“When I have a terrible need of-shall I say the word-religion, then I go out and paint the stars.” -Vincent van Gogh

Not long ago I was attending a ministry conference at a very large church. The setting was impressive by any measure. The mammoth auditorium sat thousands in cushioned theater seats rising heavenward. Wherever I looked a dozen flat-panel displays crammed my field of vision with presenters flashing their high definition smiles. And the stage was alive; a mechanical beast to behold. It was moving fluidly, breathing smoke, and shooting lasers through its digital chameleon skin. The band members were spread across the platform as jagged teeth in the beast’s mouth, and the drummer was precariously suspended from the ceiling like a pagan offering. But even this spectacle could not hold me. In fact, with each passing minute I felt a growing need to escape.

I should disclose that sitting through an entire church service has always been difficult for me. As a child I would tell my mother I had to use the bathroom. Then I would slip out of the sanctuary to sit under the crabapple trees. That kind of behavior was excusable for a child, but I still do it, and now I’m a pastor. Sitting through a worship service is a basic requirement for ordination, but sometimes I still slip out-usually to sit under a tree or visit with the children in the nursery. I suppose I’m not setting a good example, but I don’t do it too often and I’m always mindful to get back in time to preach the sermon.

The man suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder; that might be your first assumption. But I don’t have ADD, but at least that would be a face-saving explanation for my behavior. It was something else that compelled me out of my theater seat and past the other worshippers attending the ministry conference. I left out the back entrance, walked through the mezzanine, and outside to a lonely balcony.It was dusk. The moon was low on the horizon and the first stars were appearing. With the beauty of creation unfurled before me, and the glitz of American Christianity behind me, I began to ponder. Is this what Jesus envisioned? Is this why he came, and suffered, and died? Is this why he conquered death and evil, so that we might congregate for multi-media worship extravaganzas in his name? On that balcony, taking the chilled air into my body and watching the stars appear, I met with God in silence-my questions filling the space between us.

Over a century ago another struggling Christian fled the church to find God in the stars. Vincent van Gogh is remembered for his volatile mental health, severing his ear and later taking his life. But the tortured artist also had a volatile relationship with Christianity, oscillating between devotion and rejection. At one time his fervor was so intense he became a missionary. Later he announced “That God of the clergymen, he is for me as dead as a doornail,” and called himself “no friend of present-day Christianity.” His paintings and letters show us a man wrestling to synthesize his faith with modern thought. But his struggle was primarily with the institutional church, not Christ. In his final years, as his mental illness became more severe, van Gogh reveals a profound devotion to Jesus while remaining disillusioned with the church. His most celebrated painting from this period, Starry Night, captures this sentiment.

The scene of a quiet hamlet beneath a churning sky of stars was composed from his imagination. For this reason Starry Night depicts the vistas of van Gogh’s soul more than the countryside surrounding Saint-Rémy. The deep indigo of the sky was used by Vincent to represent the infinite presence of God, and the heavenly bodies are yellow-van Gogh’s color for sacred love. The divine light of the stars is repeated in the village below, every home illuminated with the same yellow warmth. For Vincent, God’s loving presence in the heavens was no less real on the earth.

But there is one building in van Gogh’s imaginary village with no light, with no divine presence-the church. Its silent darkness speaks van Gogh’s judgment that the institutional church was full of “icy coldness.” Like many people today, van Gogh struggled to find God in the confines of institutional, programmatic religion. Instead, he found himself drawn outside the respectable piety of the church to commune with peasants and prostitutes. And his devotion to Christ was inspired by nature-the radiance of sunflowers, the knuckled contortion of olive trees, and the silent providence of the stars. Rather than visiting the church van Gogh said, “When I have a terrible need of-shall I say the word-religion, then I go out and paint the stars.” Were he alive today and attending the same ministry conference, I might have met him on the church balcony that night.

Like Vincent a century earlier, I fear the contemporary church is losing its ability to inspire. In a world churning with God’s wonders, designed to inspire our imaginations and draw our souls heavenward, the programmatic church is dark by comparison. A more recent painting by pop-artist Ron English captures the church’s condition today. A parody of van Gogh’s work, Starry Night Urban Sprawl replaces the original French village with the architecture of consumerism-fast food restaurants and Hollywood icons. The church steeple is crowned with McDonald’s golden arches and King Kong straddles the roof.

Unlike van Gogh’s Starry Night, in Ron English’s composition the church is not dark. Light diffuses through every window and door, but it is not the sacred yellow light of the stars above. Instead, the church repeats the electric white light of the franchised stores and restaurants around it. It reflects the values of the earth not the values of the heavens. This church is a corporation, its outreach is marketing, its worship is entertainment, and its god is a commodity. It is the church of Consumer Christianity.

Richard Halverson, former chaplain of the United States Senate, is said to have observed that:

In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centered on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise.

Van Gogh, English, and Halverson capture the question that drove me to that lonely church balcony. Has the contemporary church been so captivated by the images and methods of the consumer culture that it has forfeited its sacred vocation to be a counter-cultural agent of God’s kingdom in the world? And if it has, what are we to do about it?

History has shown syncretism to the culture is a chronic ailment of the church. Solutions have tended to fall into two categories-return or retreat. Some will argue that the church simply needs to return to its first century roots. There is a bias among Christians that somehow the early church had it right, and everything after the patristic age has been a corruption of what God intended for his people. But the notion of return has two fatal errors. First, it isn’t possible. As much as we might like to experience first century Christianity, time marches forward and not backward. Secondly, the early church’s problems were just as significant as ours. In fact, most of the problems addressed by the letters of the Apostles in the New Testament were the result of cultural syncretism. Returning to an earlier era of Christianity simply isn’t the solution, no matter how romantic it may sound.

The other common answer to a church overly syncretized to the culture has been retreat-abandoning the church to establish another, supposedly more faithful, community. The Qumran sect, authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, took this approach around the time of Christ. Some monastic orders originated in this manner, and a number of Protestant denominations were born from schisms with other churches in pursuit of ecclesiastical purity. But the retreat solution simply won’t work in response to Consumer Christianity. Not only is escape incongruent with the mission the church has been given, it is also impossible. We live, and move, and have our being in a consumer cosmos. The global economy and interconnection of markets and resources means every time we eat a meal, listen to music, put on clothing, or read a book (like this one) we are being consumers.

But there is a difference between living in a consumer society and adopting a consumer worldview. Our faithful Christian predecessors lived within the Roman Empire but their minds and hearts were not beholden to Caesar. Their citizenship was not to Rome. Likewise, we must learn to exist in a consumer empire but not forfeit our souls at its altar. This means addressing the issue at a level beyond mere behaviors.

Christian critiques of consumerism usually focus on the danger of idolatry-the temptation to make material goods the center of life rather than God. However legitimate and commonplace the evil of materialism may be, it misses the real threat consumerism poses. Consuming goods (a behavior) is not inherently wrong-as contingent beings our Creator has designed us to consume resources to survive. Rather than a behavior, this book will approach consumerism as a set of presuppositions most of us have been formed to carry without question or critique. More than merely an economic system, it is the framework through which we understand everything including the gospel, the church, and God himself. Consumerism is the dominant worldview of North Americans. As such, it is competing with the kingdom of heaven for the hearts and imaginations of God’s people.

I hope to tackle the problematic union of consumerism and Christianity in three ways. First, each chapter will show how our formation as consumers has distorted an element of our faith. For example, how we’ve turned God into a consumable product, or the breakdown of community through market-driven individualism. The pervasive influence of consumerism must be revealed and critiqued before we can hope to move any further.

Secondly, the book seeks to energize an alternative vision of faith. The values of consumerism have captured the imaginations of both the religious and irreligious in our day. Our minds are so captivated by these ideas that we’ve lost the ability to think an alternative thought. As a result the imagination has become the critical battleground between the kingdom of God and consumerism, and before we can hope to live differently we must have our minds released from consumerism’s grip and captivated again by Christ. As Thomas Kelly contends, before we can live in full obedience to God we must be given a flaming vision of such an existence. This burning image comes to us through our intuitive faculties. “Holy is imagination, the gateway of Reality into our hearts.”

To accomplish this, I have approached the structure of each chapter the way we encounter a van Gogh painting. Like other post-impressionist artists, van Gogh used brilliant and contrasting colors applied with short, staccato brushstrokes. At close range the subjects of his paintings were indecipherable, a formless abstract of color and texture. One must step away from the canvas for the colors to fuse and the eye to discern the subject. Likewise, the chapters that follow are impressionist in form. They are comprised of short, seemingly incongruent scenes of personal narrative, biblical exposition, and cultural observation. But with distance and reflection they fuse in the mind’s eye to construct a discernable theme. My intent is for the reader’s imagination, and not merely their intellect, to be awakened and nourished with an alternative vision of faith from the one we’ve inherited from our consumer formation.

Toward this end, I recommend reading the book in community. I have found the discipline of godly conversation to be indispensable to my growth, and processing the concepts in each chapter with others may ignite your imagination into a fire that the single spark of your mind could never muster alone. Similarly, the content of the book is drawn from my experience and setting, not yours. While I hope there is considerable congruency, each reader must still wrestle with the implications of each chapter for his or her own life. If reading a self-help book is like being served a meal, this book is like being invited into the kitchen. Here you are encouraged to pull from the cupboards and apply the concepts yourself. This creative work is best done in community with friends.

Of course, I do not want my readers to have to fend for themselves entirely. So, the third way this book will try to address the challenge of consumerism is by prescribing actions of re-formation. With our imaginations freed from the confinements of consumerism we still require the means to implement our faith-methods of manifesting in the world what our illuminated minds have envisioned. Within each chapter I will explore a spiritual practice that can aid us, individually and communally, in living a post-consumer Christianity.

Consumer Christianity, while promising to strengthen our souls with an entertaining faith, has left us malnourished with an anemic view of God, faith, church, and mission. Van Gogh sought Christ by painting the stars; a divine distraction from the institutional religion of his day. I have found my divine distractions to be sitting under a crabapple tree, playing with a child, or standing under a starry sky on a lonely balcony. I hope this book will be a divine distraction for you. One that rekindles your dormant imagination and helps us all re-imagine what our faith can be.

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