Skip to main content

Secular Church in a Spiritual World


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.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

"Just Thinking About Jesus"

I was wondering today about how I could start meaningful, spiritual conversations with others whom I know are not Christians but perhaps once were. I wondered how I would come across if I was deep in thought and he or she asked me, "What are you so deep in thought about?" and I replied, "I was just thinking about Jesus." I wouldn't want it to be annoying, just bridging. I was reading over an article adapted from The Evangelism Study Bible, that explored responding to people who have had a bad experience with Christianity. I found their five reminders worth repeating and good for keeping in the back of your mind, once practiced in your "holy imagination" (aka, spiritual reflection). 1. Don't be defensive. Remembering that it isn't so much that you do not agree, but HOW you disagree that will stick in their minds when they walk away. Take into yourself their comments as if you were the one who did them wrong and then reflect it back to the...
Read more

Revelation's Whore as Today's Culture

  https://thehustle.co/originals/why-you-almost-never-see-a-clock-at-the-mall The word “whore” may have different definitions to some, but I want to use it as a woman who markets herself for the sole purpose of robbing men of their life for her own gain--whatever her “gain” is: monetary, lust, or otherwise. She is the reverse-consumer and profiteer at the same time, a vampiress, a luxurious drunk, functioning alcoholic. Her appeal is a marketing scheme based on not just years of study, but an exquisite composition of research and development where she is both scientist and evidence, psychologist and client--in an endless cycle and sinister feedback loop of trial and error, hypothesis and investigation, feeding and consuming. All the while tricking you into believing you are the main character. But it isn’t about you. You have entered her Nirvana constructed for you to “remain inside” her. Once her legs are wrapped around you, she is sure to suck your life away. And as titillati...
Read more

What if Metallica Came to YOUR Church?

A reaction to John Van Sloten's, The Day Metallica Came To Church: Searching For The Everywhere God in Everything ,  2010. This book caused me to rethink some of my foundational theologies, specifically Creation and the Fall. If God created us in His image and declared His creation as ‘very good’, what consequences did the sin of Adam and Eve have upon us? How deep does it go? I have some very strong thinking patterns that hold everything as either good or bad, God’s or Satan’s, black or white. This either/or (dualistic?) outlook doesn’t leave room for the mysterious. But what if all of these things were meant to lead me to something more? What if I always stopped short because I was led to believe that when I came to a certain point I had arrived—mission complete--stop here and move on to another subject? And what if that wasn't true? I was challenged by the thought of how God speaks to us outside of the Bible. I have believed that God speaks to me through many things (...
Read more

Family Time Videos