This past Sunday, our pastor used an analogy that ties in very nicely with some of the issues raised by Marva Dawn in Unfettered Hope (which I will one day finish reviewing!). Dawn notes that one instance of how the church is negatively impacted by misplaced cultural "values" occurs in how Christians approach the Bible. Rather than being those who read the Bible for all its worth, many Christians have been shaped by our society into being "consumerist readers" -- that is, they read the Bible solely to pluck out principles, lessons or applications that apply directly to them and their situation (a practice which often results in reading their own lives and situations into the text).
Our pastor, describing how we often ignore the bigger picture of the Bible in favor of such self-focused readings, used the analogy of our typical reaction to our grade school yearbooks. What did we typically do first when we received our yearbooks each year? We usually spent our initial look scanning the pages in search of ourselves.
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