Tim Samoff // Weblog (old)

October 31, 2003

Andy Crouch: The Post-Consumer Church (Jacob's Well, Kansas City, MO, October 26, 2003)

After receiving a barrage of requests (two Blog comments and one e-mail — whew!) I have decided to post the notes that I took at our church’s recent “conference” in which Andy Crouch discussed “the church in the midst of a consumer culture.” I understand that anyone’s notes, without any sort of context, can be difficult to comprehend and I will make no apologies for the fact that my notes are being presented out of context. This being said, I think that the concept being presented is is fairly self-explanatory — of course, I know why I wrote certain things in my PalmPilot and you don’t. In any case, have a good time reading and share your comments (especially if you need me to explain anything in greater detail).

A few final notes before reading:

• The majority of the ideas represented here were imparted by Andy Crouch. Though, I reword them and interject my own thoughts, the credit and copyright will remain Mr. Crouch’s.
  
My PalmPilot does not allow for the optimal formatting of text. Because of this, you will see the emphasis on certain words by capitalization rather than italics, bold-face, or underlining and book titles encased in quotes.
The hyper-links that are attached to the book references were added upon posting to this Weblog.
If you find any mispellings, typos, erroneous references, counterfactual statements, or the like, please contact me so that I can fix them.

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ANDY CROUCH (October 26, 2003) THE POST-CONSUMER CHURCH: THE CHURCH IN THE MIDST OF A CONSUMER CULTURE
– CULTURE is what human beings MAKE of the world (in both senses of the word “make” — i.e., what we make with our hands and what we make with our minds).
*Based on: – How the world “is.” – How the world ought to “be.” – What does this “making” make “possible”? – What does this “making” make “impossible”?
– CULTURE creates opportunities for new culture — culture never stops. *Because of this, human beings are constantly processing their current culture and, out of it, creating new culture. CULTURE is powerful! It can make things feel possible and impossible — completely unreliant on any “natural” laws.
Even though someone has an idea, it’s not CULTURE until the idea is executed publicly — there’s no such thing as private culture.
CONSUMER CULTURE
– What is a consumer? 1. Discovering that you have a lot of options (life begins w/ very few options — as a baby — which quickly increase w/ age). 2. Knowing what we like/want (what are our prefences?). 3. Someone who attends to VERY small matters (the minutiae of differences in product and in ourselves). 4. Having established “trust” in an “assistant” — or brand (once we have trust, we no longer need to “check it out” again, before purchasing). 5. We attend to very large things (humanity, faith, well-being, time, trust — the universal transcendant aspects of life). 6. Knowing the diffence between involvement & unknown outcome (risk and mystery) and buying something that will unquestionably provide us w/ excellence (no risk at and face-value).
*PURCHASE (satisfaction that starts high and drops after time) VS. PRACTICES (satisfaction that starts low and raises over time). *As consumers, we find our satisfaction in purchases rather than practices.
– See, “The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness,” by, Virginia Postrel.

Posted at 10:10 am

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Comments (3):
Interesting notes on the message. I was wondering how this can apply to our christian beliefs with the Bible’s call to, “Being in the world and not of it.” Sometimes Christian beliefs cannot fit into society’s culture. It is like fitting a round peg into a square hole sometimes. We need to be careful not to compromise or “water down” the call to obedience and sacrifice called to in the Bible” “We are a chosen generation a royal preisthood and holy nation to show forth the praises of Him.” However, one can use the culture when it is not opposite of the Biblical teaching to reach the lost. Many youth leaders and young people today are doing this and God’s kingdom and the Gospel is able to go forth. God bless those who have answered God’s call for the Gospel to be preached to all nations and all people.

Doug Hensley () - February 11, 2004 at 1:25 pm

It’s June 1, 2004… Just noticed that not all of my notes are here. They used to be. Where’d they go? I’ll try to append to what’s here tonight.

Arg.

timsamoff () (URL) - June 01, 2004 at 11:09 am

Wow, it’s been well over a year and I still haven’t appended the notes. Yikes. I’ll see if I still have them around somewhere. Plus, the picture of Andy is missing — ahhh!

timsamoff () (URL) - November 15, 2005 at 08:59 am

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