Journal of European Baptist Studies, 2017

ion that every experience will be stimulating and life-altering. In striving toward the developmental goals of self-discovery and realising potential, the traits of complaining, entitlement, and selfishness can arise; gratitude serves as a foil to these less than desirable habits. 20 Gratitude flows from a letting go, well-captured by the German word Gelassenheit, a yieldedness of one’s personal desires for the betterment of the community. Gratitude and Gelassenheit both support contentment in trusting that one’s genuine needs will be met by the practice of putting the other first. When Donald complained vehemently about the lack of vegan options in the free meal after the worship service, our conversation led him to see that this oversight was opportunity for teaching more than a right to be demanded. He ruminated, ‘I almost killed myself with alcohol, and now I have an apartment and a church that serves me dinner.... Yeah, I’ll speak with the folks who make dinner’. Simplicity and Limiting Options Intentionally practising contentment includes the willingness to limit options and enjoy simplicity. It creates a culture in which individuals can realise we are better suited to sufficiency than saturation, 21 and that accumulating more and more, faster and faster, is the opposite of our deeper longing for coherence, simplicity, satisfaction, and calm. ‘The dilemma posed by 18 Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition , p. 41. 19 Vincent Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 7. Similarly, ‘while virtues are to be practiced for their intrinsic good and satisfaction; that is how we often “practice” desire’. Miroslav Volf, A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2011), p. 69. 20 Christine D. Pohl, Living into Community: Cultivating Practices that Sustain Us (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), p. 21. 21 Paul L. Escamilla, Longing for Enough in a Culture of More (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), p. 4. Blomberg, Contentment 47 consumerism’, Skye Jethani contends, ‘is not the endless manufacturing of desires, but the temptation to settle for desires far below what we were created for.’ 22 The practice of contentment can transform desires, giving value to that which is centred on God and the kingdom rather than temporal, changing fads. Desire is a constitutive human characteristic, primarily to enthuse us in our search for God as well as to motivate us toward godly relationships with all that has been created. Contentment is then found not in the sense of satiation, but of confidence that the unchanging, revealing God is the appropriate object of our desire, and that the thirst we feel for God is eschatologically fulfilled. 23 A contented church does not strive for a ‘hipper-than-thou’ attitude in a constantly changing, competitive culture. 24 Rather, a contented congregation is satisfied w