Subscriptions, life – and gospel truth

All my life seems to be a subscription.

There have always been subs, of course. This newspaper for one. (What do you mean, you don’t have a subscription? It’s brilliant value!) And I really don’t mind paying regularly for things that I receive regularly. But lately things have been getting out of hand.

Take my TV. I used to have pay once a year for a TV licence, which I still consider good value. But I could also have subs for Sky, Disney+, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Amazon Prime, Netflix, TNT Sports… and so the list goes on. Every time I watch a YouTube video I am encouraged to take out a subscription.

One is never enough. This year will be the last year my favourite sporting event (the Tour de France) will be shown on terrestrial free-to-air TV. Next year it will be £29.99 a month. It is literally cheaper, over the course of the year, to go in person.

And it’s not just TV. There are subs for music, books, magazines, cars, monthly payments for apps, regular charges for software, wine delivery, food baskets, recipe cards, bank accounts, even a subscription for curry spices. Yahoo Finance researched the topic and found that households had, on average, just under seven subscriptions each. To be honest, I’m surprised it’s not more. It’s perfectly straightforward to get above 20.

Some of these are particularly galling. At the risk of sounding (a) old and (b) angry, let me vent for a moment and tell you about computer software. The go-to model for buying new software is now a subscription. I have some rather niche musical notation software I use to create scores. It’s a nice little hobby for myself and something I do for others. My software was bought through a ‘friends and family’ scheme of a coder. Now that software is redundant, outpaced by the technology that supports it.

So I need to renew. But I am being asked to pay per week what I originally paid for a one-off lifetime activation and if I want to get the features I need, I have little choice.

I am not really angry (or old!). I get it. Service and product providers want to try to secure future sources of income. Microsoft want you on the latest version of their software for all kinds of reasons, but especially because it makes the company more robust. A newspaper subscription like this one is not only good for you because of what it provides, it’s good for the provider because they can keep going.

In a marketplace full of competition and empty of loyalty, subs do the trick.

But they can give us the impression that all of life takes this form. All of life feels like a take it or walk away from it option. Fed up with a relationship? Just stop paying the sub and you’re good to go. A subscription economy (as it has been described) is positively harmful in some areas.

And when it comes to gospel truth, it undermines the very bedrock of what we believe. The saving news about Jesus is not available on a subscription model: ‘try it till you get bored of it’. Nor does it require a monthly flow out of your bank account to secure its benefits. Or, to put it another way, there was a once-for-all lifetime payment made to secure my salvation. And it’s never going to lose its effect or purchasing power.

I don’t have to re-sign up to Christianity every Sunday. My church gatherings are a celebration of what we already have in Christ Jesus. I don’t have to worry about operational redundancy or the latest software upgrade. The gospel is complete, sufficient, effective – it was when I first believed; it is today; and it will be tomorrow and every other tomorrow.

There are lots of conveniences about subscriptions. I have a few. But the gospel of Jesus is for life. And I’m pretty glad about that.