Sustainable Faith: Defining the Term (4)
March 5, 2008
I was thinking this morning of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator that’s scheduled to go active in Switzerland in May 2008.
This thing is a beast, and I don’t mean that pejoratively. Its construction has taken years, cost into the billions, and involved an international consortium of physicists and engineers; its deployment will give scientists an unprecedented look into the particles of which our universe consists. I’m personally jazzed about how it might speak into string theory, but what I was thinking about this morning was the absolutely staggering amount of human life, energy and money that went into its creation in order to squeeze out a little more energy so that scientists could peer behind the curtain, so to speak, just a little deeper. Without a doubt the next advance on the LHC will require unimaginably larger expenditures to go even just infinitesimally deeper. You can only have a handful of these “big deals” in a lifetime because of the high cost attached to them, yet many leaders within the church have, I think, believed or hoped it would be the norm. In moments of unfaithfulness we’ve lusted after a church version of the LHC. But few are asked to wear the ring, because few can wear it. (And here it’s worth noting that a few people probably can wear the ring.)
So this was part of my morning reverie, but I promised we’d go down a different path, so let’s talk about sustainable faith and holism. Many authors, too numerous to name, have spoken incisively of the way western Christians has been entrenched in a very strong dualism: there’s spiritual life and then there’s everything else. Spiritual life has been seen as non-material, non-corporeal, and “the flesh” as that poverty-stricken thing from which we’ll some day escape. But even within the so-called spiritual life we sometimes speak of separate lives. Richard’s Foster’s wonderful book Streams of Living Water gives evidence to that compartmentalization, as my friend Jeff Cannell pointed out to me. So we have the incarnational life, the disciplined life, the word-centered life, the compassionate life, etc. Now, I know that Foster sees all of these “lives” are mere tributaries of the one life flowing from Christ (The Really Big River). For him it was simply a convenient way of grouping and talking about the various ways the church has expressed herself throughout history. Nevertheless, it still reflects the way our minds — his, mine, yours — have been trained to operate: this, not that; that, not this. It’s a language of distinction and quantification and compartmentalization, and we’ve been heading down this road ever since the ancient Greeks, so we have about 2,500 years of practice in the west. But things are changing. Synthesis is becoming all the rage.
We’ll still make distinctions. After all, it’s hardwired into us and useful for our existence: this mushroom (which can kill me) is different from that mushroom (which I can sautée). That’s a difference i want to know. But the emerging church, thank God, is more interested in connections and synthesis than in disjunctions and analysis. Einstein showed us that space and time are connected. Quantum mechanics showed us the connection between the observer and the observed. People now understand that hurricanes and butterfly wings are connected thanks to Chaos Theory. The current generation is completely familiar with six degrees of separation. In short, the world for them has become more fluid and plastic and connected. Consequently, they’re looking for a radically holistic faith, one that embraces the body as much as the mind . . . which is the body as well. The current renaissance of experiential worship didn’t arise in a vacuum. It’s a natural push toward a very physical, multi-sensory, eyes-wide-open experience. Personally, I rejoice in its arrival and believe this holism is an essential part of vibrant, sustainable faith. The radical dualism that has permeated western Christian thought creates an interior dissonance that the emerging church finds not only repulsive but unsustainable.
The other day while I was waiting for my wife to finish up some grocery shopping, I went into the McDonald’s fast food shop nearby to try their “new and improved coffee.” As a habit I avoid all fast-food chains, but my curiosity got the better of me, so I ordered my small cup and simultaneously handed my mug (which I carry with me) to the employee, asking him if he could rinse it with some hot water because it was dirty and cold. He looked puzzled but did it. Then he put the mug down, pulled out a large styrofoam cup and walked to the coffee pot. “Excuse me,” I said, “but is that for my coffee?” “Yes,” he answered. “But I don’t want my coffee in that. That’s why I gave you my mug.” He paused and said, “I’ll do it this time, but we’re not allowed to use your mug. It’s against company policy.” I was really exhausted that day and very much on the cranky side. If I could have a re-do, I’d say “I understand. Don’t bother, then. I’m happier to go without.” But what I said (with thinly veiled sarcasm) was, “So McDonald’s would rather I take their styrofoam needlessly and then clutter up some landfill with it for next gazillion years?” And then the hammer fell. Handing me the mug he said, “Well, it doesn’t really matter because God’s going to give us a new heaven and earth anyway.” A wire tripped in me, and my reptilian, emotional response came gushing out: “So it really doesn’t matter if we piss all over the earth — yes, I’m afraid I said the word piss — and pollute God’s gift to us, because, you know, God’s going to give us a new one after we’ve mismanaged this one!” He backpedaled and stammered, “That’s not really what I meant,” but I ended the conversation with a crisp, “You know what, you need to get yourself a new theology.”
So he had a theology that made no connection between stewarding creation and loving God. And I, in my fatigue and “righteous indignation” showed a theology that, in the moment at least, made no connection between loving God and showing respect for another human being. May we close the gaps, Lord, wherever they exist.
Drinking a Fifth
March 4, 2008
“It is estimated that Americans now spend, on average, fourteen years of their lives watching TV.”
“We tend to over-report our good behavior, under-report our bad behavior.”
* * * * * * * * * *
Fourteen divided by seventy-four — a life span.
Multiply the quotient by one hundred.
Nineteen percent.
About one-fifth of your life (if you’re average, of course).
Sever one leg completely from your body.
Take it from the hip down.
Now run fast.
Take your house and board up a room
(without first removing anything from it).
How cramped do you feel?
Are there five in your family?
Shoot one.
How long will you grieve?
Drop your salary from forty to thirty-two thousand.
Burn eight thousand one-dollar bills, on by one.
Cover yourself with their ashes.
What is twenty percent of our vision?
When gone, are we legally blind?
Lose ten points from your IQ:
Slam your head against a brick wall
repeatedly.
Can you still understand this?
And if all this is too daunting, go down easy:
watch others live their lives.
Disregard your own,
the real one,
the one slipping away.
21 Observations on American Culture
March 4, 2008
• We’re flooded with noise and have little respect for silence.
• Our days are overly busy.
• We abuse our bodies with poor food and too much food.
• We abuse our bodies with too little sleep.
• We abuse our bodies with too little activity.
• We’ve surrendered to mindless, pernicious distraction.
• We’re over-eroticized by the marketing of sex.
• We value money over ethical behavior.
• We value individual rights over the community.
• We idolize youth and are afraid of death.
• We’re awash in possessions, having more than we either need or use.
• We’re can’t control our spending and are awash in debt.
• We’ve mistaken the vulgar for the beautiful.
• We’ve lost trust and have become litigious.
• We’ve mistaken information from wisdom.
• We’ve grown callous toward the very young and very old.
• We neglect our promises, especially when there’s a cost to us.
• We fear long-term commitments.
• We’re losing our ability to concentrate.
• We’re quick to take revenge, slow to forgive.
• We’re temporocentric, unwilling to remember the past or imagine the future.
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.]
Sustainable Faith: Defining the Term (2)
March 2, 2008
I’ll be staying on the topic of “bigness” for a while, because I think much of the discussion of and search for this thing called “sustainable faith” is based in a belief that big church isn’t the way to go and we’ve got to come up with something better. And before I go a step further, I should state that I’ve never been the A-type personality, I’m not an extrovert, and I’m not a charismatic CEO kind of figure. I’m also now squarely in the second half of life, so the idea of building something large immediately sounds exhausting to me. I’m looking for something simple and feasible, not complex and daunting.
So I write with a bias, I suppose, but I also write (I think) from the perspective of a generation (not the boomers, whom, strangely, I’ve never ever felt a part of) that finds it increasingly difficult to connect to the normal mode of evangelical church life. There’s a push for something other. As Phyllis Tickle has said repeatedly — and please know that I’m paraphrasing her comments — this yet-to-be-defined group, an blend of desires for (1) social justice; (2) stewardship of earth; (3) a meaningful liturgy that speaks to the present while honoring the past; (4) mystery; (5) participation in the power of the Spirit; (6) and a bracing engagement of scripture that’s thoroughly christocentric is currently very messy in its expression. It’s an inchoate soul in search of a beautiful body. It’s like galaxy starting to form, the dust collecting and swirling around some core that’s gaining mass and density.
But galaxies and stars don’t coalesce unless there’s a amply strong gravitational core, and I think it remains to be seen whether there’s enough “matter” to unify these many voices. I used to think there was, but a comment that appeared recently in a New York Times article regarding Pattern and Decoration (P&D), thoroughly arrested my attention. P&D was the last significant, fine art movement in western culture. It has been the only art movement of the post-modern era, and maybe the last art movement ever:
“We don’t do art movements anymore.” Mr. Cotter continues, “We do brand names (Neo-Geo); we do promotional drives (’Painting is Back!’); we do industry trends (art fairs … etc.). But now the market is too large, its mechanism too corporate, its dependence on instant stars and products too strong to support the kind of collective thinking and sustained application of thought that have defined movements as such.” [italics mine]
Think long and hard about this quotation, because what may be true of the art world may also, unfortunately, be true of the thing awaiting birth. I now wonder if the new reformation we long to see will be stillborn (i.e., thoroughly fragmented) for some of the same reasons. In a world that spawns iPods and i-This and i-That, how possible is collective thinking and sustained application of thought? Not very. But we can pray: may your kingdom come. After all, with God all things are possible. A broken and contrite heart God will not despise. With many others, I’m looking for The Rose.
Sustainable Faith: Defining the Term (1)
March 1, 2008
I’ve noticed that the term “sustainable faith” has been gaining significant traction over the last year, popping up in blogdom and emergent circles like ours, so I’d like to explore the phrase. It was bound to emerge given the growing concern about humankind’s footprint on this planet and the consequent interest in renewable energy and sustainable living.
But what do we mean when we use the phrase? I’m wondering if so far it’s partially, if not primarily, a critique of “big church” as it has been practiced (or imagined to be practiced) in evangelical circles: a churning, goal-driven, program-based, weekend-centered, top-down ideated, bottom-line attentive, corporate-glitzy, professional-feeling life, one in which those who minister are swept along in a powerful current that eventually leaves them depleted, exhausted, spent and spit up on the shore.
I’ve spent lots of time with people who live or have lived in that current. Take, for instance, this young person who was on the paid staff of a growing church: “I’ve had a few conversations with my pastor regarding rest, work, solitude and prayer, and how these simultaneously work together to [increase love for God and people]. I guess you can say we still don’t see eye to eye. I’m responsible for leading the worship team, training worship leaders, leading a home group, trying to grow a coffee shop, stumbling through VLI (a 2-year, practical/academic training program), and taking care of the entire administrative side of the church. I’d like to have a day off [Monday], but in order to obtain this, I should in his opinion be taking on more work [italics mine]. I’ve made it clear that, while I believe in the mission and method of the Alpha Course, I don’t have the time to do it and I am drawing my boundaries there; I simply won’t be filling up another night each week. We’ve also disagreed on this, as he believes it’s God’s intention that I do Alpha. So though he hears what I’m saying, [he] doesn’t think I’m willing to ’step up to the plate and swing the bat.’ “He was married at the time and, thankfully, still is. And I’m happy that he removed himself from that work.
Maybe you think I’ve used an egregious and atypical example, that I’ve set up a straw man. No, and the problem is more common than we’d like to admit. Much of my work over the last few years has put me in touch with these people, and I’ve known senior leaders who have expected their associates to put in at least 70 hours of work per week. But we know not only the trajectory of this course but it’s outcome as well, and it’s not a good one. You can sustain it — at great cost — in your 20s and 30s and maybe into your early 40s, but it doesn’t carry you through the second half of life, and maybe it’s not such a good idea to churn through the young and naive as if they were commodities.
So perhaps the emergence of the term “sustainable faith” is in part a reaction to a mode of ministry that’s difficult over a lifetime.