Against Hype

Brady Boyd is the senior pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  A recent news posting on The Christian Post website (here) features some of the content of a book that Boyd has recently published and is worth considering here.  Speaking as the pastor of a megachurch, he takes other megachurch pastors to task for being both hyper-active and the producers of mega amounts of hype.  In their tweets, for example, these pastors frequently claim that everything their church is doing is fantastic, exciting, and you better not miss it stuff.  Boyd sees a larger pattern here in which these pastors are conditioning their parishioners to be consumers of religion, to expect something in return for the time they invest in worship.  He is quoted as saying,"It would be easy to blame church congregations for the madness that has consumed our gatherings these days, except that from what I see from their pastors, we're conditioning them to behave this way. We hype and promote and position and tweet and inadvertently create pews full of consumers instead of devoted worshipers of God,"  These pastors are building their churches on the foundation of the latest marketing strategies, he claims, instead of true worship of God.  In the meantime, they are constantly on the go, something their churches encourage and applaud.

Boyd feels that churches need a different approach to pastoral ministry.  They need pastors who slow down, take time to read and reflect, spend time with their family, engage in contemplative exercises, and ground their ministries in scripture and providing spiritual guidance for the folks they serve.

In many ways, Boyd could just as well have been speaking about most mainline churches, large and small, when he complains of the consumer mentality many (most?) worshippers bring to church on Sunday morning.  We can't blame pastors alone, however, for creating this mentality.  It is the nature of our society, too.  The whole country is in a hurry, wants instant gratification, and values hyperactivity over contemplative quietude.  Our urban centers are worse about this than are folks in the countryside, but few of us escape it entirely.  Now, what to do about it is not quite as clear.  In a hyperactive culture, the church is going to be hyperactive too.  Most pastors are going to value going fast and doing things over slowing down and engaging in quiet time reflection, contemplation, and spiritual growth.  That being said, there is a place for Boyd's message and for working with congregations to be less focused in the busy-ness of church.

Regular readers of RPK might have noticed that I've been thinking thoughts like this for some time now.  See, for example, my recent posting entitled, "Finding a Balance."  The church, historically, has sometimes lived as a counter-culture, and I think it is time that it become so again in modern, hyperventilating, ruining our environment,  buy-buy-buy consumer society.   Amen.