The Consumer Church and the Death of Dependence

For the last week of my father's life I sat by his bed with a notebook and tried to write down everything before it was gone.

He was Ilie. A Romanian who read his Bible until the cover fell off. An immigrant who never learned to trust comfort.

I expected those days to be a fog. They were not. His memory was clearer that week than mine has ever been, and we talked about things we had never made time for while there was time.

At some point I asked him what I should do about the farm.

There was tension over the land. Some of the family had never worked it and were uncertain what it cost and what it earned. There was the low talk that gathers around a sick man's bed, the arithmetic of an estate, the quiet rumors about how he was being cared for. I asked the question half hoping for a plan.

He did not give me one.

He gave me the sentence he had been giving people his whole life. True religion, he said, is caring for the orphan and the widow and the unfortunate. He meant the verse. James had taught it to him long before I ever read it to anyone.

True religion was not going to church. It was looking after the ones who cannot look after themselves.

He said this while he was dying. On the farm. In the middle of the exact pressure that turns men selfish — an estate, its rumors, a bed surrounded — he reached past all of it for the one thing that mattered.

He had handed me the cure. It would take me years to understand the disease it answers.

The Disease Beneath the Disease

Near the end of his own life, Derek Prince preached on the fierce times the apostle Paul said were coming.

What stayed with me was not the warning but the certainty under it. Paul almost never tells Timothy to be sure of a thing the way he does here. And the trouble, Paul says, is not the government, or the godless, or the spirit of the age. It is the rot in human character itself.

At the head of his long catalog of last-days vices sits the root of all the others. The Greek word is philautoi. Lovers of self.

Prince was right about the disease. What he said less about is what feeds it.

In a single generation we have built the finest habitat for self-love anyone has ever built. We have called it comfort. And we have moved in.

The Man Who Eats and Never Gives

I used to call them city Christians. It is an unfair phrase, and I will trade it for a better one shortly. But let me describe the man first.

He is not a bad man. He would be hurt to hear himself called selfish, because he never does anything you could point at.

He goes to church. He listens to good preaching — more of it than his grandparents could have imagined, piped into the car on the commute. He has views on the end times. He can review a sermon the way other men review a movie.

He enjoys the Word of God. He feeds on it his whole life and never once hands it to anyone.

There is no ministry in him, because no one in his life needs him to have one. No widow on his street he could name. No orphan who is his to worry about. His giving is a line on a statement, automatic and painless, forgotten by the time it clears.

If he stopped tomorrow, nothing would fall apart. No animal would go unfed. No field unworked. No one left waiting.

He is self-sufficient in the saddest meaning of the word. A man nothing depends on.

That is what self-love comes to in ordinary life. Not cruelty. Not greed of the cartoon kind. Just a life sealed neatly around its own preferences, with the doors of dependence shut on both sides.

Cultivators and Consumers

Here I have to watch my own instinct, because the easy version of this is nostalgia, and nostalgia lies.

The problem is not the city. There are saints in the inner city spending their lives on other people, and there are ranchers who are misers and tyrants behind a hundred acres of fence. The countryside was never holier. Its history is full of cruelty.

So the line I am drawing is not country against city. It runs between the cultivator and the consumer.

The suburb is only the place where the consumer reaches his purest form.

Everything around a consumer is built to remove dependence in both directions.

He depends on no one he can see. The food arrives. The water runs. The heat comes up through the floor, and the men and machinery behind all of it stay invisible, folded into a monthly bill.

And no one he can see depends on him. Nothing waits for him at five in the morning. Nothing dies if he forgets it. Nothing softens or hardens according to whether he gets out of bed.

Needing no one, and needed by no one. It sounds like freedom.

It is the exact soil self-love requires. And you cannot fight an appetite you have arranged never to feel.

The Farm Does Not Save Anyone

Let me say this once and not belabor it.

The farm regenerates no one. Grace belongs to God alone. But grace has always placed God's people inside circumstances that teach dependence, and the farm happens to be one of those places. It does not make a man holy. It makes him available to the lesson.

The Man at the Fence

I have seen the other failure too. With my own eyes.

I have watched a man with Christ in his mouth refuse his neighbor a path across his land, the refusal wrapped in his own reading of an easement and defended down to the inch.

I have watched a man who calls himself a preacher threaten to hurt somebody over a few feet of ground and a line on a deed.

These men have everything I just praised. Dependents. Labor. The cross of the early morning. And they are tyrants.

So the farm does not make a man unselfish. I know it because I have stood next to the proof.

But notice where the selfishness comes out. Not in laziness, and not in absence, but at the property line — at the easement, the boundary, justified and ready to fight over an inch.

The consumer's selfishness is numb. He never fights anyone, because nothing depends on him, and his self-love runs so smoothly he cannot feel it. He could die without ever suspecting he was selfish.

The rancher's selfishness is armed. He took the very things that should have schooled him in dependence — the neighbor, the shared road, the common water — and made them a territory to guard.

And that, strangely, is almost a mercy. Because he can see it.

A sin standing in the road at noon can be named. And a sin that can be named can be repented of. The man fighting over the easement at least knows the address of his idol.

The comfortable man does not, and never will, because nothing in his life will ever drag the thing into the open.

Country and city both grow selfish men. Only one of them lets a man find out about himself — a light switched on in a room where something was hiding.

Is This a Joke?

A woman called me the other day from one of our RV sites.

Is this a joke?

I asked what she meant. There were animals everywhere, she said. Baby goats screaming. Weeds. Horse manure in the road. She listed it the way you would list the faults of a broken appliance.

I told her, as kindly as I could, that she had booked a working ranch and not a corporation's parking lot. The goats and the weeds and the manure were not failures of housekeeping. They were the place itself, being what it is.

Then I offered her a full refund, which is the honest thing to give someone who has landed in the wrong country by accident.

She had come, I learned, from a corporate park down the road. Level concrete pads. Full hookups. The kind of place built so that nothing alive ever brushes up against you.

I can usually spot her before she calls.

The guest whose whole day is wrecked by a fly, or a weed, or the smell of an animal being an animal, tells you who he is in his first sentence. Selfishness announces itself. It cannot help it.

To someone the farm has shaped, manure in the road and a goat hollering at first light are signs that something is alive. To the consumer they are defects. Proof that somebody has not done his job.

He is not cruel. He simply cannot see life anymore. A lifetime of smooth transactions has taught him to read every rough edge as a mistake, and every mistake as something to report to a manager — so that when he finally meets creation, he takes it for a malfunction.

Here is the part I would leave out if it were not true.

The place she came from — the clean one, with the pads and the hookups — was, by the account that reached me, the place where the water had been making people sick.

I will not judge a neighbor, and I will name no one. I only notice the shape of the thing.

The dirty farm was clean at the source.

The clean park was poisoned at the source.

The insulation that promised to keep every living thing at arm's length delivered the sickness instead. Fullness of bread. The well-appointed house is the diseased one.

There is an old word for what the manure does in that road. Skandalon. The stumbling block. The stone set in the path for men to trip over.

Scripture is not shy about calling the gospel itself an offense — a rock laid down so that some men break themselves on it and others build their lives on it.

The offense is not a flaw in the thing. It is how the thing sorts people.

There is a proverb for this, older than the gospel these people think they are keeping. Where no oxen are, the crib is clean: but much increase is by the strength of the ox.

The empty stall is spotless. It is also barren.

The mess and the harvest come from the same animal. You do not get the strength of the ox without the dung of the ox.

I have known many Christians who cannot bear disorder of any kind, and who take their own tidiness for holiness. The clean crib looks like righteousness. But the same fastidiousness that keeps the stall spotless is what shuts them down the moment real life walks in — the poor man who smells, the neighbor whose trouble is messy, the world with its weeds and its need.

They have mistaken the absence of oxen for virtue. They cannot see that the order they are so proud of is the proof of their barrenness. Nothing gets in, and so nothing gets out.

A sanitized Christianity is built for them. It paves the offense over to keep the consumer comfortable. It takes out the cost, the cross, the bother of real bodies depending on you — the goat at dawn, the dung in the lane — and calls what is left hospitality.

It is the corporate park with the lovely hookups and the bad water.

It draws a crowd for a while. And it cannot give life, because it has scrubbed away the very things life arrives wrapped in.

You cannot keep the spring-fed lake and refuse the weeds at its edge. You cannot have the living thing without what the living thing leaves behind.

So I have stopped apologizing for the manure.

I offer the refund without resentment, and I let the offense do its sorting. It turns away the man who wanted a product. It keeps the ones who wanted the place.

The stone in the road is not a defect in what we offer. It is the gate.

Spring Lake Ranch, like the gospel it sits under, was never built to please everyone. It is a sieve.

The manure is doing exactly the work it was put there to do.