“It is not so much the content of Western mission that I am challenging here; it is the container (a capitalist mentality) of Western mission I have a problem with…Those in Christian ministry experience burnout as much or more than those in other fields, which indicates that the industrial complex we have constructed for our faith is failing us.”
“I am not sure why Christians, Protestant evangelicals in particular, feel so keenly the need to defend unregulated capitalism. Perhaps it is a belief that capitalism takes economic power out of the hands of the state and gives it to the people. Both capitalism and Protestantism were responses to elitism. But movements that set out to overthrow elitism only create new elite and new excluded. We must never tire of reform; it must remain the one constant in a world that beckons us toward calcification.”
“One reason that the corporate business model has become such a standard organizational model is that it mostly works. What’s more, the economies on which the entire planet now operate are built on a vision for wealth creation and distribution based largely on a capitalist worldview. This is because most alternatives have failed so miserably. Like it or not, capitalism is the economic ideology by which the world produces and exchanges goods and service, and the corporation is not going away anytime soon.”
“For Weber, the spirit of capitalism was not so much the pursuit of greed as it was the pursuit of profit…Weber’s understanding of Protestantism, or more accurately, Calvinism, is that making a profit because of thrift and industry reflects your goodness or even your godliness…Poverty, hardship and suffering are by and large not part of the Protestant American construct of the Christian faith, and so our theology around these topics is weak and sickly.”
“It is telling that there are two main classifications of organizations in America: for-profit and nonprofit, as if making profit is the only way to understand how we can establish ourselves, the only lens through which we can imagine human collaboration. An organization pursuing profit is a for-profit business. But if a group of people establish an enterprise focused on any number of other noble pursuits, it is identified not by what it is, but by what it is not.”
“The materialism of Sodom translated into sexual misconduct, because coveting, objectifying, owning and consuming becomes a harmful and idolatrous way of life. Our posture toward indulging material desires is easily translated into indulging our sexual desires. Desire-consume-repeat. This is the energy the world is powered by, and the people of God are to carefully avoid it.”
“Christians often define the slippery slope in terms of sexual immorality, but according to Scripture, the slipperiest slope on earth is greed and the idolatry it inspires (Col. 3:5). Jesus warned against the corrupting power of wealth and possessions in the Gospels five times more than he addressed the issue of sex outside of marriage.
“We’ve attempted to press the gospel into product form—a privately owned salvific experience obtained through a business-like transaction…When Christianity impersonates the corporate world, we don’t need God. We can accomplish our mission with more money, a building and a bit of ingenuity.”
“The highly individualized salvation experience sold through skills of persuasion is a shadow of the all-encompassing power of the Gospel. But these are the methods we often use to measure and celebrate our mission successes.”
“The journey away from collectivism and toward individualism has been served by capitalism, which turns private ownership into a way of thinking about things. In the Bible there is an expectation that the human fabric is held together by a larger understanding of communal responsibility.”
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