As a culture watcher, I can’t help but notice how quickly and extensively youth culture is changing. In many ways, we’re living in the midst of a cultural earthquake. The danger is that when you’ve been living on constantly shifting ground for so long, you are likely to miss the fact the ground and everything on top of it is shifting in major ways. If we aren’t going out of our way to pay attention, we will get swept up in the change and not notice that it’s happening. In effect, we throw caution to the wind, and we wind up willingly yet unknowingly jumping on board for the ride. The culture steers us rather than us allowing God’s Word to steer us through the culture.

For those of us who consciously are endeavoring to follow Jesus while leading others to do the same, we regularly need to be stepping back, looking, evaluating, discerning and responding. That’s the only way we will embrace a lifestyle marked by being in but not of the world.

I’m thinking about this today as a result of some thought-provoking reading I’ve been doing…specifically Paul Hiebert’s The Missiological Implications of Epistemological Shifts: Affirming Truth in a Modern/Postmodern World (Christian Mission & Modern Culture). This book offers one of the best descriptors and analysis of the modern to postmodern to post-post-postmodern that I’ve ever read. In essence, this book offers a bird’s-eye view of the often easily ignored earthquake that is shifting the cultural landscape and changing all of us in the process. This book describes our culture, our youth group kids, our institutions and ourselves.

About that earthquake…Hiebert quotes Peter Drucker’s description of history and the times: “Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. We cross what…has been called a divide. Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself—its worldview; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born…We are currently living through just such a transformation.”

Read that again. It’s significant. Our role is to figure out which changes to embrace and which to resist. That’s what discernment is all about. If we aren’t discerning, we nonchalantly tend to accept what is as the status quo or the way things should be. With the world turning over at a rate that I’m guessing is much faster than Drucker’s 50 years, our kids need our wisdom, culture-savvy and guidance all the more!

So…what’s one area in which we can step in with discernment, understanding and guidance? What’s one cultural reality we otherwise easily might ignore? One of the main changes we have to understand and confront is consumerism. Hiebert offers a compelling analysis of how the postmodern turn has fostered a consumerism that is driving our lives and perhaps more so the lives of the kids we know and love. Consider these little snippets from Hiebert:

• The pursuit of pleasure through consumption of commodities and services has become the dominant cultural value of postmodernity, replacing the deferral of gratification and self-denial. Remember the old Queen tune “I Want It All”? Freddy Mercury sings, “I want it all. I want it all. And, I want it now.” That’s the mantra for a materialistic generation and culture.

• Consumerism offers people meaning through buying and living the good life in a world in which they feel increasingly meaningless, insignificant and unreal. Have you heard the term retail therapy? Increasingly, individuals see the antidote to emptiness as being a trip to the mall.

• Consumerism is nourished by human dissatisfaction and craving. Once existing needs are met adequately, new needs must be created to keep the market going. Marketers know this vicious cycle. Why else would they constantly be designing new and updated styles to replace the old and make us feel dissatisfied with stuff we see as so yesterday…sometimes actually so yesterday? Obsolescence is built in by design.

• People who are relatively happy with their lives, enjoy spending time with their children, enjoy walks and times of prayer, meditation, and silence, and have a peaceful sense of who they are, are not good for the market. Those who are unhappy and dissatisfied with their lives, live in anxiety and are unsure of their identity and their relationships to others, want more, and the market promises to fulfill these ever-expanding needs and wants. With our kids tethered 24/7 to their smartphones and a round-the-clock deluge of marketing messages, it’s no wonder they opt to spend rather than sit in what’s become uncomfortable silence where they might have to listen to themselves or God.

In the end, we (all of us…young and old) have been lulled into a new religion where the mall (or the Internet shopping site…or TV’s QVC) becomes the church. Liturgies are written by marketers. We shop, therefore we are…all in an effort to make ourselves feel better…for a little while at least. Rather than living for eternity, we live for the here and now. Overall, it’s an ugly landscape.

In the end, it’s idolatry. Isn’t that what we need to avoid? Isn’t that what we need to slow down, see and point out to our students?