I remember when my mother felt like she could go back to teaching. She had raised me and my younger sister (3 years younger). She was now going into 1st grade, and we both would be gone at school the whole day. So my mother became the first "consumer education" teacher that Erie, Illinois ever had. Though I was just in 4th grade, I was still old enough to be interested in what she was doing.

She answered my questions and told me that she taught her junior high students how to save and spend money, how to shop for this and that, and how the stock market works (they even pretended to buy stocks and made a game out of who made the most money). She enjoyed teaching the class. She also introduced our family to the new magazine, "Consumer Reports," which helped "consumers" determine which products work well and which ones don't, so that they made better purchases with their money.

All of that is well and good, but what happens when we "idolize" our role as shoppers, as purchasers, as owners, as consumers? One of the most striking criticisms of sinful human behavior that comes from God's Word is stated in the first of our Ten Commandments: "I am the Lord your God....You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them...." (Exodus 20:1-5)

We can make anything or any activity or any person (including ourselves) in this world SO IMPORTANT that they become more important than our calling to follow our Creator God. The young woman who follows her boyfriend into a world of drugs and violence because she doesn't want to lose him...the man who must collect everything involving this and that, even if it means not paying his mortgage or for his kids' education...the woman who must be involved in every community activity in order to be with the "in" crowd...these are just some examples of how we "dress up" our selfishness in the garb of consumerism to the point that we are what we can do with our money. I remember seeing graffiti once that summed it all up in 3 words: LIVE BUY DIE.

This negatively effects the life of the church in a number of ways. If we are consumeristic, we don't hope in the Lord, we hope we will get more money. We don't have faith in God, we have faith in our stock portfolio. We don't experience joy, because we are so disappointed that we aren't getting what we want. We don't love because we are too busy complaining about not being loved ourselves. This is not a recent phenomenon (though our high-tech culture is making consumerism even more of a force nowadays). I recently ran across a quote from 1955 by economist Victor Lebow that is just as true today as then:

"Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods
into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn
out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate."

Since we are so used to discarding things, discarding relationships has become pretty commonplace. Kids discard going to worship upon being confirmed. Young adults discard church life altogether in order to fit in in college. And even if young adults return to active congregational life when they have kids of their own, it must only be on their terms, often demanding their kind of education and values, their kind of activities, their kind of God. Even those who have raised kids in a church find it difficult to connect to church life once those kids are gone because what their only reason for attending -- so that their kids have a church to grow up in -- is now gone. Thus many empty nesters fall away.

Empty nesters and all Christians are called by God to go beyond the superficial idolatry of being consumers. To be in the family of God, to be part of the Body of Christ, is to be on a mission, together DOING the Christian life. To make a difference in someone else's life takes time and effort, devoted to OTHER people. Sure, it's a sometimes messy experience, but, ultimately, a divine one; centered in God, we stay in the center of life, the calm center of the hurricane whirling around us every day.

It's not LIVE BUY DIE, but DIE GIVE LIVE.

David Hewitt