After SVS 2010: Jason Clark: Consumerism, Social Imagination, & Ecclesiology

After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
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Jason Clark: “Consumerism, Social Imagination, and Ecclesiology”

Abstract:
This paper suggest that a previous freedom within mission for understanding the nature of church, has given rise to a situation where it is the imagination of consumer for life, that often determines the forms of church life. Where previous forms of church became captive to the nature of market forces, new emerging forms of church are seen as further captive to this logic. This paper, traces the emergence and nature of this western individualism and agency, and it’s self creating nature, seeing identity free from commitments to any others. Examples of this are shown with:

1. Blueprint Ecclesiologies:  where idealised models of church are made, that are never realised
2. Any understanding of Church becomes pathological, where Christians form church life around ideas of what is wrong with Church, with no confidence in Scripture or mission
3. The naive belief that church can be non-instutional, when what is needed is not the absence of institutions, but an articulate institutional imagination
4. The imaginations for any of these forms of Church are often taken from consumer culture
5. What is called ‘revolution’ is often not revolution at all, but a pandering to consumer ‘authenticity’
6. And the collapse of Church into the creation of private God spaces within which people make their own isolated meaning of God, that do not lead to new christian conversion

It is suggest that the solution to this problem is to re-discover the ‘giveness’ of church life, that Church is something that is necessary to Christian identity and formation.  And that is best found in a scriptured and traditioned understanding of Church organisation, life and mission.

Interview With Jason

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: Through the planting of a church, and by doing some theological reflection on the power of consumer imaginations of what life is about, and how that shapes what people give themselves to and expect the Church to support. Also through the day-to-day in pastoral life, seeing people have prayers answered and have experiences of God that seemed to lead to God becoming just one resource amongst many to get the consumer dream. In this way, you might have Oprah, but I have Jesus and he trumps Oprah to get me the life we are both trying to pursue: that is, the consumer dream. I wanted to explore what was it about consumerism that causes all of life, including the Christian life so often, to be bent around those ends. Finally, after 10 years of seeing many friends explore that dynamic by moving away from any form of Church at all, it seemed that the new post-church forms of church were pandering even more to that problem, and continuing to enable people to use Christian resources not for mission but for consumer life identities and constructions. I began to ask: Was there anything in theology and church history to help respond to this problem?

Technorati Tags: Church, Consumerism, ecclesiology, Jason Clark, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS

5 Arguments Against the Use of Marketing and Media in Church

American Evangelicalism has always been media savvy. From Charles Fuller to Billy Graham, mass media has been used for conveying the information of the gospel to multitudes. More recently, we’ve pressed into television, advertising, branding, and multi-media to attract crowds and convey the message. Video-venues (part of the multi-site church approach) are the latest accepted innovation.

Simultaneously, the American church is in a crisis of attendance and character and the missional conversation is partly about rethinking ecclesiology for just that reason. I think this necessitates rethinking our use of modern marketing methods and media technology as well. I have five concerns:

The Tendency Toward Deception:
Advertising is an inherently deceptive medium. Whether we’re producing a T.V. commerical or designing a flyer or video, the purpose is usually persuasion and that plays upon our innate desire to be seen as better than we really are. Rather than check this tendency with open humility, we often go the other direction: creative exaggeration. Brochures, websites and promotional videos portray “shiny happy people” and the promise of easy triumphalism through pixelated filters. This is the peddling of image through desire, just like a typical car commercial or beer ad. The subtle yet powerful message is, “Buy what we’re offering and you can be just like the people in this ad.” But we can never be like the people in those ads because they don’t actually exist.

Emotionally targeted advertising is a poor substitute for having an identity derived from being created in the image of God.

Artificially Exaggerating the Mundane:
One of the most effective means of containing people is to make ordinarily mundane things seem more exciting. On TV and film this is achieved through artificial “technical events” like cutting, panning, fading, adding musical scores, special effects, etc. All this adds the illusion of motion and depth to an otherwise boring experience (television and video stripped of ornamentation are inherently flat and boring).

We do essentially same thing with church services, youth gatherings, and childrens ministries. We build worship music sets and preach messages engineered to produce an emotional crescendo, or use the gimmicky minutia of American teenage culture as accouterments to the scriptural text. This kind of hype creates a false perception of reality and an self-defeating default perspective because we become over-stimulated to the point where the normal level of hype has now become the new mundane. When our old techniques aren’t working anymore we must ramp up to the next decibel.

Hype is a poor substitute for cultivating eyes and ears faith so we can recognize the movement of God in ordinary things.

The Mediation of Experience:
People tend to think they’ve experienced something simply because they saw it on television. Millions of tweens think they know the Jonas Brothers because of the Disney Channel. In my generation we thought we knew Monica and Chandler too.

A weekend outreach may become a life-changing experience for many people. But when we show a video recap of it on Sunday, hundreds or thousands suddenly own the experience. Because they belong to a church that does those kinds of things, they see themselves as participating in that reality. But they’re not. The more technically proficient the media, the more vicarious appropriation occurs and the more people are kept in a stasis where they don’t leave (the root meaning of the word entertainment). This same vicarious mediation can occur with preaching, and is likely to occur when the real people have been replaced by photon-facsimiles in video-venues.

Mediation through technology is a poor substitute for discipleship praxis.

The Trap of Professional Branding:
Being an American consumer requires I maintain an ongoing suspension of dis-belief. Wal-Mart tells me in a thousand ways that they care about my well-being. But they don’t. As a savvy consumer I’m aware of this. It’s an open secret I’ve known since I was 4 years old and my parents taught me to watch TV commercials with suspicion. But even though I know this I suspend my dis-belief while consuming because I want to believe their products will make me happier. I’m willing to try it on the off-chance it’s an accidental truth. This creates an internal dichotomy wherein I love the merchant (if I like their products) and distrust them at the same time. But I go along with the charade as long as they’re the best or the cheapest – or both. This is an ingrained consumer response to ever-escalating marketing efforts.

When churches engage in the same marketing practices we stimulate the same double-minded response. If the marketing materials are good, people are impressed because professionalism is a highly effective selling point; the appearance of competence makes the suspension of dis-belief easier. But what we reap in return is not covenant commitment, it’s brand loyalty. This cripples churches in the long run because it’s only a matter of time before someone else offers a better or cheaper Jesus product. Worse, it debilitates the believer’s capacity for faith because our implied message is that Christianity is just another dubiously-motivated product in the marketplace.

Branding is a poor substitute for genuine spiritual power.

The Deterioration of Kinship Communities:
Mass-communication is inherently fascist-leaning because it atomizes and immobilizes people in order to shape behavior (there’s no need for dictatorship in nations saturated by television). The result is passive consumer-spectators. This same phenomenon occurs in churches that depend on mass media. There’s a reason for this: small communities (families, tribes, etc.) adhere to one another through gifts, mutuality, and affection, and they communicate values and traditions through those resulting kinships. That is the currency of small groups. But among larger populations people can’t maintain a plenitude of kinships. That’s where the mass media and the marketplace enter. The marketplace allows for the mediation of relationships in a large population because cash allows for interaction liberated from relational obligation. Mass media fills the communication gap created by the loss of kinships and, in a feedback loop, supplants them at the same time, driving the population toward the market instead. Hence, the larger the group the more consumer-oriented it must become by necessity, the more it must rely on mass media to create unity, and the more the population will be passivized. In fact, the larger the population, the more it is necessary to create passivity in order to govern. I’m convinced this is a major reason why mega-churches struggle to become genuinely missional.

Mass media and marketplaces are poor substitutions for genuine community.

Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting that media can’t be utilized by the church with integrity. I think it can be, and I have friends who do – but it must be done with tremendous caution keeping these inherent dangers in mind and countering them intentionally. Ultimately, I think the key is to use these media to tell the truth and distribute power – no small task given that these aims are generally opposed by the mediums which distort truth and aggregate power by design. Telling the truth and empowering people through mass media is somewhat akin to making peace with war.

Technorati Tags: Church, Consumerism, Culture, marketing, Media

Toward a Missional Economy, Part 1

I recently spoke on “Economy and Mission” at Verge L.A. 2009. Since starting Twoshirts.org almost two years ago, this has been a significant subject of study for me and it has direct bearing on how we shape community – something we’re currently neck deep in defining over at Ikon Community. So, over the next few days I’ll share my Verge presentation here in the hopes of stimulating some thoughtfulness about how missional churches might follow the Holy Spirit in cultivating subversive, grassroots economic communities in a desert of greed and inequality.

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I am an economist. Not by education or by training. The truth is I don’t know much about “macroeconomic rigidities” or “consensus forecasts,” but what I do know, perhaps naively, is that the heart of economics is merely the stewardship of resources, or, quite literally the “rules of the household” (Greek: oikos & nomos). Therefore, I am economist simply by living.

This means you are an economist too. It doesn’t matter if you’re poorly educated or hopelessly impoverished. Economics isn’t about what you know, or how much you have; it’s about how you handle what you have. Everyone has stuff, and everyone has a way of figuring out what to hold on to and what to let go of.

Obviously, then, God is also an economist because God has stuff – lots of stuff! So if, as I take it, “mission” means going where God goes and doing what God does (John 5:19) then a critical question for us is, “What is God the economist doing?” Or, perhaps a more helpful question for shedding our cultural prejudices would be, “What are the rules of his household?” Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: 2 Corinthians, Church, Consumerism, economy, Exodus, gifts, Ikon Community, Manna, mission, Paul, twoshirts.org, Verge LA