The document discusses how consumerism has fragmented society and the church, leading the church to lose its communal identity and purpose. It argues that the church needs a new vision of itself as a public body that forms Christian identity and community, rather than seeing itself as just a private club. To do this, the church needs a theological anthropology and soteriology that sees salvation as reordering human desires through communal life in Christ, rather than just meaning-making or escape from boredom.

1. Session 11: Summary
MLDR510 2008
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2. False Formations & Imaginations
Consumerism as perverted liturgy
Fragments and atomizes ‘bodies’
What social ecclesiologies can resist this process?
Modern church lost it’s soul now it’s losing it’s body
Pilgrim Church vs Blueprint Church
Secularism: rescue from religious wars (false) imagination
Consumerism: rescue from boredom
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3. Church as public body
Secularism & Consumerism: christianity a private club/hobby
Responses: Fundamentalism vs Relevance - via media?
Protestants: so close to culture, to fickle, and development of
individual faith, collapse faith into the individual with consumerism
Torah: space time nexus and identity, pentecost new identity/
becoming, vs postmodern self creation
Need a new public for Christianity: habitat and conversion, identity
formation
Community as relief to individual, and individual as relief to
community
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4. Theological Anthropology &
Soteriology
Modern world: move from us as subject to God as subject
Autopoiesis: endless self creation
Death: is not punishment but result of individualism
Christian poiesis: grounded in Christ event, agency exchange,
cruciform life, not just meaning making
Luther: real freedom, being ‘rapt’ seized into freedom
Spirit on Mission to renew creation, through Christ event
Our task is to participate in this mission, with others, the Church
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5. Anthropology - Soteriology -
Ecclesiology
Our theological anthropology (what is meaning of life, identity,
humanity) determines our
Soteriology - How are saved and from what? Which determines
our
Ecclesiology (habit for that identity and rescue)
Evangelical Churches: warehousing people for heaven?
E/C: Saving people from church, and boredom?
Mega church: entertainment, it’s all about you?
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6. Anthropology - Soteriology -
Ecclesiology
What kind church do we need for:
1. A biblical anthropology: misplaced desire/disordered living,
desiring desire
2. Salvation: is redirecting our desires, training us, forming us with
others
3. Ecclesiology: What form of church enables that?
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