Consumerism is Killing the Church, and We Have to Talk About It.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, I found myself standing adjacent to a conversation among a small group of people. It was a casual setting, and someone mentioned Sunday morning church. A couple of them said what I’ve heard a hundred and one variations of: they wished the messages from the stage were simpler, more aimed at life application, and invested less in excavating Scripture.

I didn’t say much at first. But after a few moments of leaning in, I did ask a question—and it’s one I’d like to ask you now.

What’s the point of showing up on a Sunday at all?

Their answer wasn’t wrong by any stretch. “We just want to figure out how the Bible fits into our everyday lives,” a woman said, as heads nodded around the circle in almost choreographed agreement.

At the outset, let me be clear. It’s a good answer. But it’s also a severely incomplete one, and I let them know as much.

So I asked again, this time with a little more probing in my tone. “For what reason, though? Applied to our everyday lives toward what end? And… what about our call to minister to the Lord in worship?”

Immediately, the backyard pow-wow went quiet. In fairness, I don’t know for certain what was behind that silence; it may have been the first time anyone had asked them to justify the goal, not just the method. But in my experience, more often than not, that silence exposes something we’ve stopped examining, which is that we’ve made quick life application the central point of our Sunday sermons, instead of the byproduct of a deeper aim, which, personally, I believe is a call to maturity.1 Simply stated, transformation takes time.

Let’s unpack this concept more substantially.

What I think is actually happening is that we’ve quietly turned the gathered church into a vending machine. You put in an hour, you expect a product to drop, and the product had better be something you can use by Tuesday. And when it isn’t, you call it “disconnected,” “academic,” “too spiritual,” or “out of touch.” See, the vending machine approach never asks who you’ll become. It only asks whether you got what you came for.

Now, none of us would eagerly admit to a self-centered, consumeristic mindset (even though few of us hesitate to speak our minds about…everything). We’d never say, “I attend church to consume content.” But we probably would say we want relevance, practicality, and something we can walk out the door and use.

That might sound reasonable, except for the fact that the notion of relevance as a prerequisite is often just consumerism wearing its Sunday best.

Am I pushing too many buttons yet?

See, the test isn’t whether you wanted something practical. Practical is fine. Jesus was practical (but he didn’t play it safe). And the apostle James has no patience for faith that produces nothing. It’s just that the test is what you thought the practical thing was for.

Allow me to extrapolate.

Let’s look at Scripture, because Jesus already answered this question, and His answer should unsettle anyone who assumes clarity was always His goal. His disciples once asked Him directly why He taught in parables. Many of us wonder the same.

Luckily, Matthew, leaving nothing to chance, records His answer thusly: “Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given... Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” (Matthew 13:11, 13, NKJV).

One of the reasons I love this text is because it destroys the assumption most of us carry into a Sunday service without ever examining it: that somehow, a message’s primary job is to be immediately, effortlessly graspable by everyone in the room.

But frankly, I think that’s an incredibly immature mindset. Here’s why:

While Mark tells us Jesus also adjusted His teaching “as they were able to hear it”2 (which shows the parables were both a filter for hardened hearts and a real accommodation to where people were), the disciples’ own question in Matthew 13—and Jesus’s own answer to it—make concealment and revelation the dominant note in this passage specifically. Remember that the crowd got a story about seeds and soil. And the disciples, the ones who stayed, who asked questions, who wanted more than a tidy takeaway, got the meaning underneath the story. Same words, but a totally different yield. The difference? It wasn’t intelligence. It was hunger.

What’s my point? Well, if some of Jesus’s own listeners walked away from a parable with nothing but a nice agricultural anecdote, then the goal of preaching was never universal, effortless application. The goal was to separate those who wanted a word from those who wanted their life choices validated and affirmed.

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That said, there’s a hinge the whole conversation turns on. In 1 Corinthians 4:1 (ESV), when Paul writes, “This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God,” he’s defending his own apostolic ministry, not describing the Corinthians in the seats. I want to be precise about that because it would be easy to borrow his words for a point he wasn’t making. But the New Testament doesn’t let the hearer off the hook, either. Jesus tells His disciples plainly, “For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more” (Luke 12:48, NKJV). You don’t have to be an apostle for that verse to land on you. You only have to have been given something, and if you’ve ever sat under a message that named your sin or called you to obedience, you’ve been given something.

Moreover, Paul tells the Corinthians, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10, NKJV). That verse is about the whole of a life, not narrowly about how you received a sermon. Thus, if the whole of your life includes every Sunday you sat under the word and walked out unchanged, this verse touches that too, even though it wasn’t written to isolate it.

What’s my point? You are not the customer of the message you hear. You’re accountable for what you did with it.

Of course, I want to be careful not to make this sound like personal application doesn’t matter; it does (deeply), and a sermon divorced from lived obedience is just religious theatre. But my thesis is that life application aimed at a better week and life application aimed at faithful stewardship of the ubiquitous call to maturity in Christ are not the same target, even when they look identical from the outside. One asks the text to serve you. The other asks you to serve what you’ve been entrusted with.

This is where our study gets sharper, so I hope you’ll keep tracking with me. The writer of Hebrews confronts a church that has been sitting under teaching for years and still can’t handle anything beyond the basics. In Hebrews 5:12-14 (NKJV), he writes, “For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.”

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Notice what he says matures a person. It isn’t an information download. It’s “reason of use”: trained senses, exercised over time, through repeated engagement with something demanding.

We should know this about training in general. You don’t develop discernment by being handed easier material. You develop it by being handed real material and wrestling with it until it changes how you see. As such, a congregation that only ever wants the milk version of every Scripture passage isn’t protecting itself from confusion. It’s forfeiting the very exercise that would make it capable of teaching someone else. And that, my friend, is called discipleship.

Quite frankly, that’s the quiet tragedy underneath the complaint I heard at that barbecue. It wasn’t laziness. It was a group of people who had never been told that maturity—not comfort and convenient faith—was ever the goal.

Nobody had asked them Paul’s question in Ephesians, that we’re meant to grow up “in all things into Him who is the head, Christ” so that we’re “no longer children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:15, 14, NKJV). Pointedly, a body of believers that only wants simple takeaways will eventually be the folks most easily blown over by whatever doctrine or fad is loudest that year, because it never trained the muscle that tells the difference.

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As I land this plane, here’s the point I don’t want you to miss. A mature word will cost you something a cute, superficial takeaway never will. It will ask you to sit in a text you don’t fully understand yet and trust the Holy Spirit to keep working on you after the message ends. It will refuse to hand you an alliterative three-step plan for peace of mind and instead hand you a case study like Job, unresolved, honest, and hard. It will make you responsible for wrestling instead of merely receiving.

That’s not a flaw in the preaching. That’s the whole design; the same design Jesus used with the crowds who left His parables unmoved and the disciples who stayed and asked what He meant. And without question, that is the call to which we have been called: mature sonship3; those who ascend the mountain of the Lord with purity and power.4

So no, the point of Sunday morning was never simply to hand you something you could apply by Tuesday.

Application matters, but it was always meant to flow out of a deeper aim: that you would grow up, take seriously what you’ve been entrusted with, and give an account one day for what you did with it because you are part of God’s eternal purpose. That’s a heavier, better reason to show up than “give me something useful.” It’s the difference between eating and being fed; between consuming a service and stewarding what you’ve been given.

Please reject vending machine faith. Seek the mature word; the one that asks something of you before it gives you anything back. Let your senses be trained. Let the milk stop being enough.

Grow up. Steward this life well. And give a good account.

Let’s go.