Dangers of Consumer Church

Can self-centeredness be leveraged for the gospel?

“We are unapologetically attractional. In our search for common ground with unchurched people, we’ve discovered that, like us, they are consumers. So we leverage their consumer instincts.”—Andy Stanley in Deep and Wide

“In order to help people follow Christ more fully, we would have to work against the very methods we were using to attract people to our church…we slowly began to realize that, to be faithful to the gospel of Jesus, consumerism was not a force to be harnessed but rather an anti-biblical value system that had to be prophetically challenged.”—Kent Carlson and Michael Lueken in Renovation of the Church

So which is it?

Are “consumer instincts” morally neutral (or at least morally inevitable) and thus fair game for being leveraged toward spiritual ends, or are they something the gospel intends to crucify?

Can a person’s innate self-orientation be used to introduce him to Jesus and to becoming less self-oriented and more God-oriented? Or is a person’s self-centered orientation the very problem that the gospel seeks to cure? Keep reading