Book Review:
The Market Driven Church
By Udo W. Middelmann
Crossway Books, $14.99, 208 pages
Reviewed by
Joshua Anderson
05/07/04 In
the opening chapter of his recently published book, The Market
Driven Church, Udo Middelmann, born and educated in Germany,
favorably quotes from Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,
and comments, “De Tocqueville saw, even back then, a danger
in the marriage of too much power with too little wisdom. A nation
of producers, traders, and consumers runs the risk of measuring most
things by their motion, possibilities of the markets, and the speed
of the transaction and expected future results. What sells must be
good. People should be given what they like.” The influence
of democratic pluralism on American Christianity is essential to Middelmann's
argument, and the implicit message in referencing the 18th century
French writer is obvious; in the same way De Tocqueville’s geographic
and cultural distance from the United States gave him particular insights
into the health and future of our young country, Middelmann’s
European residence allows him to see with a clear vision how significant
and good or dangerous is the pervasive and seemingly inevitable cultural
impact of America upon its Church. And, at least for Middelmann, that
vision is bleak.
In the span of eight chapter essays, Middelmann outlines
an American church that has increasingly capitulated to the secular
culture around it by offering a version of Christianity that accentuates
“personal” truth at the expense of universal realities,
experiential evangelism instead of well-reasoned arguments for faith,
and a (sub) cultural influence that is expanding more because of the
lax theology of its consumers than any real creativity. One of Middelmann’s
most frequent complaints is characterized in his constant comparison
of the robust and expansive implications for all spheres of life promoted
in medieval, European Christianity with the frequently limited and
compartmentalized demands of the American Church, which seems content
to offer Christianity only as an comforting alternative to our culture’s
host of social problems (materialism, sexual brokenness, disrupted
families, etc.), rather than as a compelling world view which those
outside the church deny at their own peril. Specifically, Middelmann
fears that Christianity has allowed the surrounding pluralistic culture,
with its resistance to exclusive truth claims and universal realities,
to define the battleground on which Christians present their faith.
In a biting analysis that is typical of much of the book, he writes,
What was earlier an obligation for each person—to
choose to bow before the God and truth of the universe—has
been reduced to a personal (i.e., private) choice not at all that
different from other persons’ choices: Will you have decaf
or regular, white or black, sugar or sweetner? Evangelism is much
like the lady who says, “Let me tell you what exercise has
done in my life.”
The consequence of Christians relegating their faith
to the private world of their hearts shows itself in the prevalence
of America’s Christian subculture, which offers its own websites,
magazines, coffee houses, award shows, tv channels—in short,
a world of its own. Instead of standing outside secular culture while
at the same time reforming it, the American church is content to produce
an imitative Christian pop culture that is often far more “pop”
than it is Christian. In contrast to St. Paul, who placed an “intellectual
ax at the root of the [pagan culture’s] thinking,” Middelmann
sees a modern American Christianity that has largely withdrawn from
the definitive philosophical arguments of its day.
Where [the Church] once focused on right thinking
and a moral life in all spheres of society from inside the church,
she now competes for the time and dedication of the public with
such offerings as schools and gyms, bingo halls and adult education
programs. In the past she reached into the community. She has today
become an alternative community among many others.
Much of the problem, according to Middelmann, lies
in the overwhelming influence of postmodernism, which he calls a “justification
for an assumed freedom for our minds to see things only because and
when we see them.” In American Christianity, post-modern thinking
shows its influence by the emphasis, above all things, on the creation
and maintenance of the individual believer’s relationship with
Jesus. The historically important Biblical mandate to take dominion
of all of creation has somehow been lost under a blanket of best-selling
devotional books, prayer journals, and inspirational pop music (though
he does not mention it, the current craze regarding Rick Warren’s
Purpose Driven Life is a good example of this phenomenon).
“Rather than believing in ‘the light of the world’
or ‘the bread of life,’ we have reduced Christianity to
personal salvation, without being aware of the problems this creates,”
writes Middelmann, who argues that this introspective worldview inevitably
leads to an American church where "the emotive massage [has]
replace[d] the intelligent message.”
While there is much to commend in The Market Driven
Church, the book is not without several significant flaws, though
the fault may lie more with Crossway Books (the publisher) than the
author. Middelmann is not a native English speaker, and it shows throughout
his text, which is often characterized with poorly constructed sentences
and an overly simple style of writing. Additionally, there is much
wasted writing; two chapters in particular stand out as peripheral
to the book's goal—one is a poorly researched and hardly original
attack on the fatalistic implications of historic Calvinism in American
Christianity, the other an interesting, but unfocused, critique of
America's obsession with spectator sports. The fact these two chapters
are placed at the very end of the book adds to the feeling that they
are tacked on to add additional pages rather than additional insight.
Finally, as a book of loosely connected essays, Middelmann's book
sorely needs a thorough introduction; the lack of one can only be
characterized as a gross oversight by both its editor and author,
and will likely lead to many prospective readers getting muddled down
in attempting to discern Middelmann's thesis instead of weighing the
quality of his arguments.
There is particular frustration with the technical shortcomings
of The Market Driven Church because it is an important book;
the problems Middelmann identifies are genuine, and he proves to be adept
at showing how they relate—not to a lack of faith—but rather
to a limited and incorrect view of scripture. If the church is to again
provide a compelling alternative to the secular and pluralistic culture
around it, its members must learn to think and act biblically—an
argument Middelman presents, if not eloquently, then at least persuasively.
