THOUGHTFULLY DRIVING THE PORCELAIN BUS

A Column by John S Schroeder

October 5, 2002

PROSPERITY is not necessarily all that it is cracked up to be. No, I am not talking about the old cliché; "Money can't buy happiness." I am talking about something far more serious. In my opinion, prosperity can lead to two related and important problems, 1) a loss of moral grounding, and 2) isolation.

I should start by stating that anyone reading this is prosperous, whether you believe it or not. It has been my privilege to travel to some pretty exotic places in this world. In many places I have witnessed common working people living to standards far below what people in the West would call poverty. In China the Chairman of the Board of a large company told me he would not entertain me in his home because the average welfare recipient in America lived better than he did, and he had been to America so he should know. I have met people in the Ukrainian countryside who lived in one-room cabins on sustenance farming. And yet, I have not been to the most impoverished places on earth like India or sub-Saharan Africa. We are prosperous. The poorest of the poor in this country live well by comparison to those in real poverty.

I find it very informative that the "morals" and "values" if not entirely synonymous and heavily interrelated. What we learn from this is that our societal rules for behavior are based largely on what we consider is important. When one is prosperous, when many of the basic necessities of life are not difficult or even expensive to obtain, those necessities lose apparent importance, and this creates the opportunity for a moral shift.

Look at it this way, when people were poor they might have an apple tree in the backyard. The fruit from that tree was carefully harvested and canned and preserved and used to feed the family throughout the year. If you stole an apple from that tree you were perhaps robbing that family of a meal. If you were a child in that home and picked apples to throw at friends, chances are you were punished because of how it hurt the family. I had an apple tree in the backyard, but grew up prosperous. Our apples were commonly projectiles of various uses. Even when I tried to eat them they did not taste as good as the ones from the grocery store so I threw them away with just a bite or two gone. Because the apples from that tree were of no value to our family, there was no moral consequence to using the apples for all sorts of unforeseen purposes. If someone else came over and picked them it mostly meant I would not have to pick them up before I cut the grass.

In this apple tree example we have seen the definition of "theft" eroded. The person that prevented me from picking up the apples was still technically stealing the apples from my yard, but my prosperity enabled me not to make a big deal out of it.

Prosperity also isolates us. The more we have, the less interdependent we are. If I have an apple tree and you have a pig, a trade, or maybe even eating together makes a lot of sense. But if we can both buy what we want at the grocery store, why bother? This lessening of interdependence makes us more and more self-involved. Such self-involvement generally turns to narcissism, which, in the end, further erodes morality as we have examined in these spaces before.

It is a nasty little downward spiral and if you look at our society today it is rather evident. How do we overcome it? Should we all reduce ourselves to poverty? Of course not! But this goes a long way to explain why I fight so hard for the church. The only way to overcome this kind of self-involved downward spiral is to have people come to the realization that they are a part of something larger than themselves.

I believe the church is the last place where a person can find that sense of being a part of something larger. In the past one could also do that with their nations, but we have become so prosperous that the last war we fought seemed like a TV show. Our prosperity is so great that even a major war does not require the participation of the entire nation. The stakes of war are no longer high enough to create the necessary focus and unity.

In light of that fact, eternity appears to be the only stake that has any hope of being high enough. Anything less and people can retreat into their own little narcissistic bubbles. Part of me also wonders if individual salvation is enough anymore. Too often I hear people act like eternity is their choice too; the stakes have to be eternity for everyone.

What is most amazing though is that I am not talking about some sort of marketing scheme. Eternity really is at stake. Eternity for everyone really is at stake. We have failed miserably in helping people to understand what is at stake in the church, and religion, and individual lives. There is far more at stake then whether one goes to hell or not. There is far more at stake than whether one feels good about oneself or not.

And this, I think is because the church is too prosperous too. It is just too easy in this day and age to raise some money and hire somebody for this or that. More than that, it seems like the more money an institution has, the more fighting there is over how to spend it, and the more fighting there is, the more incivility, the more incivility, the less the Holy Spirit shines.

Maybe another way to look at it is this. The more prosperous, the more options. The more options the more difficult it is to create a central focus.

The church cannot afford to lose its central focus. The central focus of the church is not homeless shelters, worthy though they are. The central focus of the church is not Sunday School, most worthy though that is. The central focus of the church is not the building, beautiful though it may be.

The central focus of the church is Jesus Christ and His efforts to establish the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God resides in us, not in earthly structures and institutions. The central focus of the church is to convince each of us of our need for God, and help us to find Him.

Do we need to give up prosperity to maintain this focus? Not necessarily, but it sure does not help. We have to focus beyond the prosperity. The only way I know to do that is, one more time, back to basics: scripture and prayer. The personal spiritual disciplines.

Join me.

With Love,