Community and Consumer Choice
You may have noticed from recent blog posts that I’ve been thinking a lot about independence in Western culture, and the effects of it.
One aspect of independence is the high value based on consumer choice, the mentality that says, “I have the right to choose the best option for me.” Again, the individual is at the centre of this mentality, and the needs of others don’t really enter into it. I know this is a great oversimplification, feel free to argue in the comments.
I think this mentality explains a lot about why the sense of community has decreased rapidly, for example in the UK. In searching for the best option in whatever it is we are looking for, we need to start looking in wider and wider areas. Because of our wealth and technology, we are able to, and happy to, travel a fair distance to find cheaper, better quality, higher quantity of whatever it is we are looking for. That distance might not even be a physical distance any more, as virtually (!) anything is available on the Internet.
Too far?
As I lay on the bench in the park just praying and listening to God today, I was thinking about the blog I wrote yesterday, about individualism in the West and how we make it a kind of god or idol. I was thinking about what it means to meet with God in prayer, in silence and solitude, about how important the individual is to God. And how amazingly revealing that is to us, that God loves each individual too. Maybe our sense of individualism in the West, in our religion as well as in our culture, has partly come from a good understanding of how God loves us. I think I’m reacting now to what I find distasteful in my own culture, but not really appreciating the richness of our spiritual heritage.
Infatuation with Individualism
I heard part of a sermon on a podcast today where the preacher changed all the words “we” in the Bible passage to the word “you”. He said he was doing this to make it more “immediate” to those listening.
I’m sure he had good intentions, but I think this is really bad. Here in our comfortable consumer “Western” world we are so obsessed by our individual rights, needs and desires that we almost worship ourselves. In the church this has crept into our worship songs as we seek our own individual “experience” of God in worship, all about our personal relationship with Him. A number of worship leaders around the Western world have started writing about this, calling for a return to real corporate worship.