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.