A handful of years ago, I attended a Saturday morning event run by none other than Contemporary Christianity. In the course of one talk, the speaker quoted a fantastic song lyric that instantly resonated with me and embedded in my memory.

He quoted just the first automotive related piece of the chorus of The Divine Comedy’s 2001 song, Eye of the Needle, but here, I’ll quote the chorus in full:

‘The cars in the churchyard are shiny and German,
Distinctly at odds with the theme of the sermon.
And during communion I study the people,
Threading themselves through the eye of a needle.’

An important, immediate point for those who may already be feeling ‘got at’ is that shiny and German cars don’t have to be exclusively German: these days, they can come from brands both old and new and from places as far flung as the Czech Republic, South Korea and the United States.

But setting aside pedantry about who makes prestigious cars, what struck me about the lyric was its combination of searing truth and total inaccuracy. It’s true because wealth really does threaten our souls. But it’s little to no basis in any experience of mine, because I honestly can’t remember the last time I heard a sermon about the spiritual jeopardy of wealth.

The church’s apparent blindness to these things doesn’t just relate to cars. A few years ago, I fell into conversation with a lady from my own local church, someone who gives every impression of real faith and genuine conviction. The subject came up of a house built on a road we both knew well, one of those enormous mini-palaces that blight Northern Ireland’s landscape. This house is genuinely so big that its garage materially dwarves my home, and then the garage is itself small in proportion to the adjacent dwelling. ‘Isn’t it somehouse?’ she exclaimed, her eyes lighting up to reinforce her verbal approval. It didn’t seem to remotely bother this follower of Jesus to question why anyone, anywhere, really needs a house that size.

But if she’s blind, then there’s such big logs in my eyes that I can barely see to type. (On my MacBook that I like very much, more so than I should care to admit, with shelves behind me in my study crammed with well over four-figures worth of Lego Architecture…)

‘No pockets in a shroud’, we say. ‘No towbars on a hearse.’ And yet, truthfully, how is it that modern and often middle-class first-world evangelicals live?

I understand why it is that money and materialism are subjects that preachers may want to avoid. I preach regularly myself and I get that it feels moralistic and judgmental to bring the subject up. Maybe it’s something that a podcaster or big tent speaker can address, but can you hold relationships and live among people but be candid about these things at the same time?

But are there other reasons why many congregations are effectively getting a bye-ball on these issues? Have we become so fixated with a privatised gospel and the saving of souls, alongside the orthodoxy of rigorously correct doctrine, that we fail to see the day-to-day and age-old temptation and the risk to which it exposes our souls?

Are we so preoccupied with railing against unethical sexual progressivism that that takes up all our bandwidth in what we see and notice in the culture around us? Yes, the seventh commandment tells us not to commit adultery, but as big a war in my soul is number ten and all the modern equivalents of coveting my neighbour’s ox and donkey.

Have we become so convinced that we are ‘only middle class’ – and a middle that’s been ‘squeezed’ – that there are plenty of people better-off than we are, that we’ve lost sight of how incredibly rich we are in both a global and historical context?

In all this I fear that many in the modern church – and I ‘preach this blog to myself’ as well – have become, in ways, dreadfully deceived. Our antennae have become so intensely alert to looking for theological error, or waging war with ‘wokeness’ in the public square, that we’ve relegated wealth and consumerism to something small and trivial, in terms of how much and how seriously we actually pay attention to it.

On two occasions, Jesus uses the word ‘mammon’ to describe wealth or profit, a peculiar word that seems to ascribe to money the allure of a ‘small g’ god, capable of estranging a person’s soul from their maker. Jesus also said that serving both God and money is as impossible as serving two masters, and later Paul told Timothy that the love of money is nothing other than the root of all evil. That’s plain English.

In terms of the song lyric, Jesus didn’t – to be fair – say that the rich, akin to a heavily loaded camel, can’t get to enter his kingdom. But he did make plain that it’s hard and difficult for the rich to do so. It’s easier for the goods laden camel to strain and squeeze its way through that narrow city gate than for the affluent to take full hold of all the compassion, generosity, love and justice that mark the fullness of the kingdom.

So, surely, we need more sermons on this subject. Challenging sermons, no doubt, but rather than deflecting from the saving of souls, because they’re not obviously ‘gospel’ sermons, it may be that being truly faithful to Scripture, it is just such sermons that might rescue some that are lost.

Colin Neill works in local economic development, and is a PCI accredited preacher and spiritual director.