The Consumption of the Covenant Idea of the Church

Last time we saw consumerism, having canalized its attitudes in our culture, shapes what the consumer sees when he or she steps into a church. Here, we’ll see how it has eviscerated the covenant and familial ideas necessary to understand the church, which is necessary to understand the role of men in ministry, which is necessary to the role of women in ministry.

The consumer steps into the church looking for a spiritual product. Many churches’ respond to that by playing along. They appeal to the very forces of consumerism that are breaking down their church, that are hostile to the covenant. They will market the church in order to get potential customers’ business: the lighting andthe band, the “stage skins,” the untucked shirt and jeans all carefully crafted to appeal to the “unchurched” consumer. (“Unchurched” is a term that arises from the mind of marketing the church.) There is a special sermon series on child-rearing or whatever felt need appeals to the moms; the building feels like a mall or concert hall and the speaker communicates like a friendly neighbor leaning over a fence giving lawn care advice.

Selling the church is not new. Churches whose traditions were formed in the nineteenth century draw-in consumers with a gospel sing, a revival, or a “home-coming.” Gimmicks to get customers in the door are commonplace, and some are now so long-established that they are considered sacred traditions. The “old time religion” is largely a figment of the consumeristic “second great awakening.”¹ The new “seeker sensitive” model is the same philosophy with a different style. Both old and new church marketing assumes that the “unchurched” are inviolable consumers. “The premise of all marketing is that the customer’s need is sovereign, that the customer is always right.”²

So, churches are like grocery stores or restaurants, offering sales and specials. Maybe a mariachi band or an all-you-can-eat oysters or a fiery evangelist or a contemporary singer; or for some, a healer in a tent, or for the rare few, a professor of church history giving a lecture, followed by a pot-luck dinner, of course. Maybe, for many, just stay home and hear their favorite preacher, with a big smile and coifed hair – all by themselves in their living room, with none of those other people to make them uncomfortable. It is the same core values as consumerism: individualism, choice, freedom. The exact same attitude: ‘Entertain me or leave me alone.’³ So the lines were blurred between the theater, the concert, the motivational speaker and the church. Jesse Bryan, Mark Driscoll’s creative director, let slip about an incident after a Driscoll preaching engagement, “At the end of the perform-, or show or sermon or whatever …”.⁴ Whatever.

Churches presented themselves as the retail out-let for a new product: a relationship with God. But that feeds the problem, like letting an alligator nibble on a toe. The consumer goes to church like a shopper goes to the grocery store, to pick up some piety like ice cream, theology like meat (but many such shoppers are theological vegans), tips for living like bread, inspiration like sugar, to see whatever is on sale, like a new song or guest speaker. If they chat with another shopper on their way, that’s a nice plus. If they want to hurry to their car, that’s okay. They got what they wanted and it wasn’t a relationship, at least not with the other shoppers.

Relationships are another product which can be disposed of like any other garbage when they cease being useful. So, American divorce rates – 39% — reflect the triumph of consumerism.⁵ No-fault divorce says that if we consumers of marriage are no longer getting out of it the satisfaction we bought it for, it can be discarded. The earlier commitment, no matter how solemn, cannot constrain the consumer for looking elsewhere for satisfaction. So, when the consumer hears us say “church is a family,” they think families can be balled up and thrown away. So, the relationship with God, held out as the product evangelical churches were offering – “not religion,” they assured us – is no exception.

Consumerism and the Church Covenant

Feeding consumerism radically undermined the church. Previously, Puritans saw the church as held together by a covenant. The church covenant was an embodiment of what John Fawcett (1740-1817) called the “blest . . . tie that binds.” The practice of covenanting became formal and written with the English Congregationalists, like a marriage becomes formalized in wedding vows. It reached full-flower with the New England Puritans. Baptists inherited it, as they inherited much else, from them.

The covenanted church is the antithesis of the consumer church. In covenanted church membership, Christians sacrifice their freedom as consumers to dispose of their relationship with the church on a whim, to consume another one somewhere else, like you might be drawn away from your favorite restaurant to the new one. Instead, other church members are understood to be the other members of the same body, people one is attached to, a family. That was the Puritan and Biblical vision.

Not surprisingly, church covenanting declined in the twentieth century. Toward the end of that century, Charles Deweese, noting the decline, predicted that the church covenant would return to prominence.⁶ Regrettably, he was wrong. The forces of consumerism kept up their pressure so that in the generation since Deweese’s hopeful prediction, church covenants are now often mere curiosities of a by-gone age in older, traditional churches and absent altogether from many newer churches.

Mr. Consumer Goes to Church

When Mr. Consumer goes to church, he’s pragmatic about who should speak and lead, unless otherwise indoctrinated. Whoever stands up front and speaks should be the most competent, entertaining speaker. This is the default assumption of the consumer of religion. What matters is his or her ability to capture the consumer’s attention. “Time is money,” so the consumer believes, and so his time shouldn’t be wasted on some old man rambling when the alternative woman is so much more engaging. In a consumer culture one’s function is determined by one’s abilities to perform the functions consumers demand. Why should the consumers be deprived of the most affective orator if she happens not to be male?

Jonathan Leeman notes that much of contemporary advice for the church stresses “gifts,” containing Sunday School programs and leadership guides focusing on spiritual gifts with the application being to find one’s own gift. Thus, we’re commonly told to find our niche in “every member ministry” determined by our giftedness, with nothing, apparently, determined by our sexual identity. So, egalitarians happily chime in. Mimi Haddad tells us, in perfect harmony with the culture and the fads of church life, to replace a ministry that is “gender-based” with one that is “gift-based.”⁷

The assumption is that a “gift-based” ministry will be equitable to women. Consumers assume that if we exclude women from church leadership it is because we believe that they lack the gifts; that they are incapable of performing the functions of ministry as well as a man. We must think women are inferior, thus we’re misogynists or sexists. This is the only logical explanation for excluding women from some functions, given the options left by consumerism. If covenanting is seen as repulsive – because it restricts freedom – and the idea that the church could be a family is wiped out by a lifetime of experience in which institutions are always disposable and customer-centered, what else can the church be but a retail out-let for a spiritual product?

Thus, when the consumer opens the door to the church, he or she sees a customer-service provider, in the mold of other prevalent sources of consumption, like the restaurant and the theater, or, at best, the hospital, a favorite paradigm for the church, even by many Christians. Just as the hospital provides healing for the body; the church provides healing for the soul. The proverb “The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum (or hotel) for saints,” is (falsely) attributed to Augustine or John Chrysostom. It apparently originated with Abigail van Buren, of “Dear Abbey” fame.⁸ But hospitals, like theaters and restaurants, are pragmatic, customer-centered institutions. If the consumer steps foot in the hospital, he or she doesn’t care if the nurse is male or the doctor is female as long as they are competent.

The only reason to exclude women from church leadership, then, is because we don’t think they can do the job, so the consumer assumes. Sociologist Peter Beyer notes that modernity-strong normative institutions, like the church, have lost much of their power to determine who may or may not do what. Instead, functional criteria have taken over. We discriminate now not by race, nationality, or even gender but by the ability of the person to carry out the task in a way that meets the organization’s goals. Discrimination, in a consumer culture, follows functional criteria.⁹ So, consumerism assumes that if a woman can communicate as well as a man, provide pastoral counseling as well as a man, administer the sacraments as well as a man, and in every other way function as well as a man then there is no reason to exclude her from the pastorate. Hence, in a modern, consumer culture, egalitarianism will be the natural, de-fault position.¹⁰ The assumption – rarely confronted – is that the church is a customer-centered institution and the pastor is its functionary, like a chef to a restaurant or a doctor to a hospital, a cog in a machine that can be replaced. That assumption is the question.

Many complementarians, regrettably, haven’t ferreted out that assumption. They will say that women cannot perform the “functions of a pastor.” The question here, though, is a pastor just a functionary, like a chef at your favorite restaurant is just a functionary and you don’t care whether he or she is male or female, as long as he or she cooks a good meal? Functional complementarians restrict women’s roles because of their (admirable) commitment to scripture. But, if they’re not careful, the consumer culture will teach them that the church is a retail out-let for a spiritual product. Then, pragmatism will win the debate that “egalitarianism” couldn’t. They’ll misunderstand the church and, so, the role of men in ministry and thus the role of women in ministry. So, what is the church?

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John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022) and the Covenant Caswell substack.

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1. On the “second Great Awakening” in cycles of American religion, see John B. Carpenter, “The Fourth Great Awakening Or Apostasy: Is American Evangelicalism Cycling Upwards Or Spiraling Downwards?,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 44/4 (December 2001), 647-70. ↩︎
2. Wells, God in the Wasteland, 82. He goes on, “and this is precisely what the gospel insists cannot be the case.” ↩︎
3. This paragraph was inspired by Mark Dever’s introduction to his sermon on 1 Corinthians, The Message of the New Testament, 170. The audio is illustrated at “Mark Dever on the Use of the Church,” Covenant Caswell YouTube Channel. ↩︎
4. “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,” Episode 6, “The Brand,” accessed 8/5/2021, starts at 21:53. ↩︎
5. The divorce rate was 39% in the USA as of 2018. (Belinda Luscombe, “The Divorce Rate Is Dropping. That May Not Actually Be Good News,” Time, November 26, 2018., accessed September 27, 2021.) ↩︎
6. Charles W. Deweese, Baptist Church Covenants (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1990), 88, 91. ↩︎
7. Jonathan Leeman, “Does Complementarianism Lead to Abuse?: A Response to Mimi Haddad, ‘Helping the Church Understand Biblical Equality’” and Kylie Maddox Pidgeon, “Complementarianism and Domestic Abuse,” Eikon (The Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, June 22, 2023.) ↩︎
8. Abigail van Buren, “Dear Abbey . . . Sinners and Saints,” Park City Daily News, March 29, 1964, , accessed December 20, 2021. ↩︎
9. Peter Beyer, Religion and Globalization (London: Sage Publications, 1994), 59. ↩︎
10. Russell Moore, “After Patriarchy, What? Why Egalitarians Are Winning the Gender Debate,” JETS 49 (2006: 569–76), 572. ↩︎