Progress is Dirty

The following is a copy of the Thomas Question email devotional. You can subscribe to the email edition from our website.

www.worldometers.info falls into the category of truly neat websites which are worth a visit. It can give you an idea of the staggering amount of activity going on throughout our planet at any given moment. Births, deaths, hectares of forest lost, CO2 emissions, numbers of books published, etc, all of the numbers dancing wildly before your eyes. Particularly frightening is the section on the environment about a third of the way down. It gives an impression of alarm, to be sure. One can be left asking, “How long is this sustainable?” It’s almost like where in the cockpit of planet earth staring at gauges on a dashboard which have us on a collision course with something ominous. There’s no two ways around it. Progress is dirty, costly, wasteful and impossible to sustain at this pace.

Lester Brown reports that at the current rate, the Chinese economy will generate as much per person income as in the United States. It can be easy to feel happy for them – any movement away from poverty is a good thing. But what if they choose to live a North American lifestyle with their new found wealth as is the dream of so many around the world? Well, the results would be too disastrous to imagine. Their grain consumption alone would equal 2/3rds of the current world harvest. They would consume twice as much paper as is now produced and 10% more than the total world production of oil at current levels. And should they adopt the North American habit of having 3 cars for every 4 people, there would be 1.1 billion cars in China alone, which is well beyond the current world fleet of 800 million cars. Progress is dirty, costly, wasteful and impossible to sustain at this pace.

Two weeks ago, I said something in our Sunday service and it keeps coming back to me in my own life: “A need met and a need forgotten both feel the same.” Think about that. You can either meet your “needs” or forget your “needs”. And how much more efficient is the latter? Our pattern of wild consumption looks and feels like gluttony if you just take enough of a step back from it to see it objectively. We don’t just buy cars – we borrow huge sums in outrageous ways in order to buy shiny new cars. And what difference does it really make? (My friends will think I’m only writing this out of bitterness associated with our recent purchase of a station wagon – and they may be right).

We must look like terribly desperate people to be gobbling up so much. How much time does it take for an anticipated, shiny new purchase to make it’s way to the bottom of a closet and then the bottom of a landfill? Jesus imagined a vastly different and far more rewarding lifestyle for us. Maybe what we all need is a “stuff” diet in a big way.

Starting September 24th we’ll be diving into a whole new train of thought about the satisfied life and what it looks like. All with a single, over arching emphasis: how do we extract more genuine fulfillment with far less goose-chasing and resource-wasting. Is there a way we can sustain the state of being fulfilled without a sea of purchases to sustain it? True freedom isn’t having everything you need to feel good, rather, it’s not needing much of anything to feel good, at all, in the first place.

Invite someone to lunch this Sunday and bring them to The Thomas Question first. I hope to see you there,

CSW

LAST SUNDAY
The final message in our series on small, intentional steps to an actual practice of ancient Christianity. The focus of each week has been a single sentence you can carry with you as you go. Much of what we’ve looked at so far has been about how to do your life better. This final installment will have a much more intensively spiritual message, because, after all, the Christian life is about Christ. Listen to the whole series on our podcast or visit or website.

WE CAN NEVER DO THIS
Many of Jesus’ analogies about the Kingdom have a single thing in common: they anticipate an investment first and a reward later. Think of his agricultural analogies, the image of casting a net and that of building a house on rock or sand. It means Jesus, Christianity and church can never be a purely mental exercise. So don’t just ask yourself if you’ve experienced God lately, ask yourself if you’ve taken the kind of steps that could position you to experience God lately because they go hand in hand. And we’d love it if you would take a step at the Thomas Question. Who knows? Maybe in the process of building a great church for someone else, you may just find you give yourself The Kingdom.

SEPTEMBER 10 & 17
These will be great Sundays to bring anyone you can think of. We’ll be looking at the power of a dream and the problem with a dream – both of them having to do with passion, adventure and the life you could be living. It’s something almost anyone can identify with. I can almost guarantee they will go home surprised at what they’ve heard.