What is the danger of religious consumerism?

Question 9111.

Religious consumerism is the habit of approaching church the way we approach every other service we buy, and it has crept into congregations so quietly that most of us do not notice we are doing it. We assess the music, the preaching, the children’s work, the coffee and the car park, and we choose accordingly. Nobody teaches this. It is simply the air we breathe in a culture built on choice.

I am not writing this to scold anyone for wanting good preaching or a safe place for their children. Those are reasonable desires. The problem is what happens when the whole relationship is organised around what we receive, and when the question who will serve me quietly replaces the question whom shall I serve.

What religious consumerism looks like in practice

It looks like a family visiting six churches in a year and describing each one entirely in terms of what it offered them. It looks like attendance that rises and falls with the preaching rota. It looks like a member who leaves because the style changed, without ever having raised it with anyone, and who is genuinely surprised that the church noticed their absence.

It also looks like church leaders competing for the same believers. Religious consumerism has a supply side as well as a demand side, and congregations that market themselves against neighbouring churches are feeding the very appetite that will eventually take their people elsewhere. Once a church has taught its members to shop, it cannot complain when they do.

The subtlest form is internal. A member who stays for twenty years can still relate to the congregation as a consumer, evaluating everything and committing to nothing. Longevity is not the same as belonging.

The danger to spiritual growth

Growth in the Christian life happens largely through commitment that outlasts our feelings. We learn patience by staying with difficult people. We learn humility by submitting to teaching we did not choose. We learn love by serving those who cannot repay us. Religious consumerism removes every one of those pressures, because the consumer can always leave.

Consider what the New Testament assumes. Bear with one another. Forgive one another. Confess your sins to one another. Restore the one caught in a transgression. Not one of those commands can be obeyed by someone who moves on when the relationship becomes costly, and none of them appears on any church’s list of attractions.

There is a further loss. A believer who is never uncomfortable is never stretched, and a diet chosen entirely by appetite will be unbalanced. Paul told the Ephesian elders that he did not shrink from declaring the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27), which includes the parts nobody would have selected.

The danger to the church

A congregation shaped by religious consumerism becomes fragile. Its committed core carries an ever heavier load while the majority attend when it suits, and the leadership begins making decisions with one eye on who might leave. Ministry choices stop being driven by what a church should do and start being driven by what will retain people.

It also distorts what a church is. The New Testament describes a body in which every part supplies something, so that the body builds itself up in love (Ephesians 4:16). A body cannot function if most of its members are spectators. The image collapses entirely under a consumer arrangement, and so does the reality it describes.

And it makes discipline nearly impossible. Where membership is a preference rather than a commitment, correction is simply an invitation to leave, and everyone knows it. That is one reason so many churches have quietly stopped exercising discipline at all. See whether church membership is biblical.

The danger to the gospel itself

This is the deepest problem. The gospel announces that we were bought with a price and are not our own. Religious consumerism assumes precisely the opposite: that we are autonomous selves assembling a life from available options, and that God is one of the options. A church that accommodates that assumption in order to attract people has undermined the message it exists to proclaim.

Jesus never recruited on consumer terms. He told a crowd to count the cost, and He watched people walk away rather than soften what He had said (John 6:66-67). That episode should be read regularly by anyone tempted to design a church around what people say they want.

The biblical alternative

The alternative is covenant rather than contract. A contract says I will give you this if you give me that. A covenant says I am committing myself to you, and I intend to keep that commitment when it stops being convenient. That is what membership in a local church means, and it is what religious consumerism cannot survive.

Practically, that means joining a congregation and staying. It means serving in something unglamorous. It means listening to preaching that does not always suit your temperament and being formed by it anyway. It means raising concerns with the people concerned rather than voting with your feet.

It also means choosing a church for the right reasons in the first place. Ask whether the word is faithfully preached, the ordinances rightly administered, and discipline genuinely exercised. Those three questions will settle the matter far better than any comparison of facilities. Related reading: what makes a church biblical and when it is right to leave a church.

A word of balance

Not every departure is religious consumerism. A believer who leaves a church that has abandoned the gospel, tolerated abuse, or refused correction is doing something necessary. So is a family that moves house. So is someone whose conscience genuinely cannot rest under a particular practice. I do not want anyone reading this to feel trapped by an article.

Nor is it consumerism to want good teaching. Wanting to be fed is not a vice. The line falls between seeking what is faithful and seeking what is comfortable, and most of us know in our own hearts which of the two is actually driving us.

How churches accidentally teach it

Very few leaders set out to produce religious consumerism, and yet a great deal of ordinary church practice trains people in it. Language matters here. When we describe a service as an experience, advertise a series as unmissable, or measure a Sunday by how many attended, we are using the vocabulary of the market and people hear it.

Programme design does the same. A church with a separate provision for every age, interest and stage of life can unintentionally teach that the congregation exists to meet needs rather than to be a body in which people serve one another. The programmes may be excellent; the lesson learned alongside them is the problem.

The remedy is not to strip everything back out of principle. It is to name the danger openly and to keep asking what a given activity is training people to expect from the church.

What commitment looks like in practice

It looks like joining. It looks like being present when nothing interesting is happening. It looks like giving regularly to a work you will not control. It looks like serving in something you are not especially gifted for because it needs doing, and doing it for years.

It also looks like staying through a disappointment. Almost every believer eventually discovers something about their church that they did not expect and do not like. Religious consumerism says that this is the moment to look elsewhere. The New Testament says it is the moment to bear with one another in love (Ephesians 4:2-3).

None of this is dramatic and none of it will be noticed. That is rather the point. The believers who hold congregations together are almost always people whose commitment nobody has ever had to think about.

Where the appetite comes from

It is worth asking why the consumer instinct has such a grip on us, because scolding rarely changes a habit whose roots are unexamined. We live in a culture that has taught us from childhood that identity is assembled through choices, and church attendance becomes one more expression of who we have decided to be.

There is also a genuine spiritual hunger underneath much of it. People move because they are not being fed, and sometimes they are quite right. The tragedy of religious consumerism is that it takes a legitimate hunger and trains it to expect satisfaction from a service rather than from a shared life.

The gospel answers the underlying issue rather than the surface behaviour. If my identity is settled by what Jesus has done rather than by what I assemble, then I no longer need a church that expresses me. I need one that will form me, and those are very different requirements.

So, now what?

Ask yourself an honest question this week. If your church asked something of you that you did not enjoy, would you still be there in a year? If the answer is no, you have a relationship with a service provider rather than with a body.

And if you lead a church, examine what you are teaching people to expect. Every advertisement, every welcome, every announcement is training your congregation either towards commitment or towards religious consumerism. Which one has your church been teaching, and what would it cost to change it?

You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

1 Corinthians 6:19-20, ESV