April 29, 2006

Commercially Sacred

Macaulay Culkin, in the 2003 release Saved, asks his Christian sister if anything is sacred to her and her Christian friends. This seems like a very apt question for the church today, "Is there anything sacred?"
I ask this question in light of the way we treat the objects of our faith. For example, Christian radio takes something sacred, (our worship music) and transforms the sacred into pop or just background music.
What about the object of our faith, Jesus? Is he sacred? This weekend, the youth at my church had a lock-in, and all of them were wearing a shirt that read:

"Jesus Clean,
You got a sin,
we got an answer."
This is hardly uncommon in the church and especially in the Christian sub-culture. We worry about packaging Christ in the "right" package, so people will be attracted to our product: Jesus, salvation, our church, etc.

We are so got up in image, and this seems to be the motivation for the loss of the sacred in Christendom. The objects of our faith become products, to be treated in anyway possible to reach anyone possible. The problems is that we are consumers in every facet of life, even faith. We think like consumers, thus we have to package our products in a way that is pleasing to the consumer, the seeker, the lost person, whatever.

The Gospel is a stumbling block and foolishness, why change it? It is what it is, not what we want to make it.
If you happened to stumble (no pun intended) across this, what do you think? Do you think we should do away with Christian t-shirts, radio, tattoos; or is this just good evangelistic commercilization? When does something loose its sacredness?

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