Consumerism (continued)

This consumerist attractional model is what Hirsch says characterizes Christendom. Success is measured by numerical growth, better programs, and an increase in resources – all of which require an attractional model. The success of outreach services and evangelism programs are measured by how many new folks attend church.

The strategies of the attractional model are based on conventional church growth principles and include incorporating the following steps:
1. Expand the building for growth and redesign.
2. Ensure excellent preaching that is relevant.

3. Develop an inspiring worship service with a good band and positive leaders.

4. Provide good parking.

5. Ensure excellent programs for kids.

6. Develop cell groups rooted in a Christian educational model.

7. Make sure next week is better than last week.

However this type of strategy only entrenches the Christendom model and creates a church that has very little active participation of its members (usually only 10-20%). Church growth principles have not really contributed to a growth in the percentage of Christians or in the effective discipleship of Christians. It has however contributed to the consumer mentality of Christendom and has resulted in the ongoing “trading of sheep.”

Even a church that focuses on missions or on social action is not breaking out of the mold. Giving to outreach projects and going on missions trips can function as outlets that allow us to appease our conscience and still remain a safe distance from the poor, lost or needy of our world. It is much more comfortable to depersonalize the poor or the lost so we don’t feel responsible for the catastrophic human failure that results in third world poverty or someone sleeping on the street while people have spare bedrooms in their homes. Demonizing those we disagree with (liberals, abortionists, gays, Catholics, Moslems, etc.), or going on protest marches, or writing letters, also allows us to remain a safe distance from our “enemies.” Jesus is not seeking distant acts of charity, or social action, or moral indignation but concrete acts of love (Matthew 25).

Shane Claiborne provides this example. “The social work model of church produces clients and providers … merely facilitating the exchange of goods and services, putting plenty of professionals in the middle to guarantee that the rich do not have to face the poor and power doesn’t shift. Rich and poor are kept in separate worlds and inequality is carefully managed … The Church becomes a distribution point where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. Both go away satisfied … but no one leaves transformed. No radical new community is formed”

We have developed programs to do everything in the church. Many programs can be helpful and useful because people do care and understand why they are doing what they do. But many times programs are implemented to provide a service – not to develop community, nor to act incarnationally. The examples are manifold. In ministries to the poor it is often quite obvious when people come just to provide a service or are doing something to ease their consciences. Inside the church we have ushers and greeters to welcome and seat people; visitors groups instead of personal interaction; advertising instead of personal invitation. We have discipleship courses instead of one-on-one mentoring. We do fellowship lunches instead of extending hospitality in our homes.

Each of these things not only serves a consumerist mentality, but it also removes much of the responsibility from individual Christians to develop relationships and engender community. Instead of connecting with someone that God brings across your path and walking with them for as long as it takes to see them mature in Christ, we give the task to the church “machine” and we become cogs in the machine – each doing our part (greeter, parking lot attendant, teacher, group helper, kitchen clean-up crew, etc., etc.) All of these tasks keep us busy with church work, and meetings with ourselves, but leave us with little time to interact with our neighbors, whom we are commanded to love.

“Believers are a dime a dozen … but lovers are hard to come by – people who are building deep genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about. So we need to put a face on war, on Moslems, on poverty, on the difficult situations of the world.”

Matt Casper, an atheist commissioned by Pastor Jim Henderson to visit churches to provide an outsider’s view of what we do in church, said this about the machine that church has become. If someone who had never attended church went to visit a number of churches … “if that’s where they started, they would have to conclude that Jesus’ number one priority was that Christians invest the very best of their energy and their money into putting on a huge church service – a killer show as it were … is this what Jesus told you guys to do?” Casper simply could not imagine Jesus telling his followers that the most important thing they should be doing is holding church services. And yet this was the only logical conclusion he was able to come to based upon what he observed.

Consumerism

I wanted to post a bit more on consumerism in the church and how serious a challenge it is to faith in the Western world but didn't really get to it. Scot McNight at Jesus Creed is posting on a recent book by Paul Metzger called Consuming Jesus.

One of the solutions Metzger proposes to the rampant consumerism practiced by Christians is a theology that begins with personal conversion that works itself out into genuine reconciliation with others and downwardly mobile ethic. But Scot McKnight's contention (counter to Metzger) is: "Either evangelicalism is filled, big-time filled, with unconverted folks or this strategy is just words. The fact is that many, if not most, of evangelicals — or those who claim personal conversion — are not that involved in the anticonsumerist and antiracist and anticlassist agenda Metzger advocates." Consumerism is so deeply entrenched in our culture - including our Christian culture - that we don't even know we are so deeply infected by it.

So because I didn't get to all that I wanted to say about consumerism I will quote from Emerging Churches by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger (which I also included in my paper and which I have also quoted previously on this blog).

Consumerism
Gibbs and Bolger present an insightful critique of the consumerist mentality of many churches. Their comments, though lengthy, are worth quoting. “Today, typically, individuals come to spirituality as shoppers. They consume spiritual experiences. They pursue the next experience that promises to take them to a higher spiritual plane and yield greater growth. Churches that adopt a marketing approach treat their visitors as customers, numbers and potential converts instead of simply as people. A culture of self-interested exchange permeates the life of consumer-oriented churches, where the "customer's" financial support is solicited in exchange for spiritual services rendered. The underlying assumption is that customers are never satisfied and are liable to take their business elsewhere. Satisfaction is an elusive target, constantly moving and taking on new forms.

“Much of marketing practice borders on manipulation by creating needs. Until one sees or experiences a product one often does not "need" it. The creation and the presentation of a product create the need. Marketing is not neutral; it fosters human desire as much as it satiates it. Churchgoers associate the consumer church's products with "need satisfaction." There are areas of an individual's life that are ambiguous and insecure, to which the church seeks to respond by creating and offering products that will address those gaps. Consumer churches present a relationship with Jesus as the answer to widespread feelings of angst. Thus Jesus is turned into a product that satisfies needs. The problem is that Jesus won't satisfy individual needs, for the gospel is primarily about God's agenda, not ours. For true satisfaction to take place, needs must be reformed and transformed to correspond with the gospel.



“When Jesus is presented as a product and ceases to satisfy, as all products cease to satisfy at some point, one must then move on to another spiritual expression. By marketing Jesus, therefore, the consumer church actually makes the pain worse, for now even God (from a visitor's perception) cannot help. Instead of challenging the logic of the economic system, which the kingdom does wonderfully, the consumer church blesses the economic rules and creates transitory, surface-level Christians in the process.

“Consumerism both pacifies and disempowers people and robs them of their individuality and creative potential. Consumerism destroys community by discouraging active participation. Unbridled consumerism also leads to greed, acquisitiveness, and wastefulness as people become dissatisfied and bored with their possessions and strive for the latest and the biggest (or the smallest, in the case of gadgets).”

My comments again - the next post will continue on this theme.

Everyman’s Religious Varnish

The last post on fruit, leads into the next section (and a couple of posts) of the DMin paper, the malaise of the Constantinian church and the scourge of rampant consumerism in the church and what some people are doing about it.


Frost and Hirsch describe the revitalization of the church as a diaspora – being thrust out of our safe environments like a mother robin pushes her fledglings out of the nest. Frost uses the term “exiles” to mean Christians who find themselves caught in that dangerous wilderness between contemporary secular Western culture and an old-fashioned church culture of respectability and conservatism.

Douglas John Hall describes it this way: “If we have the courage to give up our defense of the old facades which have nothing or very little behind them; if we cease to maintain, in public, the pretense of a universal Christendom; if we stop straining every nerve to get everybody baptized … if by letting go, we visibly relieve Christianity of the burdensome impression that it accepts responsibility for everything that goes on under this Christian topdressing, the impression that Christianity is a sort of Everyman’s Religious Varnish, a folk-religion (at the same level as that of folk-costumes) – then we can be free for real missionary adventure and apostolic self-confidence.”

Shane Claiborne says “I gave up Christianity in order to follow Jesus.” He then quotes Soren Kierkegaard: ”The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly … Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close.”

If committed Christians are leaving the institutional church (yes, even Evangelical and Charismatic churches) to pursue radical obedience to Jesus, perhaps the very existence of this institutional church needs to be challenged. The philosophical aspects of church as we know it are expressed in tangible structures. The structural characteristics of Christendom thinking include:
1. dedicated, sacral buildings that are central to the notion and experience of church so that church becomes a visible, tangible place to be sacred,
2. leadership and much of the hands-on ministry provided by institutionally ordained clergy, mostly gifted as pastors/teachers/administrators – a professional guild,
3. a hierarchical/top-down organizational structure, that often excludes “undesirables” (women, youth, poor, new people, those not of the dominant ethnic group, etc.),
4. the institutionalization and formalization of sacraments into a symbolic event administered by the dominant leadership culture,
5. the perception that church is central (or should be) to society and culture,
6. an attractional (come to the church building) and extractional (extract people out of the host culture and into the church culture) missional mode.

To put it into context, this list describes a church that invests much of its time and energy into conducting a weekly “worship service” and a number of other programs that include music and teaching, designed to appeal to a small percentage of society. These events are planned and conducted by about ten percent of the people (predominantly male paid professional staff members) and presented to the other ninety percent of the people (who are predominantly female). The majority (90%) of the financial resources are committed to the upkeep of the building and the hiring of staff.

Given the poverty in the world, and that of our own neighborhoods, spending millions on church buildings begins to become a justice issue. The main mode of growth of this type of church is marketing (by members and often through various forms of media) that invites people to come to the church building to consume what the paid professionals are presenting. This description may sound harsh or crass. In reality, some are able do this type of church with excellence producing positive results (in terms of some conversion growth, and some discipleship). But the fact remains that the vast majority of resources of this type of church is consumed to sustain itself and it typically doesn’t transform communities , produce new converts or truly disciple Christians.

Results and Fruit

I had a great conversation with a friend today about how we go about measuring things in this Christian sub-culture we inhabit. We tend to be very fuzzy about what we think success is unless it involves attendance or finances. How do we really measure Christian growth or church health?

When we say "I really enjoyed that church service" what does that really mean? Does it mean that it made me feel good? Or that it was better than last week? Or maybe it's that they sang all my favorite songs? Or that I liked the stories the preacher told? It may be more well thought out and involve a new insight or a sense of connecting with God or maybe an answer to prayer.

Those things might all be true but what is the lasting result of a good service? I believe we need to measure these things by what type of action or result it produces. Spiritual things are notoriously hard to define - and not just for Christians. People sometimes say to me (in the context of arranging a funeral service) "I'm not really a Christian but I'm very spiritual." When I ask them how they would like me to help them express their spirituality, they usually have no answer or give me a "Christian" answer (like read Psalm 23 or say the "Lord's Prayer"). Most people feel that they are spiritual but don't really know what it means to live out that spirituality. They don't really know what a spiritual person is supposed to look like.

We sometimes don't know what a Christian is supposed to look like either. Sure we have some traditional descriptions that made sense when holiness was measured by what you didn't do (smoke, dance, drink or go to movies). But when we describe a mature follower of Jesus, a disciple - what does he or she really look like?

When Jesus talked about results He sometimes used the word "fruit" like in Luke 6.

43"No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. 44Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers. 45The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.

But in this passage Jesus is kind of vague in helping us determine what good fruit is. It is certainly the fruit of the Spirit mentioned in Galatians 6:22 and the fruit of people coming into the kingdom, and I suppose the fruit of righteousness and right living (holiness). John the Baptist actually gives some very specific examples of what fruit looks like in a few specific examples earlier in Luke (Luke 3).

8Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father.' For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. 9The axe is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire."
10 "What should we do then?" the crowd asked.
11 John answered, "The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same."
12 Tax collectors also came to be baptized. "Teacher," they asked, "what should we do?"
13 "Don't collect any more than you are required to," he told them.
14 Then some soldiers asked him, "And what should we do?" He replied, "Don't extort money and don't accuse people falsely—be content with your pay."

John the Baptist gives some tangible actions that result from a spiritual activity (repentance). Those actions fall into the category of Justice - helping those less fortunate than yourself, being fair and equitable, being content with what you have. Those are good fruits? Apparently so.

My point is not that acting justly is the only fruit (or tangible result) of hearing and obedience. Rather it is that we should be seeing and being able to measure the result of our life in Christ - as a result of attending 50+ "worship services" a year, after reading through the Bible in a year. What is the fruit and where is the fruit? Disciples bear fruit.

John 15
8. This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.
16. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name.

P.S. This actually is challenging me to do a deeper study into what it means to bear fruit and the nature of fruit in the Bible. There may be more to come.

Responding to Our Post-Christendom Reality

Sometimes looking at our culture and our church with open eyes can be discouraging. At times as I was writing my paper I wondered where we go from here. Was I the only one thinking about the consequences of a culture that had for all intents and purposes moved beyond (or at least away from) its Christian heritage. It was encouraging to find other pastors and authors and bloggers who were asking some of the same questions and struggling with how to make their faith in Jesus vital and live their lives in such a way as to have a message to our culture. The DMin paper continues ...


Responding in a Post-Christendom Era
The responses to the demise of Christendom are varied. Rodney Clapp lists three main categories of response. The first is Relinquishment (or sentimental capitulation) where the church capitulates to the culture and has nothing significant to offer it but sentimentally hangs on to Christian practice and language anyways. This response is more common in mainline denominations. Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong typifies this response by saying: “The only churches that grow today are those that do not, in fact, understand the issues and can therefore traffic in certainty … The churches that do attempt to interact with the emerging world are … almost by definition, fuzzy, imprecise and relatively unappealing. They might claim to be honest but for the most part they have no real message.” The honesty of his response is mildly refreshing but the depth of hopelessness reflected in his comments reveals the pervasiveness of the despondency experienced by many Christians in the face of the relentless advance of postmodernism.

The second response is Retrenchment (or getting back to Constantinianism). Trying to turn the nation back into a Christian nation and trying to regain the power and influence it once had as the sponsor of Western civilization, characterizes this response. Postmodernity is then seen as an attack against the Church and must be confronted at every level.

This seems to be how much of the Evangelical world is responding – particularly those commanding a strong media influence (Pat Robertson, James Dobson, John MacArthur, etc.). In many circles, this “religious right” has become the face of Evangelicalism and the position is politicized (Republican versus Democrat), and narrowly focused on only a few key issues (abortion, sexual morality, and family values).

The other expression of retrenchment is the tendency of some to try and escape the evils of society by creating a “safe” Christian environment isolated from the world (complete with Christian schools, clubs, books, movies, restaurants and amusement parks). Christians have their own celebrities, media networks and “yellow pages” and God is the means to become happy, “healthy, wealthy and wise.” They do not question the dominant culture: they embody it and baptize it. This “consumerism” is a serious challenge to discipleship.

A further expression of retrenchment is one of blissful ignorance where people really are unaware of the shifts within our culture and the challenges it presents to Christianity. They are unwilling or unable to engage their culture actively and just want to be a good Christian living a holy lifestyle. They don’t know what Postmodernity is and wonder what all the fuss is about. All that is needed is more prayer, deeper study of Scripture and a greater reliance on the Holy Spirit. This may be the most positive expression of retrenchment because there is an innocence (or is it ignorance?) and simplicity to this way of life and some may be called to this. They may be the Mennonites of the twenty-first century.

However, other Christians are sensing the deep change in culture. Many feel a vague dissatisfaction (for some a deep and profound dis-ease) with their Christian experience and the way church is done. Some are leaving the church because they are unable to see the connection between institutionalized faith and reality. Clapp puts it this way: “Christians feel useless because the church feels useless. And the church feels useless because it keeps on trying to perform Constantinian duties in a world that is no longer Constantinian. So the grace is this: Christians feel useless because they are no longer useful for the wrong thing, namely, serving as chaplains in a sponsorial religion.”

Others are leaving the church because they see life outside the church as the way forward and that they feel being part of a typical Evangelical congregation is actually harmful to their spiritual growth. These are those who (in George Barna's words) “wish to be faithful followers of the radical Jesus but no longer find themselves able to fit into the bland, limp, unsavory straitjacket of a church that seems to be yearning to return to the days when “everyone” used to attend church and “Christian family values” reigned.”

George Barna calls them revolutionary Christians. Revolutionaries are typical of a “new breed of disciples of Jesus Christ. They are not willing to play religious games and aren't interested in being part of a religious community that is not intentionally and aggressively advancing God's Kingdom. They are people who want more of God in their lives and they are doing whatever it takes to get it.” Clapp calls this third response Radicalization (to be radical followers of the Way – of Jesus).

My Week

This was a bit of a hectic couple of weeks. I attended a conference. My in-laws moved. I had a birthday. So I thought I'd post a couple of pictures. The first one is of my in-laws new house. The second is our house church.

Everything

A friend sent an email asking if I'd seen this video. It was posted on GodTube, a Christianized version of Youtube. I hadn't heard of Godtube before but I think there is a place for it - as long as it doesn't remove Christians from interacting missionally with their culture.

I often ignore the "have you seen this" links or quickly browse through them to see if anything catches my interest. I thought I'd briefly check this one out and watch the first bit. I was surprised by its impact. I was questioning it with my intellect but at the same time it snuck up on me and struck deep at the heart level. It reminded me of my time with street kids. It's not short (almost six minutes long) but check it out.



The name of the song is Everything. It's by a band called Lifehouse and you can find it on their album, No Name Face - I've posted the lyrics. (Rather vague and not really a major theological treatise but goes well with the skit.)

Everything
Find Me Here
Speak To Me
I want to feel you
I need to hear you
You are the light
That's leading me
To the place where I find peace again.

You are the strength, that keeps me walking.
You are the hope, that keeps me trusting.
You are the light to my soul.
You are my purpose...you're everything.

How can I stand here with you and not be moved by you?
Would you tell me how could it be any better than this?

You calm the storms, and you give me rest.
You hold me in your hands, you won't let me fall.
You steal my heart, and you take my breath away.
Would you take me in? Take me deeper now?

Cause you're all I want, You're all I need
You're everything,everything

The Church Still Stuck in Christendom

Ready for another quote from my DMin paper? Here it is.

This demise of Christendom is hardly a new phenomenon. “Taken as a sociopolitical reality, Christendom has been in decline for the last 250 years, so much so that contemporary Western culture has been called by many historians (secular and Christian) as the post-Christendom culture. Society, at least in its overtly non-Christian manifestation is “over” Christendom. But this is not the case within the Western Church itself. Christendom, as a paradigm of understanding, as a metanarrative, still exercises an overweening influence on our existing theological, missiological and ecclesiological understandings in church circles … Constantine, it seems, is still the emperor of our imaginations.”

As the demise of Christendom continues and its influence in the world wanes, many in the church still continue to oppose any change in the status quo, as though buttressing the system will somehow make it more relevant to our society. It is not just that we need a new style of ministry to attract a new generation. What the Church needs is that revolutionary new/old (ancient-future?) approach that fundamentally reforms its Christendom structures. Trying to make the Christendom system work in our current milieu is like trying to fly to the moon with a twin engine Cessna. It’s a good airplane but it won’t get us where we want to go. We need a flying machine of a different order.

So to attack secularism and pluralism as contrary to “the Christian values this country was built on,” seems to miss the point. In fact, Clapp maintains that the church is actually responsible for secularism because it has sponsored the system, it privatizes faith (Jesus as my personal Savior) and trivializes vocation (only full-time workers are “in the ministry”) and then calls on its members to be model citizens while it allows the state to determine the laws and the norms for what it means to be a good citizen. To quote Albert Einstein: “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Not the End of Christianity

Just to clarify, when I suggest that Christendom is at the point of expiring, I don't mean that Christianity is dead - not at all! Christianity is actually the one religion that is quite fluid and amazingly able to adapt to changing circumstances. When I reflect on some of the conversations I have with some of my Jewish friends or neighbours I realize that they are quite proud of the heritage of their religion that has not changed very much for three millennia. They look back to Moses or David or the Maccabees confident that the way they celebrated their religion was much the same as it is celebrated now. The clothing, the food, the scrolls, the layout of the buildings can all be traced back centuries if not millennia. It is a religion that resists culture and maintains its traditions in spite of cultural shifts.

I think that Christianity is for the most part very fastidious about maintaining its Scripture but has tended to adapt many other things that at various times seemed more or less important. The list of changes I mentioned in the last post is an illustration of how significantly the focus of Christianity has changed over the centuries. The changes at times are so significant that the true faith becomes almost unrecognizable at time - hence the need for renewal movements and reformations to bring the church back to the few core basic of the faith. A call back to the centrality of Scripture, to the Lordship and divinity of Jesus Christ, to simple and humble worship, and to an authentic love for one another.

There really are very few clear guidelines about what church should look like. However the people who make up the church should always look and act like Jesus. If we are not doing that then someone needs to call us to account. Do I hear a voice calling out in the wilderness?

3-5Thunder in the desert! "Prepare for God's arrival!
Make the road straight and smooth, a highway fit for our God.
Fill in the valleys, level off the hills,
Smooth out the ruts, clear out the rocks.
Then God's bright glory will shine and everyone will see it.
Yes. Just as God has said." Isaiah 40:3-5

That has always been a guideline for me. I really believe that pastors should be doing what Jesus did - walk around, gather disciples, feed the poor, heal the sick, tell stories and make pompous religious people mad. It may mean you get crucified for it but what a way to go.

The Demise of Christendom

Here is another post of some of the writing I have done in conjunction with my DMin course. This section is on the characteristics of the Christendom system that has been set up in Western culture - which most of the culture is now rejecting. I trust it is interesting reading.


It is because there is such a significant shift in our culture that the church has become the least likely option for those seeking an “artistic, politically subversive, activist community of mystical faith" - and the rejection of middle-class American values in some ways is also a rejection of Christianity, the sponsor of those values. The mode of operation of much the Church is still rooted in an assumption of “culture Protestantism” – in other words, still rooted in the Christendom paradigm.

Christendom is the term used (in many instances negatively) to describe the church-influenced culture that has dominated European society for the last Millennium. Its roots go back to the Edict of Milan in CE 313, where Christianity moved from being a marginalized, subversive and persecuted movement, secretly meeting in houses and catacombs, to being the favored religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity became the metanarrative of Western culture blurring the lines between the church and the state to the point where, in some countries, the king (or queen) was, and still is, the head of the church.

The head of state was often the one who determined what type of church there would be, or if there even was to be a church. You became a Christian by birth rather than choice, and to be a good citizen was to be a good Christian (and vice versa). Rodney Clapp refers to this as “Constantinianism” and a good summary of his thesis is this quote: “The question is no longer ”How can we survive and remain faithful Christians under Caesar?” but now becomes “How can we adjust the church’s expectations so that Caesar can consider himself a faithful Christian?””

Stuart Murray provides an excellent summary of the major shifts that occurred in the centuries after Constantine imposed Christian rule on the Roman Empire.

• The adoption of Christianity as the official religion of a city, state or empire
• The movement of the church from the margins of society to its center
• The creation and progressive development of a Christian culture of civilization
• The assumption that all citizens (except for the Jews) were Christian by birth
• The development of the corpus Chirstianum, where there was no freedom of religion and where political power was regarded as divinely authenticated
• Infant baptism as the symbol of obligatory incorporation into this Christian society
• Sunday as an official day of rest and obligatory church attendance, with penalties for noncompliance
• The definition of orthodoxy as the common belief shared by all which was determined by powerful church leaders supported by the state
• The imposition of a supposedly Christian morality on the entire society (although normally Old Testament moral standards were applied)
• A hierarchical ecclesiastical system, based on a diocesan and parish arrangement which was analogous to the state hierarchy and was buttressed by state support
• The construction of massive and ornate church buildings and the formation of huge congregations
• A generic distinction between clergy and laity, and the relegation of the laity to a largely passive role
• The increased wealth of the church and the imposition of obligatory tithes to fund this system
• The defense of Christianity by legal sanctions to restrain heresy immorality and schism
• The division of the globe into Christendom or heathendom and the waging of war in the name of Christ and the church
• The use of political and military force to impose the Christian faith
• The use of the Old Testament rather than the New to support and justify many of these changes

Even though many of these changes may have been well intentioned, we see how the Christendom model has created a system that makes it difficult to produce radical followers of Jesus. To be very simplistic, the Christendom goal in North America has been to establish a nation that is lead by a godly person and that has laws reflecting the Old Testament moral code, with morality legislated so that the behavior of the citizens is controlled. The spiritual leaders sponsor the civil leaders (or elect one of their own) so that the nation will create an environment favorable to their purposes. The model citizens of this society are outwardly obedient and outwardly observant – inner conviction was a matter of personal choice.

Those who are unable to comply are marginalized to the fringes of society. It devalues the powerless. It produces Pharisees and outcasts. It sounds very much like the system in which we find ourselves in North America. It sounds like the system from which Jesus came to deliver us. Tony Campolo says it this way: “If we were to set out to establish a religion in polar opposition to the beatitudes Jesus taught, it would look strikingly similar to the pop Christianity that has taken over the airwaves of North America.”