Eugene Peterson on state-of-the-art consumer churches

This post is from the defunct blog "Dying Church"

Eugene Peterson from The Jesus Way:

The local congregation is the primary place for dealing with the particulars and people we live with. As created and sustained by the Holy Spirit, it is insistently local and personal. Unfortunately, the more popular American church strategies in respect to congregation are not friendly to the local and personal. The American way with its penchant for catchy slogans and stirring visions denigrates the local, and its programmatic ways of dealing with people erode the person, replacing intimacies with functions...

The great American innovation in congregation is to turn it into a consumer enterprise...If we have a nation of consumers, obviously the quickest and most effective way to get them into our congregations is to identify what they want and offer it to them...We are the world's champion consumers, so why shouldn't we have state-of-the-art consumer churches?

Give the conditions prevailing in our culture, this is the best and most effective way that has ever been devised for gathering large and prosperous congregations. Americans lead the world in showing how to do it. There is only one thing wrong: this is not the way in which God brings us into conformity with the life of Jesus and sets us on the way of Jesus' salvation...The cultivation of consumer spirituality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, 'deny yourself' congregation. A consumer church is an antichrist church.

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