How Do You Preach to the Consumers In Your Church?

This is the fourth post of a five-part series based on Pastor Daniel Im’s book, The Discipleship Opportunity: Leading a Great-Commission Church in a Post-Everything World. In his previous post, Daniel explained the mindset of a “seeker,” and how to preach to them. In this post, Daniel will talk about the type of church-goers that he calls “consumers”—people who are a Christians but is more concerned about what they get out of showing up at your church then how they can collaborate in living the gospel.

In my first post about “sleepers,” I wrote about God breathing into the dry bones of sleepers and awakening them through His Holy Spirit. Remember how Ezekiel’s involvement was a picture of how God is inviting us to partner with Him to awaken the sleepers all around us? Well, it’s the same with consumers. And while only the Holy Spirit can shake consumers out of their spiritual rut, He wants to do this through you and me—through disciples and through a change in how we approach discipleship in today’s post-everything world. What an incredible discipleship opportunity we have!

Here’s the thing: You must stop trying to please the consumers in your church and community. Don’t obsess over the online reviews of your church either. It’s a lose-lose situation. If you try to please the consumers, you’ll end up losing the interested non-Christians (seekers) and the interested Christians (disciples). And when you inevitably upset or displease the consumers, they’ll just go somewhere else that will cater to their comfort, convenience, and choice. And yes, I recognize that by doing this, you’re running the risk of losing big donors. And if you lose them, then how are you going to do ministry? Pay the bills? Keep the doors of the church open? Support your family? Those are all legitimate questions, but God never asked you to please people. I’m thankful that the apostle Paul and members of the early church also wrestled with similar temptations. Just consider Paul’s thoughts on people-pleasing:

Am I now trying to persuade people, or God? Or am I striving to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.

GALATIANS 1:10

Whatever you do, do it from the heart, as something done for the Lord and not for people, knowing that you will receive the reward of an inheritance from the Lord. You serve the Lord Christ.

COLOSSIANS 3:23-24

So stop doing whatever you’re doing that’s feeding a consumeristic mindset, however unintentional it might be. Stop perpetuating the notion that the church is a dispenser of religious goods and services. Stop competing with other churches in your community. And stop making comfort, convenience, and choice a primary lens for decision making—for you and for your congregation.

When you stop all this nonsense, you will start starving the consumers to a point of decision. They will leave your church and continue their consumeristic ways by finding somewhere else that will accommodate and feed their appetite. Or the Holy Spirit will convict and remind them that following Jesus has always been about denying themselves, taking up His cross daily, and following Him (Luke 9:23). And if the latter happens—I’ve seen it happen—consumers will become disciples again. They will move from being uninterested Christians to being interested once again. In the first post in this series, the preaching section for sleepers (uninterested non-Christians) was short and sweet. The point was simple: Focus on the interested. Don’t worry about preaching to the uninterested non-Christians because they aren’t there anymore. They’ve left.

Can the same be said about consumers? Should we stop trying to appease them since they are uninterested anyway?

No! As I’ve been wrestling with this question for quite some time, I’ve concluded that we can’t ignore the consumers. We need to pray that God would stir and sanctify them, but we can’t simply pass over them in our preaching. We can’t assume that they aren’t there, because they are! They are sitting in our sanctuaries. They are listening to our sermons. And too often, they are the ones who send us “constructive feedback” because they want to “help.” So how are we to speak to them?

To answer that question, we first need to recognize that consumers just want their ears tickled. Culture has conditioned them that way. Consumers have an itch to hear what they want to hear, and if they don’t get it, they’ll either complain or go somewhere else. So instead of acquiescing to their demands, being held hostage to their criticism, or being surprised by any of this, we need to...

preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; correct, rebuke, and encourage with great patience and teaching. For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, will multiply teachers for themselves because they have an itch to hear what they want to hear. They will turn away from hearing the truth and will turn aside to myths. But as for you, exercise self-control in everything, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.

2 TIMOTHY 4:2-5

We need to preach in a way that disturbs their comfortable lives, disrupts their obsession with convenience, and challenges their choices. To do this, we need to discern what aches they are trying to satisfy through counterfeit gods. What are the cultural and spiritual strongholds that they are bowing down to? Is it money, sex, or power? Is it one of the seven deadly sins (pride, envy, wrath, gluttony, lust, sloth, or greed)? Or perhaps it’s one of these nine “cathedrals”—each with their own sacred texts and canonical traditions—that author and theologian Leonard Sweet wrote about in his book Rings of Fire:

• Blue-Dome Cathedrals: The worship of Gaia, or Mother Earth. One of the “high and holy days that dare not be desecrated” is “the opening of deer-hunting season.”


• The Cathedral Market: The worship of Wall Street. “Money is god. Economy is religion. Understanding the market is theology.”


• The Cathedral Mall: The worship of consumerism. “Consumer culture rips off our wallets as it rips apart our souls.”\


• Cathedral of Sports: The worship of sports. “For most of the planet, FIFA World Cup is world communion.”


• Cathedrals of Experience: The worship of experience. “The sacralization of experiences exists everywhere from food to tourism to worship itself.”


• The Cathedral Celeb: The worship of celebrities. “A celebrity culture worships the golden calf of personality and cares little for personhood.”


• The Corporate Cathedral: The worship of corporations. “Steve Jobs dubbed the iPhone ‘the Jesus phone’ and was quite aware of his status as a tech messiah.”


• The Cathedral Kitchen: The worship of food. “Food is now a sacred experience, with high priests (‘celebrity chefs’), denominations, rituals, and sanctuary kitchens.”


• The Cathedral of Self: The worship of self. “‘Selfies’ are appropriately named.”

To disturb, disrupt, and challenge the consumers in your church, spend time prayerfully discerning which of these cultural or spiritual strongholds you can dismantle in light of the scriptural text you are going to be preaching through. These aren’t the main points of your sermon or the only things you’ll be talking about. Instead, think of these as tools that will help you connect and relate with consumers in your introduction, illustrations, and/or conclusion.

For example, if the central text for your sermon is Philippians 1:18-26, the pertinent ache consumers in your church are trying to satisfy through counterfeit gods could be the fear of death, or a reticence to think about it. With Philippians 2:1-4, the stronghold you address could be how divisive our culture has become and how that’s seeped into the church. With Ephesians 6:10-13, it could be how Christians have often either overemphasized or underemphasized the spiritual world. Or with Mark 1:1-8, you could talk about commitment phobia.

By naming and addressing the cultural or spiritual stronghold that you are trying to dismantle, your sermons will make consumers feel uncomfortable, since you are disturbing, disrupting, and challenging them. This is a good thing because it will move them to action. They will either starve or be sanctified. But it’s important not to stop there, or only focus on that.

Preaching isn’t just about disturbing the comfortable; it’s also about comforting the disturbed (as quoted by English professor, poet, and writer Chad Walsh). So yes, the consumers in your church should be confronted with their sins and idols—they desperately need to be—but they should also be invited into the forgiveness, grace, and love of Jesus. After all, isn’t the gospel of Jesus a message of wrath and love? Judgment and salvation? Death and resurrection? Hell and heaven? Repentance and forgiveness? Salvation and sanctification? Trials and joy? Restraint and freedom?

In the next post, you’ll read how to walk alongside Christians in your church committed to living the gospel (the disciples).

Daniel Im is a pastor, Bible teacher, writer, and podcast host with a passion for the local church. He is the lead pastor of Beulah Alliance Church and the author of No Silver Bullets,Planning Missional Churches, and You Are What You Do: And Six Other Lies about Work, Life, and Love. He lives in Edmonton, Alberta with his wife Christina and their three children. For more information, visit danielim.com and connect with him on social media @danielsangi.

Want to share this with members of your church? The Disciplemaker blog from NavPress has published a series of articles from Daniel Im written for your church members.