Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Gimme, gimme, gimme

"Gimme, gimme, gimme. My name is Jimmy!"

That's what one preacher used to yell at us.

Church consumerism seems to be a theme in blogland the past couple of days. I just read the following post by DaveDV at meremission.org:
Milfred Minatrea describes the consumer mentality of many Christians. "Just as they count on Wal-Mart meeting their material needs, they expect their churches to provide religious goods and services." John MacArthur adds this insight, "It is easy for Christians to get to the point where they expect things to be done for them. They show up for church only if they think they will get something out of it."

There is a whole generation of church shoppers and hoppers who decide where to worship based on getting their needs met. Mark Atteberry describes it like this:

Church A might have an awesome worship band, while Church B has a preacher you love to listen to. But then one of your buddies who attends Church C ask you to play on their softball team. Is this a problem? Of course not! You just do what any good consumer would do. You hop back and forth between the three churches.

One evidence of consumerism is the "Pareto Principle." Eighty percent of the people allow the remaining twenty percent to do eighty percent of the ministry. There are a lot of spectators watching the show.
(link)

And I've seen this classic on a couple of blogs today as well:


HT: Mikescape and SimpleMindedPreacher.

1 comment:

Shaun Sells said...

Yes, the sad reality is that most churches are modeled after Walmart. Unfortunately the chruch Jesus describes is more like Amway, disciple 12 of your friends who will in turn disciple 12 of theres, and lookout - exponetial growth and everyone has someone to fellowship with.

That's it, I am closing the doors and gonna start over with 12 friends. Of course, that is how all the mega churches started - crud now what? I guess they did a bad job teaching the 12 to teach 12 to teach 12.

2Timothy 2:2 The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.