This week I visited the Christian Resources Exhibition (CRE) for the first time in a few years. It is an odd experience as, while, practically, a very useful opportunity to see a wide range of suppliers and products, it makes transparent the extent to which Christianity is immersed in capitalism at the same time that this reality is resolutely ignored.
The exhibition features well over 300 suppliers each with a product to sell yet this is not written about or spoken of as a commercial event instead it is described as an exhibition providing everything needed to resource, equip and empower the Church. In this way, the commercial nature of the event is disguised by the use of spiritual language to describe what occurs.
CRE also provides "practical and resourcing seminars" and workshops, together with opportunities to "enjoy the very best in Christian theatre and music" but again each are provided by those who have products to sell in the main exhibition. Unless you are willing to separate the presentations and performances from the product placement, this produces some odd disjunctions. So, Stuart Townend began leading worship by saying that this was time out from viewing cassocks to worship God. Yet, if worship is holistic, then viewing cassocks is as much worship as is singing songs, as, perhaps, is selling product which was, after all, among the reasons Townend was there as his most recent album was being heavily promoted in the main exhibition with a huge advert on the Kingsway stand featuring his face.
This is not intended as an attack on CRE or Townend (we'll be singing at least one of his songs tomorrow at St John's Seven Kings) but simply as an observation that we tend not, as a Church, to actively acknowledge the extent to which we imitate the consumerist Capitalist culture of which we are part. Now I would fully acknowledge that I am as complicit in this as the next person having chosen to work within existing structures and needing many of the suppliers and products at CRE in order to do mission and ministry at St John's Seven Kings. My main complaint is that we don't honestly acknowledge the reality of what we are doing but instead dress it up in spiritual language and, in fact, seem to need to do this in order to sell the products which we are promoting.
There are several implications. First, that we cannot truly provide an alternative to consumerism when we are so enmeshed in it ourselves. Second, that much of what we then promote is safe, rather than radical, at least in part because that is what sells. It was interesting to note that none of the groups involved in emerging church appeared to be represented at CRE and that those who are seen as representatives for that movement, which seeks to work at least to some extent outside of mainstream Christian structures and culture, were not being heavily promoted by those who were there at CRE. Having said that such groups are still implicated usually having their own product to sell albeit via other channels.
Can we escape the dilemma? Possibly not, or not fully, being part of a consumerist culture but the debate about the extent to which we may or may not cannot really start until we honestly acknowledge that the extent to which we participate in consumerism.
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The Jam - In The Crowd.
2 comments:
An interesting issue...
I generally release my compositions under a Creative Commons license, which allows non-profit reproduction without people having to seek my permission. Since some of the music I write is for small church choirs without much in the way of financial resources I'm very sympathetic to those who don't have a generous budget for buying new material. I do know that my work has been used by people I don't know personally, but only because they've been kind enough to get in touch. Sadly that doesn't buy my groceries.
In general I am strongly in favour of people donating their time and energy where possible.
But -- is not the worker worthy of her hire? The amount of work I put into playing the organ in my parish is such that I couldn't really afford to do it for free (and could not really afford to do it at the rate I am currently paid, except that my partner is supportive and earns considerably more than I do; he's atheist and quite anti-organised-religion, so the church should count itself lucky that he makes such a contribution).
I have had conversations with people who think that I should be donating all my services anyway, because it's church and therefore wrong to charge; these are usually people who don't have any idea how much work I actually do, or don't appreciate how much effort and expense went into learning the necessary skills. I am acutely aware that if I were to find myself in a position where I could work without pay, doing so would make it much harder for any subsequent organist to be paid reasonably, with predictable results in terms of finding someone with the skills and commitment to do the work. There are all sorts of issues here around the professionalization of worship but they are not new. In a situation where all participants are amateurs you will get professionals selling their materials or teaching outside the church structures (this happened with the traveling musicians in the West Gallery period, going from one parish to the next to teach new songs to Quires), so I would argue that a certain amount of church-endorsed professionalism is acceptable and even productive as long as it does not come to exclude all volunteer involvement.
I think I would be happier with a stipendiary model where I could be paid a modest amount, enough that I don't have to seek other sources of income, and then work full-time on a balance of work that is directly related to church music in the parish and on more "emerging" or less obviously worship-related projects. This structure doesn't exist for laity in the C of E (and for that matter I'm not entirely certain how well it works for clergy where there is no paid admin support), and so instead I try to make ends meet without doing anything too soul-destroying. There are days I think I'm being too precious about wanting my compositions to be freely available, but I realise that the traditional publishing route isn't going to be sufficiently profitable that I could expect to change my current lifestyle.
This got too long -- second comment to follow.
I agree with you about dressing the reality up in spiritual language. How much of this is the English distaste for discussing money at all? Most of the ads I see on the Tube are also dressing up practicalities in language and images which imply I will be happier or more fulfilled if I buy a certain product.
How much of the consumerist model with regard to creative material is actually a response to the way copyright law works these days, so that the content legally available for free is generally at least a century old? And what part should the church have in changing that model without damaging the livelihood of people who create such content now?
What would happen if any parish with a budget for new worship materials could commission at least some of those materials themselves, on the condition that the material then be made freely available for non-profit purposes? Obviously this doesn't work for physical resources like cassocks or consumables like candles, but I don't see why it couldn't work for sheet music or any other content that is easily transmissible by digital means.
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