The Trouble With Me

I've just finished reading Mark Sayers' book, The Trouble With Paris. Suffice to say, as anyone who has ever heard Sayers speak, this guy has a gift at examining culture and seeing where the church has bought in to it. And by the church, I mean the individuals who make up the church. Which includes me. A quote on pg 32 has got me thinking:

The ultimate authortity and religion remains the consumer culture...that which has final authority for a believer or society, both in the sense that it determines one's scale of values and in the sense that it provides the models, the basic patterns through which the believer grasps and organises his or her experience...

In other words, you may say you're a Christian or a Muslim or an aetheist. That's all well and good. But the bottom line to what I am is decided by worldview I actually follow. If that culture is consumerism, then all my decisions will be valued against that belief system, whether I am a Christian, Muslim etc etc. And that's a really challenging thought.

What if my faith is not in Jesus, but in hyperconsumerism? (Albeit with a dash of Jesus thrown in for eternal good measure). That's scary. What if my final authority is not God's word, but the latest catalogue? What if the model I base my life on is not in fact Jesus, but the models advertised in the magazines I read (which as Sayers points out, are airbrushed to within an inch of their life and, therefore, are impossible to follow?).

If I'm serious, I have to really dig deep and ask some hard questions about who - or what - is the final athority in my life.