The church must stop pandering to 'personal preference'

If the church is to survive it must re-learn what it means to put God first.

The other day I was watching an interesting interview with Louise Perry and Liz Oldfield. It was an enjoyable conversation, but by the end something was really beginning to bug me. The unspoken assumption between what both of them said was that you needed to find a church which suited your own personal preference. So, for example, Louise talked about having tried over 30 different churches in her search to find something appropriate for her. And Liz talked about churches with charismatic spirituality and ‘four-chord worship music’ not being for everyone.

Many people over the years have recognised that we are now living in a consumer-choice driven society. Our motto is now, to quote the Burger King slogan, “have it your way.” Many people have recognised the corrosive effect this is having, and have written about it - including a number of Christians. At the same time, I wonder if the church has seriously grappled with how big an effect this attitude has had on the church itself. I think the church is too often ready to collude with the ‘consumer choice’ attitude - even if it does so unwittingly.

In this post I am going to start by thinking about why this is such a problem, before moving on to look at a few ways the church colludes with this ‘consumer preference’ culture.

The problem with ‘consumer preference’ culture in the church

The biggest problem with consumer preference culture in the church is that, ultimately, the church should be about God’s preference, not ours. This is precisely why God included the first two of the Ten Commandments:

“You shall have no other gods before me.

“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Exodus 20:3-6

The first commandment says that we don’t get to choose which God we should worship - there is one God, and everyone is commanded to worship him. (Therefore, to worship another ‘god’ is an act of wilful disobedience.) The second commandment says that we should worship God in truth, rather than worshipping an idol of our own creation. In short, we can’t imagine God how we like him, and we can’t simply arrange worship to suit ourselves: God’s will and desire must come first. It makes sense when you think about it, doesn’t it: what’s the point of worshipping God if you’re not pleasing him in the way you worship him?!

Taken together, these two commandments say that we should worship God alone, and that we should worship him truly. You could say that these two commandments are designed to take away our choice: we can’t choose which God to worship, because there is only one. We can’t choose the way that we worship him, because he has told us who he is and what he wants.

Note: this is not to say that there can’t be variety in worship - e.g. whether we worship with hymns and organ music or modern songs and raised hands. My point here is that reducing worship to preferences over tangential issues serve to undermine what worship actually is…

So, how do we worship God? This is what Paul says in Romans:

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Romans 12:1

I remember reading this verse as a student and finding it quite literally life-changing. Paul says that worship is… offering our whole lives to God. God wants it all - he wants our whole being, body and soul, to be a living sacrifice. This is in contrast to the old covenant, where the Israelites had been commanded to offer sacrifices to God only at certain times. Under the new covenant we are to offer everything we are at every moment.

And this is the primary issue with consumer preference culture in the church: it relegates church to ‘a part of my life’. Church fits a neat little box in my life marked ‘spirituality,’ and I pick it up once a week - and then put it back on the shelf again until next time.

This is the issue I have with these discussions about whether to go to a Latin Mass kind of church or a charismatic, speaking-in-tongues, four-chord worship songs kind of church. Firstly, we need to listen to God to see if he has anything to say about those kinds of worship. One of the things I found most difficult about the discussion I mentioned at the start was there was absolutely no concept that God might have anything to say about the kind of worship we choose to engage in. When I was training as a curate, one of my fellow curates - who was from an Anglo-Catholic / High Church background - said that he experienced the Mass, and immediately fell in love with it. That was his own ‘personal preference’, you might say. Some people seem to like the high church style because it suits them, rather than out of a principled belief that it is the right thing to do.

Secondly, these discussions reduce worship to a matter of which church you go to - when it’s so much more important than that. Worship isn’t an addition to my life, it’s something which should take and transform us as we submit to God and his will. In a sense, worship is the antithesis of personal preference: it is about taking our personal preferences and submitting them to the will of God, in everything. As John the Baptist once said, “he must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30). Worship is about getting our priorities right when it comes to God.

I believe that any worship which puts our own personal preferences front-and-centre is not worship at all. Actually it’s worse than that: in this kind of self-centred worship we are not worshipping God, but worshipping ourselves.

I hope that nothing I have said here has been particularly controversial. What I’d like to do is share a few ways that I believe the church is (perhaps unwittingly) colluding with this consumer-preference culture, and how it is distorting our worship.

The proliferation of denominations

A few weeks ago I wrote about denominations. One of the things which strikes me about denominations is how, in today’s world, they seem to be set up to amplify this consumer choice driven culture. Denominations originally began because there were a theological differences between Christian groups - for example, whether to baptise children or not, or whether to have bishops or not. Some of those distinctives are more important than others, but in my experience the majority of churches hold pretty lightly to those distinctives these days.

Over the course of my Christian life, I’ve attended churches of various different denominations. I’m sure I’m not alone - I think the majority of Christians today are ‘denomination hoppers.’ The reason people can do this is because churches today are more-or-less the same. There might be some minor differences over style, especially between so-called ‘high church’ and ‘low church,’ but it’s fair to say the majority of low-church evangelical services will look virtually identical regardless of denomination. In fact, the average person in the pews (or, more likely, chairs) will probably not notice the difference from one denomination to another. Most people would only notice denominations if they got involved in the church structures (e.g. appointed to an Anglican PCC - church council - or some like it).

If denominations really don’t matter that much today, then why do we make such a big deal out of them?

It seems to me one of the things which this focus on denominations has inadvertently created is an appearance of consumer choice. “You can choose what you like in church: whatever kind of music you like, whether you like high church or low church, whether you like the practice of spiritual gifts or not - it’s all there. Just find a church which suits you.”

In the town where I live, most of the churches are clustered around the town centre. It’s clear they are not serving a particular geographical area - most people drive from where they live to go to church. Some people might drive past several churches to go to a church they like. This clustering of churches reinforces the concept that you can simply pick one of a number of choices open to you. I’m not saying that this situation has been intentionally created - but when there is more than one church building serving the same geographical area, what are we to conclude other than that they are serving different interests?

I hate to think what the apostle Paul would have thought about this, the Paul who wrote these words:

Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. Ephesians 4:3-6

Of course, I’m sure every church would subscribe to these verses. But does the fact that we seem to put so much stock in our denominations really show the unity that we have in Jesus Christ? Does the fact that there are not only a few denominations but a whole plethora - and their churches very often located within a stone’s throw of one another - show to the world that there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all”?

Evangelism and ‘bums on seats’

One of the things which became a bit of a buzzword in church circles some years ago was the ‘seeker sensitive’ movement. This was based on the idea that non-Christians do not come to church because they are looking to repent of their sins and turn to Christ, they come because of some perceived need in their lives. For example, someone who has been through a divorce or bereavement might turn to the church for comfort and guidance. The seeker sensitive movement was an attempt to try and capitalise on that, and help people to see how Jesus was the ultimate solution to people’s felt needs.

Obviously there is plenty to commend in this approach, because Jesus does meet our needs in a way that nothing else can. At the same time, I believe this approach has led to the church taking a ‘needs-first’ approach to evangelism: many churches try so hard to cater to the needs of non-Christians that they almost completely forget the needs of the Christians who are there week-by-week. (I touched on the topic in my video “Stop Evangelising!”).

Ultimately, the Christian life is not a matter of God meeting all our needs in the way that we want him to. The Christian life is about us submitting to God, and allowing him to meet our needs in the way he chooses. It goes back to what I was saying at the start - we submit to God, not the other way round. He must come first.

There is another aspect to this. When it comes to evangelism there is an atmosphere at the moment that nothing must get ‘in the way of the gospel.’ Many churches - with some justification - say that the only offence should be the offence of the gospel. All this comes from a good place. However, it can spill over into bending over backwards to try and make people feel comfortable. When I was at Bible college, every time we talked about welcoming people, ‘good coffee’ was mentioned. The unspoken (or even the spoken message) was that we need to make people feel comfortable in church.

It’s interesting that the New Testament doesn’t seem to mention making people feel comfortable or not. (It doesn’t even say anything about coffee!) I think it is tacitly assumed that, if someone comes into a loving church family, they should be made to feel welcome. That includes things like not showing favouritism (James 2:1-4). But, if the Holy Spirit is present, someone who is not a believer should be convicted (1 Corinthians 14:25). You could say that welcome is God’s job - if God is really present, then people will see that. If he isn’t present, then you have to try and substitute with other things…

I believe the church should be focussing on the things the church is called to do - in particular, discipleship. If the church was really doing that, then I suspect the welcome would take care of itself.

I often think of the example of Jesus, whose teaching did not draw universal acclaim - even amongst his disciples:

On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” … From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

John 6:60, 66

Jesus was never ‘seeker sensitive.’ He loved people, which is a very different thing. And he loved them enough to speak the truth, and not shield them from teaching they would find difficult. The church could do with a lot more of this kind of attitude.

Competing on YouTube

This is maybe a little more ‘niche’, but I think it might have wider implications. As a content creator on YouTube, one of the thing which frustrates me most of all is how YouTube puts this ‘consumer preference’ culture on steroids. If you want to ‘succeed’ on YouTube, you virtually have to pander to it: you have to make thumbnails of your videos which are more eye-catching than the next person. You have to make titles for your videos which will grab people’s attention. You are constantly told to be thinking about ‘audience retention’ - that is, keeping people watching and keeping them coming back to your channel.

When it comes to the church, I think this YouTube culture is the absolute anathema of what church should be. When I preach a sermon and upload it to YouTube, I don’t want people to watch it because I’ve managed to put a more snazzy title on it than someone else! I want them to watch it because it is - I hope and pray - a faithful exposition of the Word of God.

Why do I mention this? I wonder if this kind of attitude has pervaded the church today, almost without anyone noticing. We think now that people won’t be interested in the Bible unless we have a snazzy title. How many churches have sermon series with titles that are trying to be “interesting”? This is just one example. But it seems that the typical attitude of the church now is that it needs to pander to people’s interests, or they will lose interest and go away.

This, again, is anathema to the God-centred attitude we started out with. God should come first, and we should worship him come what may. Our second highest priority is to love and meet with our fellow Christians. It is not an optional extra. The entire question, “can you be a Christian without going to church?” fundamentally misses the point.

Will the church recover?

I’ve often spoken about problems with the church today. I believe one of the biggest problems facing the church is that it has adopted a man-focussed, consumer-centred attitude. This is simply the cultural air that we breathe. I’ve been reading Os Guinness’ book The Gravedigger File, and one of the things I was struck by in the chapter I read the other night was the importance of culture. The reason why it’s so important to think about culture is that most of us don’t even realise it’s there. Culture is simply “the way we do things round here.” We don’t think about why we do them, and how the Bible might speak to those actions.

If the church is to be revived, we need to put God first and listen to what he wants, over and above what our culture is telling us we should want. This may mean making some uncomfortable changes. However, it’s the only way that we are going to be the church that God wants us to be.