Shopping with Jesus
by Jim Miller

Christmas rolled around last year, right on schedule as I recall, and with it the annual platitudes about consumerized Christianity. One sophomore said to me, "Isn’t it weird that I spent a ton of money at Nordstrom's to celebrate a God who was born in a barn? Can you imagine a Nordstrom's in Bethlehem?"

So along with thousands of my youth ministry colleagues around the world, I jumped at the opportunity to address the ills of a consumer culture. At our meeting that week, I strode to the front of the crowd in my Gap baseball cap and Dockers, tripping over a new Fender amp, and introduced a PowerPoint presentation on our 50" TV. The first slide read, "The Evils of Materialism." [Sigh.]

Christians have a long history of poo-pooing the "worldly" as if we were immune to it. Not so different are the many youth ministers who happily take advantage of the best resources money can buy but complain about the commercialization of Christmas.

I’m now doing all this differently. I had set myself up for failure by assuming the worldly and the spiritual could be totally divorced. Now I’m teaching my students to claim the material world for God. A few weeks ago I gave the same talk again. This time the first PowerPoint slide read, "Shopping With Jesus."

The either/or mentality failed me. I couldn’t find a way to communicate with kids without venturing into the world of fashion, advertising, publicity and consumerism; that's the language they speak. I looked like a hypocrite, because, while I am frugal, I’m not a Franciscan. I’m now trying to turn the secular into something sacred. Shopping at the mall can be an act of faithfulness to the Sovereign Lord who cares where we put our treasure and where our eyes wander.

So I go shopping with my students. We hold a hide-and-seek type event at the local mall, during which college students dress in disguise and hide behind racks, disappear into dressing rooms and pose with the mannequins. The familiar turf brings out the crowds and opens up the chance to talk Christ and culture with them. Outside of the occasionally boycotted Abercrombie & Fitch, I asked one senior, "What’s the difference between Christian shopping and culture shopping?" Her response was piercing, "Christians say wear more and spend less. The culture says wear less and spend more."

If I scold my students for wasting money, they sneak into back alley Banana Republics and dimly lit Old Navys and spend it without my supervision. But when we spend it together, we think together. I can assure them that their net worth isn’t the same as their self worth, that their value isn’t determined by their valuables. Thus the secular world of spending becomes sacred.

By turning shopping into a sacred event, I have the unique opportunity to create a biblical counterculture to materialism, and turn materialists into missionaries.

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