When i wrote this article What can we learn from the Mike Guglielmucci scandal? I had no idea of just how many people would read the post. I was watching the stats rise by the second as thousands of people checked it out, obviously reeling from the whole sorry episode. As I spoke to people in the days after the event and checked out what others were writing on the net. I noticed that a lot of people who were understandably angry and disillusioned. However there were also a huge amount of young people, who’s response went something like this.
“Hey we all sin”
“Can’t wait to see him back and speaking and leading again”
“All sins are equal”
“He is gonna come back bigger and better from this”
I noticed that how people were responding to this very much illuminated a trend that I see all across the church as I interact with young adults. That is a confusion over the idea of sin and consequences. Let me explain.
Christianity in contrast to many other religions believes in the concept of grace. That is the radical idea that no one is beyond the love of God. That you can be a mafia hitman and if you commit your life to Christ your sins will be forgiven. This is the Christian idea of salvation. But I am noticing that this idea is getting a slightly bit skewed. Many have failed to realise that whilst grace allows us to be free from sin, grace does not give us a free pass from consequences.
I remember having dinner with Gerard Kelly when he was out here in Melbourne. He used the idea of playstation to illustrate how many young people today grow up without an idea of consequences. He said that when you grow up with playstation, you grow up with the idea of the reset button. If you mess things up or if your character dies, all you have to do is press reset and you can start again from the beggining. This is true also of the education system that many young people have grown up with today, which encourages the building of self esteem over the old pass/fail model, students are protected from the consequences in a way that they have never been before. The age of peerants has also seen many helicopter parents swoop in and save their kids from the consequences of their actions. Thus it is no wonder that many struggle to understand that whilst grace covers a multitude of sins, it does not press the reset button on the consequences of our choices.
Thus whilst all sins are forgivable in the eyes of God, not all consequences are equal when it comes to our earthly lives. Staring at the girl crossing at the lights in the mini-skirt may be a sin but it does not carry the same consequences as killing a pedestrian because you were drink driving. God will forgive you for both sins if you bring them to him, but the consequences of the drink driving offence will probably mean that the rest of your life here on earth will be a living nightmare as it will be for the family and loved ones of the person that you killed. It is possible to be forgiven and right with God yet to have trashed your life here on earth. This is one of the paradoxes of having free will.
Here we can learn much from scripture. Abraham was given a promise by God that out of him would come a nation that would inhabit the land that God would give them. In essence the Hebrews had been given a gift of grace. They had been picked by God to be his ambassadors, his chosen ones. However they still had to be shaped, moulded and had to learn the consequences of their actions. Isidore Epstein writes of the early Hebrews in Judaism: a Historical Presentation
…their slave mind still possessed them. Largely undisciplined and spiritually enervated…Much less could they rise to the loftiness of their mission for the fulfilment of which the land was promised to them as an inheritance.
When I read this quote I can’t but help think that we have much in common with the early Hebrews. We who are believers may be saved; yet to be truly disciples, to live the kingdom life on earth, we must understand that much of biblical teaching is written to shape our life and show us the way out of poor choices and their disastrous consequences. When we just have the concept of grace minus an understanding of consequences, we create a generation of immature spiritual consumers. This is a key concept to understand for young adults and those leading them.
Do you remember the episode of Seinfeld where Elaine goes to the bizzaro world diner and becomes friends with the bizarro world Jerry, Kramer and George. Well Ladies and Gentlemen I just found the bizarro world version of my book, this blog, and a lot of what I teach.
To summarize. This guy (an advertising exec) is encouraging young advertising execs to not feel guilty about selling people stuff because they are engaged in a noble cause. The more people buy the less spiritual they will become and thus the world will become a better place. No I am not making this up. Sounds like this guy has been reading Richard Dawkins on the subway. Hows this for a quote?
Our civilization — while a long way from perfect — is safer, fairer, healthier and more prosperous than any other in history in good part because we have subordinated the search for spiritual purity in favor of material well-being…Material well-being seems to be the only antidote to the vicious, violent, cold-blooded history of the “great human spirit”, so often praised by misguided poets and pandering politicians…Ad men and women: stop apologizing for promoting materialism. People planning a trip to the mall are far less likely to do mischief than people planning a trip to heaven.”
Enter bizarro world here (cheers to Kevin Thow for the link )
Some of you who have heard me speak about my book the Trouble with Paris will know that the book came out of me asking the question “What is a theology of Paris Hilton?”. I realised that Paris Hilton captured so much public attention because she was a cultural symbol, an icon of our age. But what was she was symbolizing? The answer is a number of things. But I want to focus on one of them. Paris Hilton is a symbol of the almost religious power of luxury in our culture.
Ever since civilization began, symbols of affluence and power have been sought by humans to make powerful statements about ourselves. But the last ten years of our history has seen luxury and luxury items elevated to a level never seen before in human history. This effect has been seen across the globe in democracies, capitalist economies, communist regimes, and Islamic Republics. What we have seen in the ten years of economic boom is if you like the democratization of of luxury. I am not saying that everyone has access to luxury goods but that rather the world, the rich, the middle class and the poor, have been exposed to the luxury bug and thus there has been a flattening of the desire for luxury goods.
I think of the missionary I spoke to who works and lives in a slum in South East Asia who tells me about the desire for luxury goods (albeit bootlegged) amongst his neighbours, I think of the African Pastor that I spoke to recently after one of my talks, who was asking me how can he protect his congregation from the corrupting desires of materialism, I think of the prayer letter I read this morning by a missionary secretly working in a communist state, who asked that supporters pray for the young people of the country that he is serving in who are growing up with no moral framework because their parents are too busy working to earn money for consumer goodies.
So what is behind this global desire for Luxury? I was recently listening to a forum on the BBC world service and one of the contributors noted that Luxury today operates as a kind of religion. Luxury items are items or services that have been overlayed with deep sociological, cultural and even mythological meanings. For example a signed copy of Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan will carry far more symbolic meaning that a signed copy of an album by the Huey Lewis and the News cover band that play Tuesday nights at your local sports bar. Why? Because our culture has deemed that Bob Dylan carries a tremendous amount of cultural currency. Therefore an album by him particularly with his signature, carries far more mythic symbolism. Thus you could say that a luxury item is a totemic symbol. It carries an almost magic quality. By adding a symbol such as the Louis Vuitton logo to a product all of a sudden its status changes. Fashion designers operate as modern day priests or alchemists turning ordinary objects into totemic luxury items.
There are some similarities between the cult of luxury and the mystery cults that existed in the Roman Empire during the time of the early church. The mystery cults were exclusive communities that required a knowledge of the secret rituals and beliefs to join. Naturally they became exclusive and sought after groups to join, they not only gave inititates access to a world of esoteric beliefs, they also created a social differentiation between believers and the rest of society. Thus the purchaser of luxury goods, hopes to join an elite group, they hope to prove their social power. The knowledge of what luxury goods to buy, becomes a kind of secret knowledge, that will differentiate to buyer from the rest of his or her peers. By possessing a luxury item we hope that it will act as a charm, that it will inform others of our standing in the world, and thus our passage through life will be hopefully be smooth and successful. We wish through purchasing and owning luxury items the same thing as the builders of the Tower of Babel wished for, we wish to make a name for ourselves without having to rely on God.
But now many are in a sense of panic; the economic gods of the luxury pantheon seem angry and depressed. They mystery cult of luxury has taken a hit. The luxury items that many have used as signifiers in our culture of symbols, may now be out of reach for many as we lurch towards global recession. Hopefully, many who have been caught up in the cult of luxury will now begin to ask the deeper questions and begin to look beyond the material.
In this episode, I meander along discussing spiritual expereinces amongst the unchurched, why we often feel dislocated in our lives, connecting with God’s pathos, evangelism as explaining the human condition, our inner longings, and just how far you can see from my office. Download or listen here
So, to wrap up this way-too-long-for-Web-attention-spans essay, here is the good news in our very real and sobering predicament: Easy is not going to be easy any longer. Our culture’s addiction to ease is unsustainable. A core Christian conviction—one that informed much of the best of Western civilization—is that the good life is not easy. It requires discipline. It invites us into pain. It makes of us ascetics—not people who shun all earthly joys, but people who choose to limit our appetite for ease so that we might actually know true joy.
From a great article by Andy Crouch on the current economic crisis check it out in full here
I remember a few years ago watching a James Bond flick and thinking to myself that if 007 was a real life person that he would be a lonely guy. That despite living the male fantasy life of adventure, gadgets, fast cars and beautiful women, that Bond would surely at times find his life lacking the deeper, ongoing relationships that all humans crave. However it would be hard to test such a theory because Bond does not exist. However there is another semi mythical character who lives the ‘male fantasy life’ who does exist, the creator of Playboy magazine Hugh Hefner.
By creating Playboy magazine, Hugh Hefner not only mainstreamed pornography, but managed to change how millions thought about sex and relationships. Like all great pop culture icons, Hefner seemed to live the dream, embodying the fantasy of a new unattached male, who lived a life of unfettered hedonism and radical individualism.
Many social commentators now speak of the man drought, that is the lack of men who are willing to commit to long term relationships, who instead prefer casual sex with women, who prefer pornography to commitment and who look to their male friends for companionship instead of looking for a spouse. This kind of life was pioneered by Hefner. Strangely Playboy now makes more money selling accessories to young women than it does selling magazines to men, Playboy has also deeply influenced how young women see themselves. Just look around at the amount of girls that you see with playboy stickers on their cars. Ariel Levy in her book Female Chauvanist Pigs illustrates the way that Playboy has influenced what she calls raunch culture amongst young women. Playboy seems to embody on so many levels the hyperreality that has come to dominate Western Culture over the last half century.
However the tale of Hefner’s life seems to have a twist in its last act. The man who lives surrounded by naked models at the playboy mansion, who has spent most of his life partying with the rich and famous, who until recently has been in an open relationship with his three playboy bunny girlfriends, who has made millions of dollars, seem to be craving intimacy and relationship as he approaches his final days on this mortal coil. The irony is that Hefner seems to be living his last days as a broken and lonely man. In the last few weeks, two of Hefner’s girfriends have left him for younger more attractive men.
It is interesting that instead of being a life that men envy, Hefner’s life could end up turning into a cautionary tale. A reminder that the hyperreal dream cannot not deliver us what we desperately need as humans. That nothing that our culture can offer us can help us to deal with the fact that we age, and that we die. Check out the full story here
For those interested in checking out how in contrast to the hyperreal view, the biblical imagination creates a more liberating and ultimately satisfying view of sexuality check out this article that has been one of the most popular posts on my blog The Unadulterated Pleasure of Limits
Contemporary culture has changed how we view time. This in turn affects our expectations from life. In this episode I discuss how MTV changed how we all view time, the symbolism behind Lot’s Wife turning to salt, and how to create a small media circus at your local mall. Listen if you have time. Listen or Download here You can download or subscribe through itunes here
That is if you consider not being able to go on overseas holidays, spend big at the maill, and buy cars you cannot afford being poor. Still interesting article anyway check it out here
Well today is blog action day. A concerted global effort on the part of bloggers to get the topic of Global Poverty on the agenda. It is quite an inspiring thought that blog action day will reach approximately 8 million readers, an amazing achievement for non-manstream media.
So in thinking about blog action day I wanted to speak about the topic of tourism. Being a speaker and preacher I have spoken in front of people for over 15 years. I have only had people interupt me twice in anger. Why was I interrupted? Did I preach some kind of heresy? Was I shouted down by angry Christians or militant atheists? What sacred cow did I dare to question? Our modern addiction to travel. People in the audience could not contain their anger, How dare I question our right to travel? It reminded me of a moment I saw on the news when former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was questioned by a journalist at a environmental launch. Blair was encouraging people to cut down on their carbon emissions. The journalist asked Blair if that meant that he was going to now holiday in Britain rather than fly halfway around the world several times a year to holiday. Was he going to tell the British people to quit their addiction to cheap overseas flights and holidays. Blair got very perturbed and replied that it was not practical to ask the British people to cut back on their overseas holidays. This was a revealing response. It seems that overseas holidaying once a luxury only for the super wealthy is now seen as a right of every citizen of the West.
The American writer and social activist Henry David Thoreau was once asked if he did anything over his summer vacation. He replied that he explored half the world and only got as far as half way across his backyard. He was making the point that just before our eyes is a whole world to explore. However such a view does not cut it today. We look down on the familiar and the mundane of our everyday lives. We are told that we must regularily escape our day to day existence through travel and tourism.
Our culture has attached an almost religious importance upon the act of travelling. In a secular culture that struggles with a meaning vacuum; we are told that we can find a meaning and purpose in acquiring a portfolio of experiences. Thus the 21st century hipster will set of to traverse the globe in order to ’sample’ the exotic cultures of the world, to taste the food, see the sights, and ‘rub shoulders’ with the locals. In contrast to the consumption of material goods, travel and the acquisition of experiences is as seen as a noble alternative. In his book the Age of Access Jeremy Rifkin shows how we are becoming a culture of experience consumers rather than material consumers. For example If you tell you friends that you are going to travel through south east Asia for a year ( a trip that will cost you $8000) your friends will smile, get jealous, tell you how it will be an amazing experience and how much you will grow. If you turn up to a dinner party in a new suit and tell your friends that you spent $8000 on it, your friends will worry that you are coming down with a case of influenza. This is because in a consumer society it seems less consumerist if we are consuming experiences rather than material things.
However there is a cost to travelling beyond the massive carbon footprint made by jet travel. Tourism can become a form of ‘culture consumption’. The economies of whole third world nations have become dependant on foreign tourism. On one hand this can be a positive thing in that it can move a country out of extreme poverty, but it can also mean that a country can stagnate in its development, and thus stay poor.
When you travel to an exotic place you want to see the local culture, thus there is a pressure from locals to deliver that culture, thus they create a kind of hyperreal version of their culture, that is more about the Western tourists tastes and fantasies rather than the reality of that culture. The local culture then becomes a consumer item to be bought and sold rather than genuinely connected with. Thus abusive economic practices continue that keep locals impoverished. Check out this provocative video from the guys at world vision.
In this episode I discuss the effect that Choice Anxiety is having on all of us. I also discuss the choice between Romantic Comedies and staring and the headrest in front of you on longhaul flights. I also discuss how washing powder makes you freak out in the supermarket isle, why the idea of marriage is so scary to so many and other such wonders of the modern age. Of course the discussion leads to the place of biblical faith in an age of Choice anxiety. Download or listen here. You can download or subscribe through itunes here
“We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new. “
This is from a fantastic article by Douglas Haddow on Contemporary Youth Culture. Check the whole thing out here
I now have a new author website. Props to Matt Deutscher for the design and for taking the photos of me during the book launch without me noticing. Check it out here MarkSayersthinks
Can you use facebook without creating a hyperreal version of yourself? To what extent can you let your facebook page define your identity? Does facebook create a new age of radical accountability or a new arena for showing off? How does facebook affect our faith? All this and more in today’s podcast. (If you listen really carefully you might hear a safeway truck backing up and dropping off a shipment of ham in the loading bay behind my office.) Click here to listen or download
“Unrestrained capitalism like the kind we’re experiencing right now with all its greed will in the end devour itself,” German Finance Minister Steinbrück
Well it had to happen. After the bling of the noughties we are having the beginning of the bang as the bubble bursts. To put it in layman’s terms the global economy has been acting like a teenage girl who had stolen her parents credit card and was buying everything in sight at the mall; it was fun for a while but it was always going to end in tears.
I recently saw a story about the opening of a new luxury department store in Egypt, it was catering for the growing hunger amongst young middle easterners for consumer goodies. On sale were handbags for $20,000US, what was the store called? Ego. Sums it all up really. The social landscape of the last ten years has been marked by conspicuous consumption; it has been ten years of Paris Hilton, iPods, Hummers, extreme makeovers, Jay Z and Louis Vuitton handbags. Greed became the norm, we got so used to it that we barely noticed that everyone’s ride had been pimped. A culture of insanity set in as no one was happy anymore with being healthy and free, we all wanted the lifesyles of the rich and infamous.
If any one image captures the zietgiest of the last ten years, it was the video of looters in New Orleans stealing Plasma Screen TV’s in a flooded city with no power. We had become a culture that was living beyond it’s means, our expectations of life had become inflated. We lived lives that were the most affluent and comfortable in human history, yet we wanted more. In the Trouble With Paris I write,
“in the hyperreality world, happiness is always just around the corner yet always out of reach. This sense of incompleteness powers the global economy. Happiness is always postponed; fulfillment and meaning can never be found. In many ways, it is like trying to reach the horizon; you can always see it and you can walk toward it, but it stays away at the same distance. Hyperreality is a “I will be happy when . . .” existence. The space following the “when” will be different for everyone and will constantly change. But the principle of postponing happiness is the same for everyone who operates in the hyperreal world. So no matter how affluent or comfortable our lives become, we will always be looking over our shoulder at something better.”
And thus this Hyperreality, this desire to live beyond our means, this disconnection from reality seems to have gripped that mysterious group of traders who seem to be at the wheel of the global economy. David Brooks writes in the New York times,
“These traders live in a high-tech version of Plato’s cave. They do not see reality directly. Instead they see the shadow of reality as it dances around in numbers on their computer screens.”
But now reality has crashed the hyperreal party. We are seeing the consequences of our culture’s credit card lifestyle. So now I pray, because this will hurt a lot of people, most of all it will hurt those at the bottom of the economic pile. Yet I also have hope, hope that sanity will return, that people will begin to question our culture’s hyperreal paper tigers. That people will see that there is another unseen reality that exists in our world. A reality that does not revolve around stocks, currencies and computer screens. A reality that is marked by shalom, righteousness and justice. A reality that is breaking out in our world, that we will see if we just can take our eyes off the dollar signs.
I spend a bit of time with different ministries, churches and denominations consulting. One of the organisations that I have spent some time with is the Salvation Army Southern Territory Youth Department. Like most denominations the Salvation Army have lost a ton of young people over the last twenty years. However what is fascinating is what the Salvation Army is doing about it. While many organisations simply try and copy what is working elsewhere, the Salvation Army is encouraging its young people to rediscover the founding ethos and values of the early Salvation Army. Instead of copying other denominations and churches, the Salvo’s are asking what is different about their movement, they are seeking to fufill their unique calling as a denomination. One Salvo leader told me that they would rather have a small committed core than a large half committed group. They are choosing discipleship over mere attendance.
The Salvo’s have an incredibly inspiring history, in the first fifty years of its existence, the Salvo’s were an incredibly innovative movement. The first multi-media event in the world was created by the Salvo’s here in Melbourne. For more of the Salvo’s interesting early stories check out Dave Collinson’s great book Insane: The Stories Of Crazy Salvos Who Changed The World.
I have a new podcast up, it is from a talk that I did at a Salvation Army conference for Youth Workers this week in a Tudor motel that was not built in the Tudor period but actually was constructed in the 1990’s. Check it out here. Also my podcast is now available in iTunes if you are so inclined.
My article from this blog entitled 5 Things We Got Wrong in the Emerging Missional Church has been reprinted in the Emerging Church info e-zine/mag along with a number of other articles questioning whether the emerging thing is dead/dying/wilting. Check it all out here
Like 200,000 other Melbournians I visited the art Deco exhibition at the NGV. Art Deco was an early 20th century movement which influenced art, industrial and interior design, architecture, film and fashion. In many ways Deco was a decorative reaction to the pure functionalism of modernism.
The exhibition at the NGV was not so much an exploration of Art Deco in of itself but also of the macro themes of progressive culture in the 20′ & 30’s namely,
The Emergence of Urban Culture
A growing interest in non-European culture and art
The cultural fusion brought about by increased international migration and travel
The growth of consumer and commerciall culture
A fascination and optimism in the potential of technology
An increased emphasis on surface and style
The growing influence of mass media on public opinion
The influence of non-traditional and thus controversial music styles such as Jazz
The almost semi-religious devotion to the celebrity and glamour culture of Hollywood
A changing view of sexuality and gender eg flapper culture
mmmm sound familiar? It is interesting to note that many of the issues that we ascribe to our epoch in history have a much longer history than we think. Often in church circles there is a belief that society was chugging along quite nicely until sometime in the 60’s to 80’s then culture changed and postmodernity turned up and now we have to evolve in order to to respond to a changed cultural landscape. That we are in the midst of a hyper paced cultural change, this is true to an extent; however the more I read history the more I believe that we have been in a slow change that has been evolving over several centuries and the church has been struggling to deal and respond to this change for just as long. There has been much written about how the church can respond to postmodernism, but as we study history we realize that the church is still reeling and struggling to respond to modernism.
My friend Neal Taylor pointed me to this story. I literally felt sick as I read. The UK Daily Mail reports
A jeering crowd taunted a suicidal teenager as he threatened to jump from the top of a city-centre car park. n a shocking indictment of modern Britain, youths who gathered in the street below yelled at 17-year-old…to kill himself over the course of three hours. One allegedly shouted: ‘How far can you bounce?’
The A-level student eventually plunged 60ft to his death after police negotiators tried in vain to talk him down. In a final sickening act, some of those responsible for the abuse outside the Westfield shopping centre in Derby rushed from behind the police cordon to take pictures of the teenager’s body on their mobile phones. Yesterday police branded the mob’s behaviour at the scene of Saturday’s tragedy a ’shocking reflection on society’. Read full story Here
As Neal said this reminds one of the last days of the Roman Empire as the crowd bayed for blood at the circus. Stories like this one, on one level depress me beyond belief; but they also steel my resolve and my commitment to speak the life giving words of God into a culture which desperately needs salvation at every level.
)
