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The Commentary

Conference consumers?

It is around this time each year that the Christian conference season bursts upon us, and thousands of evangelical and charismatic Christians go off to various seaside holiday complexes for worship and teaching, fellowship and fun.

My own experience of these events in the past has been on the whole very positive. It is not often that many of us get the opportunity to hear gifted expositors like John Piper or John MacArthur, or Alistair Begg from the USA. Bible overviews, (usually from gifted young Anglicans), have opened up the Scriptures as never before for some people. Then there is usually some kind of arena in which missionary societies, Christian publishers and community projects have their stalls and capture our interest. Probably most encouraging of all is seeing Christians of all ages, students, young families and elderly, all mixing and praising God together. Wonderful.

I have to say, though, that from the early days of these events I saw a rather different side of things too. Being involved with Evangelicals Now, different ‘marketing opportunities’ were offered to us by the organisers. Necessary though organisation and structure are to these great events, I was made rather too aware of the ‘doing business’ and ‘profit margins’ side of it all. But though I am slightly uncomfortable with that, it is not what most worries me.

What do we go for?

My greater concern is for those of us who go along as punters and customers to the conferences.

We live in a consumer society and the self-centred consumer mindset rubs off on us Christians more than we realise. Have we begun to treat the conference weeks as some kind of consumer experience to meet our needs? Do we go to meet God in repentance or to be entertained? Do we assess times of worship by how good they make us feel? Do we see speakers as celebrities rather than brothers and sisters? Do we handle the books and CDs and mp3s we buy as some kind of Christian fashion accessories?

The apostle Paul warns of the church in the last days becoming full of people who are ‘lovers of self …lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God’. In his excellent exposition of 2 Timothy (Finishing the Race, Aquila Press, The Good Book Company), Chris Green has some searching comments on those verses. He writes: ‘In a church such as this, the spotlight will not be on loving God or on loving others…but on the individual and his or her needs…People will arrive crushed, tired and bored, and the church’s task is to ensure they leave lifted, stimulated…That church will be a great success wherever it starts.... hey arrive as lovers of self and leave as lovers of self.’ Wow! What a warning!

Of course we want to see people encouraged and joyful. But we want that to happen at our conferences through a real encounter with God, not, for example, through some form of fan-club experience or a Christian version of retail therapy. Let’s not allow consumerism to rob us of the great spiritual experience the Christian conferences can be.

John Benton