Sustainable Faith: Defining the Term (3)
March 3, 2008
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I digressed more than a little in post #2, but in the moment it seemed important to make three points: (1) I’m not hard-wired toward what’s large, fast-paced and impersonal. I like what’s simple, uncomplicated, and family-feeling, so you need to know my natural bias. (2) The post-mods are by all indications looking for something very different from what most of the evangelical church is expressing. (3) The thing longing to be born needs a powerful center, a touchstone, one strong enough to attract and subordinate all the longings and desires we hold. As Christians we confess this is Jesus, but if we can’t arrive at a common image of him and common understanding of his work, then the collective thinking and sustained application of thought [and practice] necessary for all movements will be lacking.
Now back to the topic of “big church” and sustainable faith. First of all, by big I mean anything over 150. Some of you recognize this instantly as Dunbar’s Number (which was really 148), the upper limit of a social group wherein all the members can know the names and roles and mutual relationships of all the other members. As you go above that number the church (or any group for that matter) is experienced less as family and more impersonally. I’ll say more about familial loss in a subsequent post. Right now I’d like to focus on the energy requirements of bigness, which are a function of size.
With a modest amount of strength training each week (which doesn’t even have to be at a gym and might even be a natural part of our daily work) and with a sensible diet, we can have a pretty decent physique. But to achieve the freakishly large and unnatural proportions of professional bodybuilders, you have to have to devote hours on end not just to heavy lifting but to a very regimented kind of lifting that isolates certain muscles, entails a specific number of reps and sets, has precisely defined days of rest and progressions. It’s all very detailed and demanding. And then there’s the food. I saw a short web story on a bodybuilder whose daily breakfast was 10 egg whites and a head of broccoli, and this was only one a many meals he needed each day in order to compensate for the tremendous number of calories expended in workouts and in carrying around all that extra muscle on his body. Just to maintain that body of his he needed each day to consume approximately three times what a normal person would need. That’s the cost of size. But that’s just the pure caloric cost. It says nothing of the cost of time or relationships or mental space. For pro bodybuilders, there is only lifting. And we haven’t even touched on the use of HGH (human growth hormone) and anabolic steroids, both of which are rampant in that culture and “needed” in order to speed recovery of damaged tissue after workouts and create additional muscle mass. The long-term cost to ones health from the regular use of steroids and HGH can be devastating, but bodybuiders, gripped by their pursuit, usually ignore the long-term cost for their short-term gain.
Elite distance runners have the same kind of obsession. I’m not elite, but I’ve run competitively, so I’ll speak here out of a fresh personal experience. I can run 20-30 miles a week mindlessly and with great enjoyment, and with that amount I can race reasonably well for my age class in local 5Ks and 10Ks. But to be in the top 10, I have to do at least 40 miles per week. Fifty will put me in the top 5. But to gain two more places I’d have to do 60 miles per week. And once I get above 40 and start toward 50, it’s like I’ve entered a vastly different universe: I wake up thinking about running, I check my pulse to see how rested I am. If it’s a little above my normal basal pulse rate, I think about how I need to alter my day’s training. I constantly monitor how I’m feeling, what my energy level is. I think about my progress and evaluate my workouts. I’m constantly hungry, always checking my weight, reading more about training theory, meticulously recording my workouts and poring over them. I find that thoughts of running slowly and insidiously encroach upon whatever mental space I have, gobbling up the RAM so to speak.
That’s what it was often like in my 20s, but I experienced this again recently in the last few months of a 2-year training buildup for the 2007 Berlin Marathon. For the first year things were fine at an even 40 miles per week, but by early summer of the following year I was up to 60 miles, and somewhere in August I got greedy and figured that three weeks of 70+ miles would be infinitely better and probably allow me to dip under three hours. But frankly, at that point I had lost perspective and was now acting irrationally. I was no longer running for pleasure, and “my” running was no long mine. It was now running me. So at the end of my first 75 mile week, when I should have quit, I idiotically pushed on and incurred a severe stress fracture that not only put to rest any hope of running in the marathon I’d trained for for two years, but even jeopardized the possibility of ever running again. I’m more than a little embarrassed to speak publicly about this, but the walkaway from that experience was personally sobering and instructive. Plus it’s germane to this topic. Running, you see, went from being a pleasurable and appropriately mindless way of recreating to being a mechanistic, all-consuming and depleting activity that would, if everything played out perfectly, reward me with me with something trivial: an elite level time. But even if I had made it to the starting line healthy and ready to go, I could never have kept up that volume of training following the race. In the end it was just too much.
And “it’s just too much” is what many leaders in their second half of life, and smarter leaders in their first half of life, are saying. On the heels of the concession is the natural question, “What then is sustainable?” The other day I told the story of my marathon debacle to a pastor, who said, “You know, that’s really interesting, because the number of hours I work during a week corresponds roughly to your mileage experience. When I work about 40 hours a week, I do really well, but when I get into 50 and 60 hours, it dominates my thinking, I get sick more often, I have less to give to others, it’s no longer pleasurable, and my family suffers.” There you go.
The cost of bigness isn’t simple and linear. If you have 150 people and the total energy cost is x, then the total energy cost for 300 people to be together in any meaningful way isn’t simply 2x. It’s always 2x + something, and the something gets larger and larger as you go down the pike. Which leads me to my last question. If being big has an inherent wastefulness to it, then why in the world do so many leaders want to go down that path rather than hive off smaller clusters? If Richard Schwartz (Natural Church Development) has documented that 10 solid churches of 200 each will together always “outperform” one church of 2,000, why would we want to subject ourselves to the costs attached to bigness? Having said this, I want to state again that I find it entirely possible that a few people are genuinely called by God to lead very big churches. I don’t see size as an argument for or against faithfulness.
We have a long ways to go, but we’ll continue to wend our way toward a definition of sustainable faith in subsequent posts, because it’s about so much more than manageable sizes and sane schedules and family atmosphere. [Caveat emptor: if you're looking for a tidy and linear path to the answer, I'm guaranteed to disappoint you.]
Comments
Got something to say?