Soul Thoughts

Faith and relevance in the 21st century

Category: Consumerism (Page 5 of 6)

The Advent Conspiracy

December 10, 2009 /

There’s some great stuff out there on the web if you’re tired of the consumerist madness that characterises this time of the year we call the ‘silly season’. I recently came across the website of a group called Advent Conspiracy. They are a group of concerned pastors in the US who want to take us back to what Christmas is really about – the birth of the Prince of Peace, the One who gave himself for all. I love their logo on the left. Such a prophetic message, showing a shopper with a trolly full of goods coming face to face with one of the 3 wise men, come to worship the King. The Advent Conspiracy movement is catching on, as you can see from a map on their website showing others who are doing what they can to celebrate Jesus at Christmas. Here’s what they say about themselves:

The story of Christ’s birth is a story of promise, hope, and a revolutionary love.

So, what happened? What was once a time to celebrate the birth of a savior has somehow turned into a season of stress, traffic jams, and shopping lists.

And when it’s all over, many of us are left with presents to return, looming debt that will take months to pay off, and this empty feeling of missed purpose. Is this what we really want out of Christmas?

What if Christmas became a world-changing event again?

Welcome to Advent Conspiracy.

They want to take us back to giving in the real sense, back to relationship and love. The slogan at the bottom of their website is quite brilliant. It says ‘give presence’. This clip will give you more of an idea of what they’re about:

Get the Flash Player to see this content.

I feel inspired when I hear about groups like this, people who want to steal Christmas back from the ‘Grinches’ who would have us believe that it’s all about how much you can buy. A Galaxy survey in 2008 showed that

“Gen Y[ers]…would spend an average of $245 on their partners, $264 on a child, $65 on a friend and $220 on themselves [and] other Australians said they would spend $189 on their partner, $196 on a child, $35 on a friend and $107 on themselves.”

The same would be true this year, and maybe even more so as business confidence is on the rise again.

I love Christmas. I love it because, despite our addiction to stuff, it gives me hope that there is a better way, a more excellent way, as the apostle Paul put it. The way of love inspires me to subvert what Christmas has become and try to live in a way that honours the babe in a manger who grew up to walk and talk the way of the cross, and then the way of resurrection, the life that is truly life.

Christmas Reflection – 2009

December 6, 2009 /

My wife and I recently saw the movie, What Would Jesus Buy? It’s a brilliant spoof of all that Christmas has become for millions of people trapped in the shopping frenzy that is the silly season. The film follows Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir throughout the United States as they try to help consumers open their eyes to the madness that they are participating in every December.

One of the scenes that captured me the most in this movie was when the choir would roll up to the front door of unsuspecting families and start singing their carols. How nice you might say, until you heard the brilliantly farcical take on some well known lyrics. Take their version of Joy to the World:

“Joy to the World!

In the Form of Goods!

Consume! Consume! Consume!

Bright Plastics This and That’s!

For Screaming Little Brats!

Take the SUV to the Mall

Take the SUV to the Mall”

The unfortunate truth is that these words are a more accurate description of Christmas for most Australians than the traditional lyrics of this beautiful carol.

I’m not even sure if Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir claim to be Christians but they sure get the message across that we have done something terrible to this wonderful time of year when it is all about clamouring all over the person in front of you to get that special bargain.

What Would Jesus Buy? shows how far we have digressed from, not only what Christmas is all about, but also the origins of Santa Claus, or Saint Nicholas. How ironic it is that Saint Nicholas, a young man raised by Christian parents in the 3rd century in what is now Turkey, was known for taking literally Jesus’ words to “sell all you have and give the money to the poor”. It is documented that

“Nicholas used his whole inheritance to assist the needy, the sick, and the suffering. He dedicated his life to serving God and was made Bishop of Myra while still a young man. Bishop Nicholas became known throughout the land for his generosity to those in need, his love for children”.

Many centuries later, the memory of Saint Nicholas and his beautiful spirit is as unfamiliar as snow in an Australian summer. The fact is that the majority of parents in this country now dread Christmas because of the stress it creates in terms of what on earth to buy the kids this year.

How different all this is to the God who came as a babe in a manger, relegated to a smelly stable out the back because there was no room for his parents at the inn. At this time of year we celebrate a God who came as a person, a God who made the ultimate sacrifice to involve himself in the poverty and oppression of what is life for much of this planet’s population. As my pastor pointed out this week, from the time Jesus was born he was hunted. Forced to flee as a refugee to a foreign land, resulting in the deaths of all boys in the Bethlehem region aged under 2 years, Jesus’ days were numbered from a very young age.

Christmas for so many is a painful time, and for many others it is a joyful time, and for others still it is a time of stress they could well do without. If it is a painful time for you, then remember the One who came to stand beside you in your pain, the One who understands what it is to be rejected, to have nothing, and to be told he doesn’t belong in his own neighbourhood. If Christmas is a joyful time for you, then thank the One who gave all he had to come and eat at table with us, to offer us grace upon grace, even when, no, especially when, that is the very thing we do not deserve. And if you can’t wait for Christmas to be over so you can relax, then allow yourself to be set free by giving yourself this Christmas. May your gift be in the form of love and community, and gifts that have meaning.  Your gifts may be in the form of a goat or literacy skills through TEAR, World Vision or a number of other aid organisations. The options are endless, and you may just find that you are giving to Jesus himself. May you have a meaningful Christmas, filled with the Spirit of the Christ who gives to all without measure.

Did Christianity Cause the Crash?

November 11, 2009 /

Photo by Tracy OlsonThe feature article in the latest issue of The Atlantic discusses the influence of the prosperity gospel on the financial crisis. It also talks about some of the ideas behind this doctrine and, worse, some of the racist behaviour of banks teaming up with pastors to rip off Latinos and African Americans.

The article makes the point that among the many reasons given for the crash is one “that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture-a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.”

The alarming increase of the prosperity gospel in the United States is seen in the fact that ‘other Christians’ apart from Penetecostals, among whom this doctrine has had its most influence are stung with this virus as well. Pew research has found that “66 percent of all Pentecostals and 43 percent of “other Christians”-a category comprising roughly half of all respondents-believe that wealth will be granted to the faithful”

One of the main peddlers of the prosperity gospel is Joel Osteen, pastor of the largest megachurch in the US. The article makes the observation that he uses very little Scripture in his books and sermons. I find this true of most preachers of Osteen’s persuasion. I have also found that when they do use Scripture, it is almost always from the Old Testament. Not that the Old Testamen is not as much the Word of God as the New Testament, but you will very rarely hear one of these preachers quote Jesus – quite ironic for people who claim to be his followers. Osteen’s message is more like positive thinking than Scriptural commands to take up our cross and follow on the road.

As with any heresy though, the prosperity gospel contains grains of truth. The problem is that they’re twisted to be made to say pretty much the total opposite of what they actually mean. Take this comment by Osteen that we should “wake up every morning and tell yourself, “God is guiding and directing my steps.” This is more like a ‘my will, not Thine, be done’ attitude. Rather, a biblical attitude says to wake up every morning and ask God to guide my steps that day. His will, not mine, be done.

In an article last year about the financial crisis, I said that 

“one of the reasons the prosperity gospel is so disastrous is because, when events like this come along, they will turn alot of people away from God as they become disillusioned with what they have been taught about God’s apparent desire for them to be wealthy.”

The hope for these people though is that, as Rikk Watts has said, “if someone is running from a false view of God, are they further from him or closer to him?’ Interesting thought to ponder.

In detailing the influence of the prosperity gospel on the financial crash, the article points out that

“in 2008, in the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, warned: Narratives of how “God blessed me with my first house despite my credit” were common … Sermons declaring “It’s your season of overflow” supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about “what God can do,” little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM.”

Continuing this point, it adds,

“Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities-the exurban middle class and the urban poor. Many newer prosperity churches popped up around fringe suburban developments built in the 1990s and 2000s, says Walton. These are precisely the kinds of neighborhoods that have been decimated by foreclosures, according to Eric Halperin, of the Center for Responsible Lending.”

The article also makes the point that “most new prosperity-gospel churches were built along…areas that were hard-hit by the mortgage crisis.” Another researcher quoted in the article, Kate Bowler, “spent a lot of time attending the “financial empowerment” seminars that are common at prosperity churches. Advisers would pay lip service to “sound financial practices,” she recalls, but overall they would send the opposite message: posters advertising the seminars featured big houses in the background, and the parking spots closest to the church were reserved for luxury cars.”

Perhaps the most evil legacy of the prosperity gospel is that its adherents will stoop to the most pernicious form of racism to get their dollars, exploiting the poor and non-white Latinos and African Americans. The article says that,

“at least 17 lawsuits accusing various banks of treating racial minorities unfairly were already under way. (Bank of America’s Countrywide division-one of the companies Garay worked for-had earlier agreed to pay $8.4 billion in a multistate settlement.) One theme emerging in these suits is how banks teamed up with pastors to win over new customers for subprime loans.”

The prosperity gospel has its roots in the USA, but its tenticles have spread to all parts of the world, from Africa to Australia. It is not good news; it is a ‘gospel’ which is held captive to a culture in which the dream of material wealth is the highest goal of humanity. It is a nationalist, me-centred heresy. Consider the following from the article:

“In their new congregation, their pastor slowly walks them through life in the U.S., both inside and outside of church, until they become more confident. “In Mexico, nobody ever told them they could do anything,” says Lin, who was himself raised in Argentina. He finds the message at prosperity churches to be quintessentially American. “They are taught they can do absolutely anything, and it’s God’s will. They become part of the elect, the chosen. They get swept up in the manifest destiny, this idea that God has lifted Americans above everyone else.”

The false view of faith that sees their riches as a gift from God is another common form of delusion amongst those held captive. Researcher Tony Lin says,

“I wasn’t very surprised when the whole subprime-mortgage thing blew up. I’m sure a loan officer never said, ‘God wants you to have a house.’ But you’ve already been taught that. Now here comes the loan officer saying, ‘Sign here, and this house will be yours.’ It feels like a gift from God. It’s the perfect fuel for the crisis.”

The financial crisis has done little to dampen the evangelistic fervour of the prosperity gospellers. From the distance, from the sidelines of the noise and glamour of the churches from which this message is proclaimed, whispers the quiet voice of the Man of Sorrows – ‘“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money”.

The (un)Happy Planet Index 2.0

July 11, 2009 /

Back in 2007 I wrote an article on the decay of western culture, in which I mentioned the New Economics Foundation’s Happy Planet Index. This is an index that addresses the relative success or failure of countries in supporting a good life for their citizens, while respecting the environmental resource limits upon which all our lives depend. Australia was ranked 139th out of 178, which suggested that Jesus was right when he said that life does not consist in the abundance of one’s possessions.

Photo by Craig JewellWell, the NEF has published its latest version of the Index, and it is indeed quite prophetic in its call for a new way of living in a world in which the earth’s resources are being depleted at a simply alarming rate. The report begins by stating that,

“In an age of uncertainty, society globally needs a new compass to set it on a path of real progress. The Happy Planet Index (HPI) provides that compass by measuring what truly matters to us – our well-being in terms of long, happy and meaningful lives – and what matters to the planet – our rate of resource consumption.”

It goes on to say that “we are still far from achieving sustainable well-being, and puts forward a vision of what we need to do to get there.”

Some of the interesting results to come out of the study we as follows:

  • The highest HPI score is that of Costa Rica (76.1 out of 100). As well as reporting the highest life satisfaction in the world, Costa Ricans also have the second-highest average life expectancy of the New World (second only to Canada). All this with a footprint of 2.3 global hectares. Whilst this success is indeed impressive, Costa Rica narrowly fails to achieve the goal of ‘one-planet living’: consuming its fair share of natural resources (indicated by a footprint of 2.1 global hectares or less).
  • Of the following ten countries, all but one is in Latin America.
  • The bottom ten HPI scores were all suffered by sub-Saharan African countries, with Zimbabwe bottom of the table with an HPI score of 16.6 out of 100.
  • Rich developed nations fall somewhere in the middle. The highest-placed Western nation is the Netherlands – 43rd out of 143. The USA comes a long way back in 114th place. Australia comes 102nd, a slight improvement on its 139th in the original study.
  • Many of the countries that do well are composed of small islands (including the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba and the Philippines).
  • No country successfully achieves the three goals of high life satisfaction, high life expectancy and one-planet living.
  • It is possible to live long, happy lives witha much smaller ecological footprint than found in the highest-consuming nations. For example, people in the Netherlands live on average over a year longer than people in the USA, and have similar levels of life satisfaction – and yet their per capitaecological footprint is less than half the size (4.4 global hectares compared with 9.4 global hectares). This means that the Netherlands is over twice as ecologically efficient at achieving good lives.
  • More dramatic is the difference between Costa Rica and the USA. Costa Ricans also live slightly longer than Americans, and report much higher levels of life satisfaction, and yet have a footprint which is less than a quarter the size.

What this study clearly shows is that our way of living in the (still) affluent west is unsustainable, as if we needed reminding. Brian McLaren calls our way of living the ‘suicide machine’, because it is a way of living that is literally killing us and the rest of the planet. His brilliant book, Everything Must Change, explains this in more detail.

The study also highlights what many people have been saying for a long time now. Consider this quote from Thomas Friedman, a long-time advocate of growth and globalisation:

“Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall – when Mother Nature and the market both said: ‘No more'”

Jesus was indeed right when he warned of greed which is idolatry. Our whole way of living is based on greed and it is not just a doom-and-gloom killjoy remark to say that it is killing us. It is an undeniable fact. T. Jackson, in a NEF publication called ‘Chasing Progress’ has said that “every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth.” The Happy Planet report has an excellent section on this myth in which it discusses the history of the philosophy behind economic growth and how it came to prominence.

Photo by Ramiro PérezMany respected social thinkers have long put forward the argument that a religious outlook on life is beneficial to a peaceful and harmonious society. A society that places ethical values and a positive outlook for the future, often based on a religious faith, is a society that is based on a solid foundation. The Happy Planet report echoes this by saying that even a magazine such as The Economist says that 

“attempting to explain why well-being does not keep rising in line with consumption, [The Economist] suggests that ‘there are factors associated with modernisation that, in part, offset its positive impact.’ Specifically, it argues that alongside consumption growth, [a] concomitant breakdown of traditional institutions is manifested in the decline of religiosity and of trade unions; a marked rise in various social pathologies (crime, and drug and alcohol addiction); a decline in political participation and of trust in public authority; and the erosion of the institutions of family and marriage.”

An article in The Age a few years ago showed that, if all people in the world lived like Australians, we would need 4 planets to maintain our lifestyle. And of all the states in Australia, my home state of Victoria was the worst of the lot. That is mainly due to our  reliance on brown coal to create electricity. We have a lot to change, but happily, there are signs that change is happening. The Happy Planet report tells of incidences such as a community in Scotland sharing ownership of a new windfarm with developers, a ‘Big Lunch’ being arranged on streets across Britain to bring neighbours together, a community in a council estate in Luton partnering up with tea-growers in Southern India to ensure trade that is even fairer than fair trade. Things are happening. As Gandhi famously said, we must be the change we want to see in the world.

Jesus said the kingdom of God is among you. Through Jesus, the kingdom is invading history, and the good news is that all are invited to be a part of it. Heaven on earth will only happen when the resurrected Jesus returns to put the world to rights. But in the meantime, we have the absolute privilege of laying the building blocks. That is why everything we do matters. Every act of kindness, every act of justice. It all matters because when we do it in the name of Jesus, it has cosmic and eternal implications. As Ross Langmead sings,

“the kingdom is coming, a kingdom of peace. Beat swords into ploughs for fighting will cease. Justice will prosper, love will be king. Peacemakers will be able to sing that this is God’s earth and it has been worth all the pain.”

The Happy Planet report is a huge step in showing us how our current way of living is not of the kingdom, but it also shows some of the things we can do to help fulfil Jesus’ wish that the kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

Our framing story

July 5, 2009 /

Brian McLaren, in his book Everything Must Change, talks about our framing story – the ultimate story we tell ourselves about how the world works. For example, if our framing story tells us that the purpose of life is to have as much stuff as possible and to have the greatest pleasure possible in our short lives, then we will have little reason to manage our consumption. Our framing story determines how we live. Call it our worldview if you like.

framePostmodernism says there is no framing story. What is right for you may not be right for me. Truth is relative. The problem with that ideology is that, as the global village becomes ever smaller and we all realise how much our lives are interlinked, what is right for me also becomes right for you. Take climate change as an example. Climate change is a challenge to postmodernism because more and more people are realising that, if we are to ultimately survive as a species, we have no choice but to have a framing story that says we have to manage our resources better and look after the planet. A philosophy of ‘what is right for you may not be right for me’ just won’t cut it in the real world of climate change. In my post on our addiction to growth I said the following:

“As long as the world remains fixated on the idea that we must grow our economies, we will inevitably fall into the same trap, and probably worse than we are in now.

In the mid-1980s, our planet passed a tipping point. It was then that we started going into debt in terms of the available resources that we have to survive. It was then that we started to consume more than we could reproduce. So while we remain addicted to economic growth, we continue the slide into debt. Our way of living is unsustainable.”

Truth can no longer be relative in a world where we have the choice of continuing our current way of life or making serious changes that will save the lives of untold millions. We can no longer hide behind the warm and fuzzy – but ultimately fatal – idea that there are no universal standards to live by.

Everything on this planet is interlinked. That is the beauty of how God made it. It all works together. David Suzuki, the Canadian environmentalist, describes how, if all of humanity disappeared off the face of the earth, then the rest of life would benefit enormously. The forests would gradually grow back, and relative stability would return to the ecosystems that control global temperature and the atmosphere. The fish in the oceans would recover and most endangered species would slowly come back. On the other hand, for example, if all species of ants disappeared, the results would be close to catastrophic. There would be major extinctions of other species and probably partial collapse of some ecosystems. The functions of the creatures living in the air we breathe, and beneath our feet, all work together to keep us alive. We need to, like our indigenous brothers and sisters did for 40,000 years, pay respect to the land we live on.

Our framing story needs to be one in which we all work together to bring in the kingdom of God – a kingdom of love, of justice, and of beautiful butterflies fluttering majestically over summer flowers. A kingdom where love finally reigns and where all of God’s children, in the words of Martin Luther King, will be able to shout ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’.

Meaning and wellbeing in the rat race

June 28, 2009 /

As I waited at the bus stop one morning last week, watching both school kids and adults waiting to go to their places of education or work to spend the day, I was once again struck by the thought of meaning in life.

silhouette_business_peopleThe kids were waiting there to go to school to work out what they want to do with their lives, what career path they want to follow. Then there were the adults who had gone through it all years before. It was the expressionless or just plain unhappy looks on the faces of the adults – who used to be just like the school kids next to them – that hit me. They seemed to convey the thoughts of millions of workers across the western world – a wish that they didn’t have to spend another day at this job, that if only they could win the lotto and ‘life could be a dream’ as one recent ad put it.

As I saw this scene played out before me, as it is every day of the working week, I wondered again – is this all there is? Is all those kids have to hope for just about getting their qualifications, landing a job, maybe having a family, living 80 or 90 years and then dying? Is that it? Are they destined to spend the next 50 years just going to work every day and making money? Where is the meaning? Where is the purpose?

I believe there has to be something more. Life is more than the accumulation of possessions and wealth, which we lose when we eventually kick the bucket anyway. I remember a pastor of mine telling me years ago of a funeral she conducted for a friend. A close relative of the friend looked at the body in the open coffin, reflected on the person’s life, and made the strong point that “there has to be something more”. It couldn’t have just ended with the death of her body. Something seemed to be telling her that people are made for more than this. Soon I hope to be able to purchase a new book by Dr. Stephen Ilardi called The Depression Cure. This work looks at the massive increase in depression in the western world in the last 100 years from, not just a cognitive-behavioral point of view, but also from an anthropological angle.

Fortunately this message is slowly getting through in even the business pages of some media. The Age last week ran an article reminding us that the measure of GDP is just one way to measure a society’s wellbeing. Paul Jelfs, the author of the article, explained how the Australian Bureau of Statistics has a number of other indicators, including the Measure of Australia’s Progress (MAP) and the Generic Social Survey. And many readers will probably be aware of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness indicator. Interestingly, according to American Public Media, since “Bhutan glimpsed the rest of the world seven years ago with the arrival of TV and the Internet…happiness [has become] an increasingly rare commodity”. Yet again I am reminded of the relevance of Luke 12:13-21 and the other old words of Jesus – what shall it profit you if you gain the whole world but lose your very self in the process?

More greed and more loneliness…and more brilliance from Leunig

May 26, 2009 /

A prophetic article from the brilliant Michael Leunig on the insanity of our obsession with economic growth. Leunig is one of those rare individuals who has the ability to speak truth into a culture, to go straight to the heart of a matter and speak it like it is. Following a previous post of mine on our addiction to growth, Leunig tells the story of a childhood friend of his working in Papua New Guinea whose hosts in PNG were fascinated and pained by our way of life and how it lacked any semblance of community. The quote which haunted her when she explained that her family home had separate rooms with private bedroom for each of her daughters, was when they responded “”How sad for your children. How sad for your family. Everyone lost from each other in such a big house with so many walls.”

‘The lonely crowd’ is a term friends of mine sometimes use to explain the loss of community and the feeling of lostness and aloneness despite living in a city of millions of people. To the ‘primitive’ people of PNG with their apparent superstitions and strange rituals, our lostness was bewildering. Leunig then goes on to explain our own superstitions and rituals. The question is then, who are the ‘primitive’ ones? He makes points which seem so obvious but blind us in our desperate search for more and better. His points, which are so pertinent in today’s climate, are:

“Yet surely an economy, as well as our personal lives, are doomed to malfunction if greed and its subsidiary behaviours and consequences are not factored in and collectively acknowledged as a central scientific reality. Just as we all have a heart, we have natural greed, and unacknowledged is uncontrolled. For economics to bypass it would be like the aviation industry refusing to acknowledge the fact of gravity or the Catholic Church refusing to accept that the Earth is not the centre of the universe.

We are asked to believe in eternal economic growth (upon which we have become dependent) when we know in our hearts and minds that such growth will destroy the Earth. This is worse than any cargo cult. It is a massive, absurd, depressing conflict.

So when the economy has a “downturn” we might think to look further and wider than new regulations or the replacing of cogs and washers and wheels. Underlying the financial dysfunction is the possibility of a conflicted, dispirited human culture that has consumed so flagrantly and ruthlessly that it has grown sick and ashamed of itself, to the point where it has lost its meaning and vitality: a society sitting exhausted and faithless in its own poisonous bathwater, regurgitating its worn-out gestures, stuck in its jaded, reactive modes, and generally incapable of sufficient originality, courage, innocence or honesty to make a healthy life.”

We have much to learn from our brothers in sisters in poorer parts of the world. What St Paul said many years ago still seems to hold true today, that the things of this world are foolishness in the eyes of God.

Fighting the plague of consumer Christianity

April 23, 2009 /

A growing number of people are disturbed by the values exhibited by the contemporary church. Worship has become entertainment, the church has become a shopping mall, and God has become a consumable product.

divine_commodity1The above quote is from Skye Jethani on his new book, The Divine Commodity. In the last year or so, more and more Christians have been expressing their concerns about the rabid onslaught of consumer Christianity – the idea that if you come to God everything will be great and you will be blessed and prosper.

I have been in churches – as I’m sure you have too – where ‘worship’ is definitely entertainment. The band has started playing a song, I’m ready to sing, and next minute there are all these dancers on the stage swinging streamers around their heads and stepping around each other in beautifully choreographed harmony. I wasn’t sure whether I should sing or watch. It definitely wasn’t worship for me.

Books like The Divine Commodity however represent a sign of hope. I have already written a review of Mark Sayers’ The Trouble with Paris. Just in the last week I have also come across another book called Enough! by Will Samson. This book looks at the question, “What would it be like to be formed by communities consumed by God and God’s vision for the world?” Smatterings of N.T. Wright and his oft-quoted question, “What would the world look like if God was running the show?” This book seems a lot like The Trouble with Paris, in that it

include[s] cultural, sociological and theological analysis of the dilemmas of consumption and contrasts them with the writer’s vision of God’s call to abundant life in Christ. In the second part, Samson offers detailed, practical ideas on how believers can make lifestyle changes aimed at embracing wholeness in connecting belief and practice as the people of God.

enough!Isn’t it refreshing that many Christians seem to have had enough of the heresy of health, wealth and happiness that a cultural Christianity has foisted upon us, from those of us in the rich west to the poor in Africa? In the latter case, lives have been ruined by the false hope of a Christianity that promises much materially but then fails to deliver, leaving the victim blaming him/herself for a lack of faith.

I wonder if this push to rid the church of such false teaching is a result, at least in part, of the global economic meltdown. Good can come out of anything, and maybe the good in this is that many Christians are waking up to the unreality of a Gospel that never promises the good life, but does promise life in all its fullness – a fullness that one can only have when fully sold out to Jesus. John Smith said years ago that if there is anything we can be obsessed about in life, it is Jesus. Plead with God to show you more of Jesus, to have your life reflect his, that you be sent as he was sent, to the poor, the vulnerable, the ostracised and the victim. This is the life that is true life, the abundant life in all its beautiful fullness.

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