It’s the Third Century BC, and on a hillside in Athens an audience has gathered to watch the latest theatrical performance. In a thrilling tale, the characters have been set up for a complex climax. What will happen? How will this get resolved? Then, from above, a familiar and formidable face descends onto set. A god has entered the fray, and with divine power resolves the complex plot with supernatural intervention. The audience boos. Yet again, sloppy script-writing has taken the easy way out and robbed the human drama of its meaning.
When 20th Century German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his Letters and Papers from Prison, he referred to the god-on-a-wire of the Greek playwrights. It was known as the deus ex machina – literally god from the machine – and it was infamous as a tool for those who could only offer easy answers. We have reduced God to a deus ex machina, claimed Bonhoeffer. Our God intervenes to make complicated life nice and simple, giving us what we need just when we need it.
Consumerism is the deus ex machina of our age. As a secular society we have placed our faith in the god-on-a-wire who offers to solve all our problems with products and services. We have literally sold our souls to this god; our economic systems are predicated on consumer spending as the primary engine of growth. The planet can’t sustain it, but we can’t stop it. Our narratives are like many ancient Greek scripts: tired out but unable to find a creative alternative.
Youth work in the age of consumerism must deal with these profoundly theological issues. Consumerism is not just a behaviour; the rampant buying of stuff in a desperate quest for satisfaction. It’s not just an attitude; a resolute belief that the world should satisfy our desires and demands. Consumerism is so much more even than that. It is a theological system. It is an entire way of running the world that defines our identity, our relationships, and how we live and act in the world. It’s a god that promises salvation but demands everything from us in delivering it.
We won’t figure out what to do with consumerism by designing better youth programmes or even cultivating different values, although that might be an important part of it. To really begin to deal with the totalising power of consumer culture we need a powerful theology that can subvert the norm and offer us an alternative.
Our traditional theology has not been up to the task. But with a different, more biblical, understanding of the kingdom of God we can create space for an alternative to the oppression of consumer culture, empowering young people to create a new future for us all.
THE SHAPE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD
‘The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed,’ says Jesus, ‘because the kingdom of God is in your midst’ (Luke 17:20-21). For hundreds of years, the Jewish people had imagined the kingdom of God to be something they could very well observe. It would come on the back of a mighty military campaign, led by the Messiah. Everyone would know it had come because Yahweh would rule from his temple on Mount Zion. It would spell the end of all other empires: finally the empire of Israel would rise in glorious splendour for all to see.
Mark opens his Gospel by saying, ‘The beginning of the gospel of Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.’ The word gospel was well-known in Jesus’ day. When Caesar won a military victory his ambassadors would ride throughout the Roman empire proclaiming the gospel of Caesar, the son of god: the ‘good news’ that he had conquered and his kingdom was advancing.
So when Mark writes that there’s a gospel of Jesus, it’s pretty incendiary stuff. And not only that. Mark also calls Jesus the Messiah, which everyone knew was the title for this revolutionary figure. To cap it all off, he calls Jesus the son of God, the title Caesar had adopted to give his reign divine legitimacy. The opening of Mark’s Gospel is a blazing political challenge. The days of Caesar are numbered: a new king has come.
This Jesus, the Messiah – the son of God with a gospel to rival Caesar’s – has no army, no chariots, no swords. He does not enter Jerusalem as a liberator should, but comes on a donkey with a dancing entourage of children. He doesn’t make for the Roman palace, but for the temple to challenge religious oppression.
So what does the kingdom of God mean? Why does Jesus talk so much about it if he’s going to bail on the idea? Jesus brings a new kingdom that is much more profound than the redrawing of a political map and much more significant than who is on the throne. Jesus’ kingdom challenges the authority of Rome over the minds and hearts of its people. It creates a space within communities for people to experience freedom. Rome might own the roads, the water supply and the currency; it might govern when you can leave your house and when you must return. But it cannot police your mind. It cannot colonise your soul; at least, not if you don’t let it!
The kingdom of God is the ever-elusive freedom of a space outside the oppressive system; a rival power that plays by entirely different rules. The powers of this world rule with doctrines. The kingdom of God holds back the doctrines to create space for freedom. And this is the gospel: that the kingdom of God is at hand. It is here, within reach. It is in our midst.
Consumerism is not just a behaviour; it is a theological system
A NEW OPPRESSION
Mental health charity YoungMinds recently published the results of research it had done with around 2,000 11 to 24-year-olds across Britain. More than half said they believed they would be a failure if they didn’t get good grades. Half had been bullied, with a third saying they didn’t know who to turn to when they felt depressed or anxious. More than half of 11 to 14-year-olds said they had seen online pornography, with 40 per cent of those saying it had affected their relationships with other people their age.
This is the power of consumerism. We are not living under an oppressive political empire (whatever you think of the coalition government!). Hard-won freedoms make our lives unimaginably different from First-Century Palestine under Roman rule. But we are still not free. Today’s battle is for the mind and the soul. And when it comes to young people we are losing that battle.
Our consumer-driven education system is so obsessed with meeting grade-based targets in order to offer league table places to parents that young people are basing their entire self-worth as human beings on the outcome of their exams. We have consumer-driven identity formation so forceful in its demands that young people believe their ability to participate in society rests on the brands they wear, on the shape of their bodies; that the gadgets, shoes and haircuts must be right or they will bear the shame of exclusion. We have a consumerdriven culture of sexuality among young people that is unlike anything we could have imagined even ten years ago. The internet has brought with it a landslide of pornography, which is reshaping the way young people view their bodies and their relationships” and turning huge swathes of young people into sex addicts and sex objects.
None of these realities are new. But the scale of their power is.
Under this oppression young people don’t need any more doctrines; What they need is space
CREATING SPACE TO EXPLORE LIFE
Under this oppression, young people don’t need any more doctrines. They have enough doctrines foisted on them from the education system, consumer culture and their peers. What they need is space. Not a vacuum, but a space to be free from the relentless pressure heaped on them; a space to explore life for themselves; a space for their souls to breathe and their minds to reflect; a space in which they are not judged or cajoled or pressured, but in which they can begin to find life; a life in all its fullness.
We’ve tended to talk as if helping young people to think for themselves is a woolly, wishy-washy, ‘liberal’ approach to faith, where we shy away from the difficult truth of God’s word and its demand on our lives. It’s not what we think that matters, we say, but what God thinks.
The problem with this approach is that it assumes that God’s word is clear. We know how we should live but choose not to. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never found it very straightforward to think about the place of education and grades in my life. Do they matter or not? It’s sort of both, right? What about self-worth? I’m made in the image of God, but what does that mean? What about wealth? Should I be selling everything I have and giving it to the poor? What’s the acceptable limit on buying ethically? What about sexuality? If I’m not watching porn or having sex before I’m married, how am I expressing my sexuality? Or should I just shut down that part of my life for a while? Life is not straightforward, and on most of life’s difficult questions the scriptures aren’t either.
The truth, in fact, is that truth must be explored and discovered to become something that transforms. Young people need the gospel of Jesus, and another kingdom is within reach. A kingdom that challenges the culture that oppresses; a kingdom that does the muscular, difficult work of creating space so that people can find life. A kingdom that opens like a door onto a space that the oppression of the world can’t touch; a soulscape, where those who are weary can explore the landscape of their lives spiritually, intellectually, emotionally and vocationally; where those who have never been able to question the way the world is have the opportunity to imagine a different future.
truth must be explored and discovered to become something that transforms
A NEW PARADIGM FOR DISCIPLESHIP
The kingdom of God creates space to explore life. This is the theology that has the power to challenge consumerism. By using that space to unmask the deus ex machina of consumer culture we provide an empowering environment for young people to critically reflect on their lives, on the doctrines that drive them, and through which they can find the faith to imagine an alternative.
In youth work we describe this process as ‘reflective practice’. As we reflect selfcritically on our youth work in order to do it better, we also encounter the various doctrines (whether Christian or secular) that drive us. In response, we reimagine our practice with greater self-awareness and the cycle of reflection continues. However, reflective practice is usually studied as a youth work discipline. In other words, it’s something we do as youth workers. It’s not necessarily something we teach young people to do.
The theology that the kingdom of God creates is a theology of reflective practice, and making it central to how we work could give us a new paradigm for discipleship with young people. In particular, it is a way to help bridge the gap that has opened up between Christian ‘youth work’ as a largely secular, education-focused, JNC-regulated activity undertaken by Christian youth workers and ‘youth ministry’ as a specifically discipleship-focused, church-based pursuit.
Disciple-making becomes a focus for both contexts by imagining Christian youth work as an act of strength undertaken on behalf of young people. The task of creating space for young people to explore life is not straightforward; it takes emotional, spiritual, pastoral and intellectual courage. As we work to create spaces – both physical and metaphorical – to hold back oppressive pressures, even for just small moments here and there, we are making opportunities for young people to be free to explore life so that they can create an alternative future. We are following Jesus by doing the very thing he did most effectively in his own life and ministry, and by teaching young people to do the same we are making disciples.
In the age of consumerism, young people need space to explore rather than another product to consume. The deus ex machina may be easier to market, but it only closes life down with simplistic solutions, whereas the God who holds open a space is at home with ambiguity and complexity. If we want to help young people move beyond consumer faith, we need to stop packaging God as a solve-all product. The God we see in Jesus suffers and dies; and in doing so opens a space for new life to emerge.
