
Please help a victim of comsumerist Pentecostalism!!
I really need to find believers who strive to follow the example of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, not the anti-Christs leading the mega-church movement.
I am fed up with the heresy of propserity theology, and I can’t seem to escape this dangerous ideology, that is, as long as I congregate with Penties.
IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE??
IS ANYONE WALKING THE NARROW PATH???
HELP!!
Pabs from Perth/WA
June 29, 2008 at 1:47 am
That is “consumerist”, sorry for the typo
June 30, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Hey Pabs, sound like you’re in a difficult place. I think there’s some people in Perth trying to walk the narrow path. I’ll send you an email. Shalom, Nathan.
July 14, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Hi there.
Yeah, I’m very keen to meet some Anabaptists here in Perth to share some thoughts with.
God bless, Pabs.