What the church is up against

Jim Street observes how life around him seems to fall into the kind of commercial-brand-dominated lifestyles Doug Atkins describes in his book The Culting of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers. Here's Jim:

Atkins makes the point that the vacuum being created by the decline of traditional communities of meaning and coherence (i.e. churches, etc.) is being filled by brands. If that is the case, geography and church membership is not what is binding us together ( note: the root word for religion, religio, means "to bind together.") but our mutual commitments to particular brands.

"Blessed be the brand that ties."

We're not fighting against flesh and blood, "but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual wickedness in the heavenlies" (Eph. 6:12). As Jim Wallis asserts in his classic work, Agenda for Biblical People, ways in which those forces manifest themselves today include massive commercial interests.