Advent Conspiracy
by Kelly Dolan
It seems this Christmas - maybe more than any before - I keep hearing people ask the question: “Why are we spending so much money on things that may have little or no lasting value?”
Two related projects that have surfaced in the past month that raise this question:
The Advent Conspiracy - a website / movement encouraging churches and individuals to “worship more, spend less, give more, and love all”.
What Would Jesus Buy? - a “docu-comedy” produced by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) about the commercialization of Christmas.
All of this sparks a few more questions for me:
How much have I personally bought into the consumerism of Christmas and perhaps lost focus on all that this season truly means?
How can our ministries dream together ways to live and spend radically different this season (and the rest of the year) in order to bless to our world?
How do I help the students I know think through these questions when all I can think about is the iPhone I want for Christmas?
It seems this Christmas - maybe more than any before - I keep hearing people ask the question: “Why are we spending so much money on things that may have little or no lasting value?”
Two related projects that have surfaced in the past month that raise this question:
The Advent Conspiracy - a website / movement encouraging churches and individuals to “worship more, spend less, give more, and love all”.
What Would Jesus Buy? - a “docu-comedy” produced by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) about the commercialization of Christmas.
All of this sparks a few more questions for me:
How much have I personally bought into the consumerism of Christmas and perhaps lost focus on all that this season truly means?
How can our ministries dream together ways to live and spend radically different this season (and the rest of the year) in order to bless to our world?
How do I help the students I know think through these questions when all I can think about is the iPhone I want for Christmas?
Labels: conference
posted by Kelly Dolan at 10:29 PM
1 Comments:
Warren Anderson said...Regardless of how people end up answering the questions Kelly is hearing, the fact that Christians are asking them at all is encouraging. So many of us American Christians have bought into the materialistic ethos of our western culture that we don't even realize that there's a war going on all around us--with messages from Madison Avenue on one side and the tenets of the Sermon on the Mount on the other. (And it doesn't help when Christian corporations feed into this by telling us that to do effective ministry we need to purchase this teaching series, or that youth-ministry curriculum, or these worship resources. Or--you'll forgive me, Shift friends, I trust--that we need to attend this conference, or that seminar, or this gathring of ministry head-honchos . . . as valuable as all these things can be and often are.) Recognizing the war is the first step toward beginning to win a few battles now and again when it comes to our consumption.
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