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If pastors are CEOs, what does that make the Church?

29/05/2012
Church & Culture, Consumerism
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Imagine you pick up the latest parenting book to capture the attention of day-time talk show hosts and realize, after flipping through it with some confusion, that the parenting techniques contained in its pages were based entirely on Army boot camp and that it was actually written by a retired drill instructor.

This would, hopefully, seem just a bit odd. Something about treating our family like a military unit feels inherently misguided, even if it “worked” in pragmatic terms.

Now imagine if the sequel to this New York Time Bestselling parenting book was entitled “How to be the CEO of your Kids”

You might start to ask yourself if the problem is deeper than a few sub-par books, that perhaps we’ve lost a sense of what the family is, and how it is different than other social structures like the military, or the corporation.

This is increasingly how I feel when I come across books on Church leadership – as if somehow we’ve lost our sense of the church’s identity, and as a result are flailing in the dark for some other form of leadership we can grasp onto.

The Church is not a corporation, and yet most books on leadership in a ministry setting are almost indistinguishable from the latest advice from America’s top CEO’s.

Yes, such methods can work. They have certainly been effective in transforming local churches into a new corporate form – but for all its pragmatic benefit I believe this trend has been incredibly destructive to the church and its mission.

When leading a church looks like pastor-as-CEO then the church becomes a business, the congregation becomes paying customers, and worship and the Gospel become consumer goods.

That this is a dangerous path to tread should be apparent, but with how enthusiastically such books are read and recommended, I fear that the lure of becoming successful by the standards of the world too often outweighs the danger that such success comes at the expense of becoming something different, no longer a church but simply a business with religious trappings.

of Politics, Postmodernism, Books, and Silence

23/05/2012
Books and Reading, Church & Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Theology
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There is not a subject to this post – or, more precisely, there are two subjects, and they admittedly have little to do with each other besides having both captured my attention today.

The first is some writing by my friend Preston, over at Deeper Story. He wrote eloquently today about something I know I’ve done my fair share of, using books to deal with the silence of God and my own spiritual angst.

“In the interim space between His silence and my learning to hear again, I made a few interesting choices. One of those choices was to burry myself in books.”

Not to imply there is no value in buying books, quite the opposite! But it’s a habit that can be turned towards both good and ill, like any other.

The other focus of my thoughts this morning is the book The Politics of Discipleship, which I began reading yesterday, and theotherjournal’s Church & Postmodern Culture blog (which is associated with the series The Politics of Discipleship is a part of).

Over the past years I’ve slowly shed most of my Religious Right heritage, but have found that a “Religious Left” holds little more appeal and seems to equally miss the point – albeit in somewhat different ways.

Reading The Politics of Discipleship is part of my attempt to wrestle with the question “what next?” What does it look like for me to faithfully follow Christ (and for the Church to faithfully act out its mission) in this place, this time, this empire, with all the complexities posed by our new post-Christendom post-modern context, particularly if the answers of both Religious Right and Religious Left are found lacking?

Or as Carl Raschke put in in a recent post,

“Every age of global “shift” like the present one – indeed, the very phrase post-modernity signifies  a transitional rather than an easily identifiable era – raises up prophets of an invisible economy.  We only have to consider Condorcet’s formulation of the “idea of progress” as he pined in his jail cell prior to his execution at the height of the French Revolution, or Bonhoeffer with his vision of “man come of age” as he also awaited the gallows in a German prison in 1944.   But how can we begin, perhaps in simply a thoughtful and less heroic manner, in this  current age of global upheaval – less than a generation after the collapse of the vision of a worldwide, democratic, market-based, neo-liberal future, as enunciated for example in Francis Fukayama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in light of the events of those fateful years 2001 and 2008?”

So far both the book and the blog have been helpful, provocative, and beautifully devastating to many of my long-held paradigms.

Liturgy as Resistance

11/05/2012
Church & Culture, Empire, Justice, Liturgy
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“How could our Churches be a center of resistance to empire?”

I asked this question of a friend yesterday, and, as usual, found his answer to be both wise and challenging.

“Liturgy.”

He then went on to tell me the story of a Christian community he had recently been reading about. After World War II a German church found itself under a new regime, the USSR. Their freedoms were curtailed, and they were witness to shocking injustice and oppression.

In response they met as a community, performed the liturgy, sang treasured hymns, and engaged in public prayer as an act of resistance.

This seems counterintuitive, but such is the nature of the kingdom of God.

By continuing to worship, and sing, and pray, they were proclaiming that history is ultimately in the hands of God not empire, and that Jesus is Lord even when the people of God appear weak and powerless.

They were displaying trust in a God who could bring freedom and redemption into a situation they could not change by their own strength, and pointing their worship and faithfulness towards a Power higher than the powers who demanded their allegiance.

Also, by coming together and practicing the liturgy they were being shaped into a community other than the community of the empire. Rejecting the ways of life that were in fact counter to humanity and right worship, they embodied a coming day of reconciliation, trust, support, and justice. This involved much suffering for the community, but that too is the way of the Kingdom.

Critique of empire is necessary I think, we need eyes to see and ears to hear what is truly going on around us, and the ways in which we are complicit in unjust systems of power.

But ultimately the solution is not found in human striving, it is found in the in-breaking kingdom of God, and in the ways in which God acts through a community that is trying to live a different sort of life that is shaped by the story of Cross and Resurrection.

The Church, in its best moments, sings songs that crumble empires.

The Creed and/as The Pledge of Allegiance

09/05/2012
Church & Culture, Creeds, Empire
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“the Apostles’ Creed functions like the church’s pledge of allegiance. Recited weekly, in unison, the Creed is a declaration – the positive affirmation that is the correlate of the renunciations we made in baptism. In it we confess our allegiance to a “foreign” king, the triune God.

In that sense, if worship is like a renewal-of-vows ceremony, each week is also a citizenship-renewal ceremony. When we pledge that Jesus is Lord – not Caesar, not the emperor, nor the president or prime minister, not the chairman of the Federal Reserve – we are engaged in a political act (recalling that our baptism constitutes us as a new polis and that the Creed was a baptismal document).

This is the pledge of those whose “citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20) – which is not a citizenship in some otherworldly, ethereal kingdom but rather citizenship in an earthly kingdom that is coming.” – James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, pg. 191.

This, I think, is a fascinating rearticulation of what it means to recite the creed.

And yet, on some level, such a meaning has always been embedded in the practice – even if primarily on a sort of pre-cognitive level.

It is exactly this inherently political nature of Christian faith that makes me so concerned about the ways we have allowed the status quo of empire to co-opt Christian ethical, social, and even theological thinking.

We take for granted a particular framework handed to us by the kingdom of the world (in our case American Democratic Capitalism), and fail to critique that framework in light of the kingdom of heaven.

This pervades our thought and practice in all sorts of ways, not least of which is the complete lack of tension so many of us feel about “pledging allegiance” to Jesus as Lord when we recite the Creed, and then the very next day (or minute!)  pledging our allegiance to “the flag” and the Republic.

This tension should not be ignored, for it is not altogether clear that our allegiance to Jesus and our allegiance to the flag are able to go hand-in-hand so easily, and one must ask which we truly defer to when they come into conflict.

I would suggest that just as repeatedly saying the Creed is a morally formative practice, so is saying the pledge, which I imagine is exactly why Smith goes so far as to suggest in a footnote that in Christian schools and churches the Creed “should replace the American Pledge of Allegiance” rather than buttressing it.

What is Empire?

07/05/2012
Church & Culture, Empire
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What is Empire?

A friend posed this question to me last week. He had been hearing a lot of people use the language of “Empire” – particularly at the Politics of Discipleship conference – but remained unsure what exactly was being spoken of.

That’s certainly understandable as the term seems to be used quite flexibly, and many people who speak of empire do so without defining what they mean.

So, I thought I’d have a go at writing a definition, at least as best I can.

“Empire” refers to totalizing systems of power that allow for no limits to their influence, shape culture beyond national borders, and offer a narrative about the world that places themselves as the pinnacle of the human story.

Historically, such a definition applied to traditional empires such as Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome. The Bible was written in the shadow of such powers.

Later empires took on the form of colonization, particularly European powers such as the British Empire. At this point trade routes, resources, and cultural influence begin to play a role equal to or greater than the acquisition of territory.

By the late 20th century, empire was increasingly ideological in nature, from Fascism in Germany and Italy, to the rise of the Communist USSR and its counterpoint in the Democratic/Capitalist West.

Today, the traditional understanding of empire as a geographical-political entity is being challenged. The United States is, in some sense, the last remaining classic imperial power. Instead, the writings of Hardt and Negri have argued that the new form of empire is a decentralized and complex set of networks which comprise global capitalism.

So that, in the era of globalization, the building of a nation’s first McDonalds can be spoken of as a marker of empire somewhat akin to the building of an embassy.

Now, what does all this have to do with theology or practicing my faith? I’ll get to that momentarily, but first a couple caveats.

Personally, I’m inclined to suggest that “empire” is a contextually determined phrase. By which I mean, if I lived in China, or Europe, or the Middle East I would still be able to use “Empire” as a shorthand for particular actions by the state or powerful cultural influencers.

Also, stating that America (or any other power) qualifies as Empire is not to equate it with every other power that has ever deserved that title. All empires are not equal, just compare Biblical accounts of the brutal Assyrian empire with the more humane actions of the Persian empire.

So back to my earlier question, what does this have to do with my faith? Quite a bit actually.

Yes, to some extent this is simply a social-political account of systems of power throughout history. But our faith is lived in context, it is not simply a individual practice with no bearing on how we live our lives in the “secular” world.

So these questions of empire quickly become relevant to a people who claim to give their ultimate allegiance to Jesus as Lord (not Caesar in his many forms), and whose sacred writings were written in the shadow of empire, and are often filled with critique and judgment of such powers.

We’ve somehow (left and right) made our faith to fit comfortably with our status as children of the empire. I’m suggesting that perhaps such an easy fit is only possible if we turn a blind eye to some significant biblical themes, and the realities of the world around us.

“You are the man!” V, Nathan, and Prophetic Subversion

02/05/2012
Art, Church & Culture, Empire, Story
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Building off of yesterday’s post – I want to suggest that there is biblical precedent for the prophetic and subversive use of storytelling to challenge the powers that be.

In II Samuel we find David, secure in power and victorious over his neighbors. He has sent his army off to war against the Ammonites, but stays behind in his palace.

As the well-known story goes, David sees from his rooftop a beautiful woman bathing, has her brought to him, and then  – after finding out that she became pregnant that night – he conspires to deceive and eventually murder her husband.

No doubt David felt he had gotten away with his actions, the only people who knew were some close aids and of course Bathsheba who would be publicly shamed if the truth came out, and may have become aware of just how far David was willing to go to protect his power.

You are that regime!

Into this situation of injustice and exploitation walks the prophet Nathan. He tells the king a brilliant little story about a rich man who robs a poor man of his only beloved lamb. David is incensed by the story, drawn into it to the extent that he has unintentionally identified with his victim and against himself, and demands that the man be brought to justice.

To this Nathan famously responds, “You are the man!”

He then proceeds to share the words of God’s judgment against David. And David, who had testified against himself, breaks down in repentance.

Like the audience of V for Vendetta, David’s worldview was intentionally subverted by a story told from the underside of power, a story that subtly placed him in opposition to his own exploitation and abuse of authority.

Though we often think of prophesy as primarily a predictive act, most of the work of the Old Testament prophets is more like Nathan’s confrontation with David – performance art, poetry, and storytelling that challenges the powers to see things the way the truly are, and that then offers hope on the other side of repentance.

It is this sort of prophetic witness that I think the Church needs to reclaim in its art, its singing, and its storytelling.

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