My Weekend (Friday Night Group)

Here’s the report,
Fri Night – The group meets every second Friday, so on the off Friday Matt (the former blogger!) has gathered anyone who wants to get together to study a small booklet by Murray Sheard (TEAR) called “Living Simply – Studies in learning to live as Jesus did”. Study one, which has lasted 2 weeks so far is on “Serving both God and Money” (That is how not too!). It is a penetrating look at how mataerialism and consumerism has influenced our thinking as Christians and the church as a whole. Murray asks the question, “Is consumerism an enemy of religion?”. Graeme struggled with the definition of consumerism and prefered to lean toward materialism, but even then, he pushed us on defining just what we meant in those definitions. This was very helpful. Like any ‘ism’ consumerism to me has the conotation of a movement, a way of being. And based on that, I guess our culture is a consuming culture as a way of being. Is this just the way it is? I mean we all consume…at least something, we need to – just to survive. Like literally, I consume food water and air! But consumerism to me is like a religion, or cult that we are in but never chose to be, we just found ourselves in it, consuming, throwing out perfectly good stuff because the newer version is now here. Buying just because we feel like it, driven by advertising etc.
Anyway you get the picture of what our discussions evolve around.