Not The Religious Type

Yes, Christmas is Too Consumeristic. But What to Do about It?

Happy almost-Thanksgiving, everyone!  I suspect this will be it for posts this week, as I can't imagine many of you will be eagerly reading this blog from Thursday on...and it's possible I won't want to break away from the yams to post.

I'd love your thoughts on Christmas consumerism.

Christmas creep is a famous and detested thing, yet in these times of slow consumer spending, it's ever-more with us.  Two of Boston's oldies stations started playing only Christmas music TEN DAYS AGO.  I wasn't ready for Johnny Mathis and "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" just yet.

Disney's mega-budgeted A Christmas Carol opened a few weeks back to middling business.  My family is the absolute perfect target for that movie--with five kids, we pretty much see every new kids movie eventually.  But my kids had zero interest in this because they weren't thinking about Christmas only a few days after Halloween. 

I'll soon be writing a sermon about the holidays and stress and money, so I'd love any and all thoughts about the subject.

You might have heard about a popular approach to this dilemma of a year or so ago called The Advent Conspiracy. (I've embedded their very cool video--you should check it out if you haven't seen it.) The church I mentioned learning from last week is very into this, leading me to buy the short book they put out.  The pitch here is to limit gift-giving as dramatically as possible and give the money instead towards providing drinkable water around the world for those who need it.  Clearly this is hard to argue with.  (And did I mention the video is cool?  It's cool.)

And yet I found myself not quite buying it as a one-size-fits-all.  I mentioned it to Grace and she pushed back.  Is it all bad that one time a year we get a prompt to give a small gift to family members and a small circle of friends?  Are cards to people we love but who are out of our area such a bad idea?  In a relational universe--a very big idea behind our stage 4 talk--perhaps it's not clear that a modest approach to Christmas is all bad.  Perhaps--as Grace suggested--for all it's worthiness, the Advent Conspiracy is stage 3--a protest against blind consumerism without being, to use that stage 4 word, all that mystical, all that interactively connected to God as we look for our calling at a season like this.

It's not that its corrective is in any way bad--most of us are not all that mystical as we go the other direction and are blindly stressed-out and consumeristic.  And perhaps we should give towards clean water whatever we do at Christmas.  But perhaps the solution to Christmas creep and consumerism and stress lies in connection to Jesus and doing our best to walk through it all with rather than apart from him.

But what are your thoughts?  How do you approach the holidays non-consumeristically and stress-free? 

Don't Label Me, Man! / Vince Brackett (Evanston, IL)

I've noticed something about my young post-modern peers:  We avoid being decidedly self-identified as one thing or another like the plague.  Certainly there's a resistance to bounded-sets—that would definitely be decidedly one thing or another—but it's the self-identification piece that is interesting to me. This trend isn't just about others labeling me, it's about me labeling myself.

I've had the fun opportunity of late to pitch two-way prayer with Jesus to a couple of my young post-modern friends and they have both found the experience to be great.  But, since then, as our conversations have gone back to prayer and Jesus and to my suggestions that they check out church if those were good experiences for them, the idea of a God who hears us and we hear from seems to have ended up just another thing in their bags of tricks.  I feel like they've hit some wall that prohibits them from letting their own personal interest in any one spiritual stream take priority over other spiritual streams out there.

And, again, the interesting thing is that, to my mind, this is all internal struggle.  The issue is not a lack of courage to say amongst spiritually diverse company, “I had a good experience with Jesus;” it's a resistance to say to one's self, “This Jesus thing seems to be working, maybe I should wade in a little deeper.”  I expect the post-modern understandings of relativism and pluralism and other -ism's to inform how conscientious young post-moderns try to relate to others in diverse contexts; but I guess I've never considered that those understandings could be so ingrained that sticking to them as personal beliefs (that sounds... gasp!... modernist) or the paralyzing fear of identity crises were they discovered incomplete would trump personally diving deeper into one particular spiritual stream after finding it at least somewhat in one's self-interest. 

Perhaps, my friends aren't being totally honest with me.  Maybe they just told me they had good experiences with this two-way Jesus prayer to make me happy... but I don't think so.  I think they have indeed found Jesus to be in their self-interest, but it feels evil in their mind to give any one spiritual stream more priority in their personal life because what always seems to follow that in the world they know is bigotry, which may be the biggest evil of all in their post-modern understandings.

I think it's a given that centered-set church leaders following this blog aren't interested in judging other spiritual streams personally or publicly, but what can the communities we're leading do to squash this culturally-conditioned (and, let's face it, legitimate) fear in young post-moderns that making Jesus more of a priority in one's personal life will make them a bigot in their public life?  Strangely enough, am I onto something that that fear is prohibiting young post-moderns from thinking about their self-interest?

Hell. Yes, hell.

While I framed yesterday's post in terms of "mission," I suppose it actually shaded more towards a conversation on the challenges of "evangelism," and I appreciate your perspectives.  I suppose my bias came out in that conflating, because I do link "mission" pretty closely to "evangelism," which is intriguing in that I'm not now nor have I ever been an especially effective or motivated "personal evangelist."  A handful of people, most from fairly far back in my past, have decided to follow Jesus largely through a personal relationship with me and some key conversation.

And yet I do think a fair amount about Jesus as the key to every lock.  I do feel that Jesus was the singular help in my own life.  I think any sane person, if they understood the offer made--and perhaps the stakes involved--would of course give all they had to follow Jesus as a top priority.  And that was a part of my starting a church on the terms that we did.  It was too much pressure on me--and and anyone else--to see each individual relationship in terms of evangelism, or at least exclusively in terms of evangelism.  But I had some real hope that a collective endeavor would, while taking the pressure off of all of us, empower us together to influence hundreds or thousands of people in this way, and that's proven true.

That said, we do encourage lots and lots of praying for folks who haven't, best as we can figure out, encountered Jesus, and we see lots of good results from that all the time.  This very afternoon, I got an email about two of the folks I pray for along these lines (we call them one's "6," in the spirit of encouraging each other to be praying for 6 such folks each day).  Another friend got in touch with them and reported very encouraging things on a spiritual front. 

But why?  Why do I care about such folks in this way?  Why am I tempted to conflate that sort of caring somewhat closely with finding one's mission in Jesus?  Clearly it's not that there are not other worthy things to be done with one's life.  There are wells to be dug and diseases to be fought and microbusinesses to be started.  I suppose it's because I do, non-postmodern as this may sound to my chagrin, believe in ultimate stakes to living.  It's one of the things I like most about life--that it matters.

Which raises questions of heaven and hell.  For my first year of pursuing faith in Jesus, along with--I later discovered--CS Lewis in his own first year of faith, I could neither stomach nor believe in the thought of hell.  It was incompatible with my take on an all-loving, all-good God that this God could "send" people to hell, to some sort of eternal misery.  Whatever they'd done to "deserve" such a thing could never actually "deserve" that sort of response, and it clouded a picture of this entirely encouraging God that I was on my way to experiencing.  (It's been years since I've so loved putting so many words in quotation marks.  Or "quotation marks."  Fun with punctuation!)

But I do believe in hell.  Who will experience hell is, of course, a far-different question than the belief in hell at all.  I recently took a course on the history of theology which ended by focusing on several streams--that didn't qualify as classic "universalism" (the belief that all would be saved)--that found help in wishing all to be saved.  That struck me as an intriguing endeavor.

I pretty much never preach on hell (and "pretty much" might be overstatement).  Motivating through fear of hell strikes me as something that might have been helpful in a very Christianized world that included such a fear before you even brought it up--not a world I've ever lived in.  Such a message would have been repellent to me as an atheist debater.

And the power of hell strikes me as being that it starts now.  Following Jesus--it seems to me--offers us a way out of hell and into a taste of heaven this moment, and that very much does motivate me.

I'm not tempted to build a scriptural case for my belief in hell--and the usefulness of that belief.  I think there is a compelling case to be made in the Bible, but one could make a case--as I've heard made--that it's a relatively minor New Testament topic until--depending on your interpretation--one bumps into Revelation. 

But a belief in hell works for me.  It works to hone my lifelong endeavor.  It works to hone my sense of personal mission.  It works to keep me focused and motivated.  And all of those things seem entirely helpful to me, which would rate a thumbs-up on the "you'll know a tree by its fruit" standard.  The fruit has been very constructive from inside my skin.

So what's your take on hell?  Does your belief one way or another have real-world impact on your behavior day by day?  How so, or not?

What's Your Take on Mission?

Thanks for the feedback on "secular friends with no needs."  We had some rousing calls to friendship as being the key thing.  And we had a few comments to the effect that it can feel weird or wounded to have to assume our secular friends are a pathetic mass of needs, whatever they may say.

I was intrigued to press this a bit further.  A fundamental tension for churchgoers is the distance between stirring calls like Jesus' to "make disciples of all nations" and the sense that we're not superior to anyone else and that it feels weird and non-relational to see all relationships with non-churchgoers as ones where, like an Amway salesman, we're only allegedly "befriending" them in order to serve our larger purpose of "making them Christians."  I suspect that reconciling that tension is a fundamental step in the life of everyone trying to follow Jesus and probably is not divorced from the conversation we're having here.

NOT reconciling that tension leaves two unappealing possibilities.  One is that we embrace that our mission is to "give people the gospel," that that's what "courageous' people do whether or not they every actually enjoy an actual friendship with such people.  We don't care if we treat people as objects to be acted upon by us or not.

Or: We regard objectifying people as such a serious and unavoidable risk that we blow off any sense of "joining Jesus' mission" and just mind our own business.

So it seems to me we need to embrace the tension and utterly reconcile it without taking either of those paths.  To my mind, as some of you pointed out, friendship with no strings is indeed important.  But so is the belief that God is actually alive and responds to prayer, thereby removing the need to "convince" our friends of anything.  I think we're helped by centered-set thinking in this. 

Let's talk!