“We spend, spend; amass, amass, indulge item by item, growing increasingly deaf to Jesus who described a simple life marked by generosity and underconsumption. Over time a new compartment develops for our spending habits, safely distanced from the other drawers like “discipleship” and “stewardship”…and listen, I am first in line…This isn’t a sage’s manifesto but a sinner’s repentance…I used to say, “But we [give money to church], and that money goes to stuff Jesus was all into.” Except many churches use it for marble floors and shiny buildings and cool videos and expensive mailers and pretty landscaping…
Journey with me on a quick sidebar for a moment: How have we let the church deteriorate like this? How is this okay? … We’ve engineered an elaborate two-step to justify this egregious spending on ourselves. We are far from Jesus’ original vision; the whole enterprise would be unrecognizable to our early church fathers. The earth is groaning, and we’re putting coffee bars in our thirty-five-million-dollar sanctuaries. Just because we can have it doesn’t mean we should. I marvel at how out of place simple, humble Jesus would be in today’s American churches.”
Jen Hatmaker, Seven: Clothes, Spending, Waste, Stress, Media, Possessions, Food – An Experimental Mutiny against Excess (Nashville: B&H Publishing, 2012) 157.