4 out of 5
by
Alan
from
Portland, OR | Mar 28, 2008
The title is a double-entendre, referring to 2 phenomena at war in the church: communion and consumerism.
The word communion is rooted in the word community, and that helps get at the essence of the ritual: the entire church comes together to remember Jesus Christ's death on the cross by consuming bread and wine together in a common meal. In order for the ritual to mean anything, all participants must prepare by reconciling their differences with one another. Thus communion goes beyond a mere ritual to the task of healing and binding together broken people and communities. True religion, as Metzger points out, is by definition the act of "re-binding."
Unfortunately, evangelical churches have often failed the mission to re-bind. Why? Because they've attempted to grow themselves by catering to consumer preferences. The result is a worship space where a pop band or coffee bar might take precedence over the communion table as the center of Christian fellowship. As churches fine-tune their music, programs, and refreshments to meet consumer tastes, the diversity of their congregations drops, whether by accident or design. "The most segregated hour" stays that way, and the Body of Christ fails to bring reconciliation to communities broken along race and class lines.
Metzger finishes with a vision for reordering the Church's mission, drawing heavily on John Perkins. Perkins defines the church's task as the "three R's" of Relocation, Reconciliation, and Redistribution. Needless to say, these three vital steps toward community healing are a must for churches, but only after achieving the very first step of simply reaching out to all races and classes of people.
This book has opened my eyes to the significance of race and class in the church. Metzger shows how these divisions, and apathy in the evangelical church, are rooted in the history of evangelical belief, and that the solution is rooted in a reexamination of Christian theology.
4 out of 5
by
Josh
from
The United States | Feb 2, 2008
metzger addresses how consumerism as a pervasive framework in modern Western culture has affected race & class issues in the church of contemporary America. while slavery and the jim crow laws may be no more, the cultural modes of consumer preference, upward mobility, and the "homogeneous unit" principle have infiltrated the church's self-understanding and ideology, resulting in church growth strategies that market towards niche groups, seek to assist the American in their upward pursuit of life, liberty and personal happiness, and result in homogeneous units segregated from other walks of life (often along lines that include strong demarcations between race and class).
he proposes theological alternatives to frame the church's practice towards prophetic living in a consumer society. my favorite chapters are 3, 4 and 5, where he addresses, respectively, the following dimensions of the gospel in this regard: the structural (Christ's victory re-orders the cosmos in a way that has immense implications for challenging the powers of market / economic forces), affective (Christ's victory re-orders the affections, passions and values of the human heart from the narcissistic towards God / other / creation in sacrificial "downward mobility"), and ecclesial (Christ's victory establishes a body united to him through his eucharistic presence that is marked by heterogeneity [all races / classes] with a particular and prophetic way of life).
the call is thus for intentionality in the church to allow Christ's consuming presence to consume the race & class divisions we have allowed to take such a strong hold in the church.
some highlights for me were the recognition that for many of us today the word "community" is extremely popular but is often a code-word for what is more "affinity"--ie. hanging out with people who think, dress, and share the same cultural ideologies as us. what would it look like for the church body to reflect the homeless dude & the CEO, the soccer mom & the punk rocker, the business exec and the cleaning lady in his office, the migrant worker and the stock analyst? i find this an inspiring vision and am convicted that i'm often more interested in pursuing affinity (developing relationship with people like me) than pursuing truly biblical diverse community. this was an inspiring call to be consumed by Christ towards the latter.
i also found inspiring the challenge to homogeneity and upward mobility, as in the comparison of Sartre's hell in "No Exit" where three self-consumed individuals are locked in a room together with no escape with eyelids that cannot close to the following scene in many of our churches "... Christians gather there, with eyes wide open, some of them hanging out around the coffee bar to check out the possibilities for future dates, perhaps in hopes of building cozy Christian homes. Some others plan evangelistic ski trips to Vail, with the only aim of showing their non-Christian homogeneous friends that Christians can have fun, too." (p.98) I'm convicted how much I adapt the Christian gospel to the pursuit of my own comfort rather than a willingness to lay down my life for the world around me.
I also found refreshing the reminder of the "theology" behind the metanarrative of the economic structure today, as in the following quote from Bigelow he builds upon (p.43): "Economics, as channeled by its popular avatars in media and politics, is the cosmology and the theodicy of our contemporary culture. More than religion itself, more than literature, more than cable television, it is economics that offers the dominant creation narrative of our society, depicting the relation of each of us to the universe we inhabit, the relation of human beings to God. And the story it tells is a marvelous one. In it an enormous multitude of strangers, all individuals, all striving alone, are nevertheless all bound together in a beautiful and natural pattern of existence: the market..." Metzger's ensuing discussion is an example of the refreshing call to question the underlying "theologies" and narratives of what we tend to culturally promote as secular or even neutral realities.
okay, there's more but this has gotten long, i should probably shut up now...