A Reaction to John Drane's, The McDonaldization of the Church:
Consumer
Culture and the Church’s Future. 2001 (215 pages).
“If our faith was to make a
difference to our nation…we could not continue to do the same things as our
forebears had done before us” so we need to “find new ways of being church”—the
church needs to “reinvent itself'. “the spread
of Western influence during the last five hundred years or so has had a
profound impact on the way today’s world has developed”. The sociological “bending” culture
has is something that hadn’t clicked for me like it had before. In other words,
culture has a developmental impact on people—it trains people to be the way
they are.
So what are we to make of this developmental influence culture has on the people who are
coming into the church? Is the church infected by it? Is it ready for and proactive about it? Drane picks apart the “values
that have shaped our culture” by aligning them with the "McDonaldization" of
society ...and the church. Drane gives several conceptualized
sets for communicating what is going on around us and does a great job in explaining the great fault of “formalized rationality”. But a question I am
left with is the founding of the maxim—Does
it hold true that the more mechanized we become the more dehumanizing also?
“In a world
where we have lost touch with our emotions…many find the only way left open for
them to express grief for their [loss]…is by either acting out their anger or
covering it up…” (19). Drane goes on to connect risk and extreme sports to this
“acting out and covering up” tactics people use to cope—people are inventing
ways to "keep themselves amused.”
We would do well in understanding McDonaldization and its process more than
just seeing how it is played out in the church today. If
the church is just another reflection of the mechanized world people find
themselves droned into, then it stands to reason that
coming to church is just more of the same--where people are a statistic, a means to an end. One can see why people do not want to attend a
church like that. We need to look at ways to De-McDonadlize our church experiences. It seems we have a secular church in a spiritual world today.