Desiring God: Desiring Goods

In our last discussions we labored to show that branding is about differentiation, competition, and segmentation. Marketing is about satisfying desires and needs of a target audience. The mission of the church is to build a universal community of believers characterized by unity, fellowship, mission, and an overriding desire to build the kingdom of God here on earth. Thus Godly desire should be geared toward those purposes for which the church has been created. From the above and the following discussion we are starting to see how church branding and marketing principles can affect the mission of the church.

In his book “Consuming Religion,” Vincent Miller discusses the desire for consumer goods and Godly desires. Miller writes that our society is marked by a massive deployment of infrastructures and practices aimed at eliciting, inciting, and sustaining consumer desire. But what do consumer desires have to do with Godly desires? Or put yet in other words, what does Madison Avenue have to do with Jerusalem? One could try to distinguish these desires by their objects and argue that consumer desire is different from Godly desire because the former is focused on material things. Miller however adds that consumer desire does not start and end in the desire for material things. Consumer desire exploits more profound longings- a desire for more than just goods. If a church concentrates on giving people what they need, it misses the big point which is that people are obsessively consuming things because there is a void within them which can only be satisfied by God.

As Augustine puts it, consumerism tempts us to become entangled in the “love of low things,” which causes our advance to be impeded and sometimes even diverted and we are held back from our pursuit of “higher things.” Thus, rather than turning our hearts towards what can truly fulfill us, we squander our love on petty objects, rendering ourselves unclean in the process. For Augustine, we should and, in the end, can only enjoy God. Nothing else can fulfill our desire. The myriad cultivations of consumer desire seem quite literally to encourage us to enjoy lower things. But lower things cannot satisfy us. The human person can never be fully satisfied with finite objects and, as a result, is constantly searching for more.

Thus, however unwisely man may choose what to set his heart on, he will eventually be spurred on to seek more, since man is made for fellowship with the divine, and only that will satisfy the profundity of man’s desire. Every church should strive to sell this idea- that it is only God who can satisfy.

Consuming Sacred Bread at Individual Tables

The calling of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost began to produce what 1 Peter calls a “race, priesthood, nation, and people” (1 Peter 2:9-10), a worldwide multicultural fellowship of witnesses. The people of God, in all their cultural diversity, may be understood as a universal community of communities. The particular church community is, in an essential sense, an expression of the universal church. Thus specialization and segmentation advocated for by church marketing compromises this universal personality of the church.

In his high priestly prayer, Jesus set out the purpose of the church as the community of communities:

“I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in me through their word; that they may all be one; even as you, father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me. The glory which you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as we are one; I in them and you in me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that you sent me, and loved them, even as you have loved me.” (John 17:20-23)

This prayer is a central New Testament passage defining the purpose and relatedness of the church. It teaches us that the dimensional connectedness of the church is not merely a matter of institutional unity, and even less of efficiency, stewardship, good public relations, or effective growth strategies. The oneness spoken of here is a matter of obedience to the Lord of the church, obedience that centers on his mission, “so that the world may know that you have sent me.”

The church is not only a community of communities, but it does share in the Trinitarian relationship of Father, Son and Holy Sprit. As Metzger notes in his book “consuming Jesus,” one of the ways the communal and commissioned church of the triune God repositions itself as a divinely communal entity is through the Lord’s Supper. The supper illuminates and intensifies the profound reality of participation: the whole church is present in each assembly, and each local assembly is present in the whole through Christ, their head. In its own community and beyond, each church is to exist for the whole church, not as a specialized enterprise that only cares for its own existence.

This communal nature of the church removes the emphasis from the organization and places it on the collective relationality of its members. The church as an organization must serve the purposes of the triune God within the body. Thus the mission of the church goes beyond self-preservation to becoming an instrument for building community. The church’s goal is not serving the organization’s own ethics and purposes, but leading the organization to fulfill a more universal purpose as a representative servant of God on earth. The church works for the ultimate order of manifesting the glory of God, of becoming a people of God, of serving the purposes of God, and of fulfilling the plan of God.
A community-centered people of God must orient their desires not towards their personal good feelings but towards the broader category of the will of God on earth; which brings me to discussing personal desires as compared to religious desires.

Until next time,

Happy new year to you all!