Overcoming consumerism in American Christianity

One of the issues that every new church plant faces is how to attract attention and visibility for their new church. On one hand, this means using modern media (such as web sites, social media, podcasts, videocasts) to get the word out. On the other hand, it can lead to a focus on tailoring the “product” to satisfy “customers” rather than offer the prospective converts the Good News of the risen Christ.

This latter point was the culmination of a commentary last week on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. The commentary seeks to explain where this American Christian consumer mentality came from, with the end of parishioners naturally being assigned to a specific parish

Which Henry Caused the Reformation

by Carl R. Trueman

10.31.17

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In fact, I would argue that the single greatest enabler of the modern world’s attitude to religion is not some sixteenth-century Reformer…Henry Ford, not Henry VIII, is the guilty man. The Reformation may have familiarized the world with the concept of religious choice, but that choice became a reality for most people only with the advent of cheap and easy means of private transportation. It was the arrival of the internal combustion engine, and then the mass-produced automobile, that really changed everything. It altered our relationship to time, to geographical space, and to our communities and all that is contained therein. It was the motor car that truly freed people from the constraints of having to worship within walking distance of their home. The motor car made churches into choices, competing for customers in the marketplace of Sunday recreations. It turned us all, Protestant and Catholic alike, into consumerist Congregationalists.

To be fair, this change may have been enabled by Henry Ford, but not one that he oversaw. Instead, the the growth of American consumerism in church — as in the rest of society — would likely be traced through is explosion in the postwar era.

Some of this is due to cars, which were in scarce supply during the Depression and World War II, but become plentiful after the war (and Ford’s 1947 death). But the postwar era and television also brought a new tools of the  mass media – the great American selling machine that sells us soap, dreams of happiness, and even presidents. This trend of the 1950s and 1960s was captured by the TV show “Mad Men” and the book The Selling of the President.

Most Anglo-Catholic church planters seem to understand this dilemma. On the one hand, we have to reach prospective members — whether Anglican, Christian, fallen away or the unbaptized — and have a conversation with them about the triune God, faith and salvation. On the other hand, a church that exists only to put on programs — to attract new members — at best has put the cart before the horse and at the worst has forgotten the teaching and discipling components of the Great Commission.

Various studies and consultants have emphasized the need for the church to be real, honest and authentic, particularly with the Millennial generation. If we really mean it — consistently manifesting the vertical and horizontal fellowship of Matthew 12:29-31 — we may be able to overcome their cynicism that churches (and the Church) are just another organization trying to attract interest and revenues to line its own pockets..

Pros and cons of bivocational planting

By J. West

In working with church planters, one of the key questions is always how to provide clergy to launch a parish before it has enough resources to be self sufficient. In some cases, it’s possible to raise external funds from the province, diocese or mother church to temporarily support the planter (typically two years). But in other cases, it’s not.

Bivocational clergy are a common answer to this lack of resources. They are also increasingly used by established parishes, including in The Episcopal Church. For example, a 2013 policy document from The Episcopal Diocese of Texas says:

In the past several years, the Church has been faced with a growing need for clergy leadership in smaller congregations and in churches with unique challenges and circumstances. Studies indicate that most congregations with an average Sunday attendance of 30-75 find it difficult to fund the services of a full-time priest. Congregations with an average Sunday attendance of fewer than 30 are accustomed to utilizing supply and part-time Priests-in-Charge.
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Begun in 2004, the Bi-Vocational Priesthood Program gives the Diocese of Texas the ability to provide for the needs of its smallest churches. Bi-Vocational Priests are called to the priesthood but have independent means of income, including retirement or other professions.

At the same time, there are disadvantages to the bivocational approach. Here’s an overview of the arguments.

Advantages

Many have noted both the prevalence and advantages of bivocational clergy.  The strongest argument is that it allows churches to be created and congregations to be served that — under conditions of limited resources — might otherwise not be served.

Others make even stronger arguments. One of the most enthusiastic advocates is Ed Stetzer, who in an Oct 15 column noted that already one-third of American clergy are bivocational:

Bivocational ministry offers a great opportunity for evangelism. Bivocational pastors are uniquely positioned to live out their pastoral calling as the lead missionary to their local community. As a well-equipped and gifted emissary of the gospel, these ministers can lead their congregations by demonstrating the power of evangelism to build the local church.

In a mission field that is moving in an increasingly secular direction, bivocational pastors are on the frontlines of gospel witness.

In focusing on how bivocational pastoring can facilitate effective evangelism, I will first argue that full-time ministry can potentially hamper cultural engagement. In light of these challenges, I will outline the role of bivocational pastors in leading the church into a season of fruitful evangelism.

Disadvantages

On the skeptical side, last week I saw a tweet of an article by Pastor John Starke, a graduate of Southeastern Baptist Seminary and lead pastor of a NYC parish. The tweet refers to a 2015 article, entitled “Cautions Against Bi-vocational Ministry,” posted to Medium.com.  His main points include

• Bivocational ministry is harder between two careers than between two churches
• The Biblical demands on a pastor are not part time — and multiple part-time pastors aren’t going to be available in most of the country
• Something will suffer, most likely the pastor’s family
• Rather plant 100 under-resourced churches, plant 10 properly resourced churches

I encourage any potential clergyman — or planting team — to read the entire article. These are serious and well-considered arguments.

Conclusion

Based on my own work with church planters — as well with secular entrepreneurs trying to launch a company in their spare time — I think there are two ways that part-time planters can actually work.

One is when the planter doesn’t have to be bivocational, but can get by long term on a part-time salary. The most common example I’ve seen is a military (or other) retiree, but there are also cases of extremely sympathetic (and gainfully employed) spouses. In this case, the pastor is not worrying about supporting his family, but on growing the parish.

The other is when the bivocational period is a temporary measure, typically 2-3 years. I’ve known lots of entrepreneurs who start companies in their spare time, hoping to sprint to creating a self-supporting organization; if they make it, they’re a hero, but if not, eventually they give up.

Short term, a bivocational church planter can leverage the enthusiasm of the launch team and other supporters: a capable part-time leader with a vision and a good team can achieve miracles. Longer term, if the church can’t support the clergy, there will be limits to how long he can sustain the push and contribute to the parish growth, and usually the momentum will stall. (Given the consumerist mentality of American church shoppers, flagging momentum also means that many volunteers will jump ship for some other church).

So in my opinion, the key is to know whether the bivocational calling is a sprint, or a marathon. If a sprint, then there must be a realistic prospect of making it to the finish line — consistent with Christ’s admonition in Luke 14:28-30.

If there is no realistic hope of achieving self-sufficiency in a reasonable amount of time, then it appears there are three alternatives: don’t launch, hold off on launching until adequate resources, or plan to create a small parish with a permanently part-time clergyman. The latter approach poses other challenges, which requires a more complete discussion another time.

Why we Plant: Churches Planting Churches

By Father Lee Nelson, SSC

"As they went on their way through the cities, they delivered to them for observance the decisions which had been reached by the apostles and elders who were at Jerusalem. So the churches were strengthened in the faith, and they increased in numbers daily." Acts 16:4-5

One of the realizations the reader of the Acts of the Apostles will make is that while the ancient Church was passionate about evangelism, it was every bit as passionate, if not more so, about establishing churches in every city of the world. In a sense, you could say that evangelism was a bridge to the establishment of a local church with local leadership granted authority by the apostles. The above verse speaks of the time just before Paul is called into Macedonia, where he would preach the Gospel in Europe for the first time. The churches of Asia are experiencing explosive growth following the Council of Jerusalem, and for good reason. The Council had made clear her expectations of Gentiles coming to the Faith, and they were not so high as some might have expected. Yet, Luke does not recount that the number of disciples grew, but that the number of churches grew as they received the decisions of the Council. So what we see is the dynamic and exponential growth of churches under the authority of the Apostles and subsequently the proclamation of the Gospel through those churches. This results in the dynamic and exponential growth of the numbers of disciples, but that growth is contingent on the numbers of churches.

Today, research shows us the same phenomenon. In towns with more churches, more people go to church, even when you correct for every other variable. A rising tide truly does lift all ships. We have long been told that personal and individual evangelism is essential to church growth, but does this really fit the bill of the New Testament? The Lord Jesus made fishermen fishers of men. Had they seen a rod and reel, they would not have understood it. These men fished with nets. They were all-or-nothing sorts and as they were taught to become fishers of men, The Lord taught them to rely upon the building up of the ecclesial community to make disciples. You may remember the disciples coming to shore after a long, fruitless night. Jesus commands Peter to put down his nets, and a great catch - 153 fish! - are hauled in. You see, the Church is the great net in which are caught up all the nations of the world. (John 21:11) Personal evangelism, though important, can never be a replacement for the local church.

In the United States, we live in the largest mission field in the Western Hemisphere. There are roughly 120 million unreached Americans. A lack of church planting, as much as cultural forces, has brought us to this point. Population has expanded, and the number of churches has remained relatively stable. It is our conviction at Christ Church that The Lord is calling us to be part of a movement of churches planting churches. It is our belief that as long as there are unchurched people in our city, there is a need for more churches, not less. We also know from the research that new churches make more disciples than older ones. Churches under three years old make three times the disciples as churches fifteen years old or older.

So that is the goal, and we are already going about that work. When I came to Christ Church, the bishop also gave me responsibility for our student ministry at Texas A&M. They had about 25 students and one family. We now have ten families ready to go in that mission. A permanent full-time planter will be starting up in November and December.

Here in Waco, we are beginning to pull together a group of people who will explore a call to plant another parish church in the area. Who knows what it will be like. Would you pray that the Lord will put clarity and passion in that group of people?

The vision at Christ Church is to become a church that plants other churches. We will do that by training up our members - especially students - as planters and evangelists. As these students disperse, they will do so with the skills and tools of church planting in their tool chests. They will know how to catechize. They will know how to find appropriate space, start small, and build patterns of sustainable growth. In other words, they will be fishers of men, mature Christians able to build up the body through replication. 


From the weekly parish email newsletter of Christ Church, Waco.

Task force at 2017 FiFNA Assembly

The task force will be leading several church planting events at the Forward in Faith 2017 Assembly, July 26-28 in Hurst, Texas (near DFW airport).

Both events take place on Thursday, July 27. At 2:00 p.m., Fr. Lee Nelson of the task force will give a lecture and lead a workshop on church planting. In the evening, we plan an informal social for those involved in Anglo-Catholic church plants.

Below is a flyer summarizing our plans. We look forward to anyone at the Assembly interested in church planting, as well as those located locally in the DFW Metroplex.

Making Anglicanism accessible

By J. West

An important issue for Anglican parishes is incorporating those unfamiliar with our liturgy (or language) into our churches. At the same time, Anglo-Catholics want to do so without diminish from the mystery and reverence that were reclaimed by the Oxford Movement and often the reasons why people seek out Anglicanism in the first place.

In my second year lay ministry class last month, only two of us (plus our rector) were childhood Anglicans. At Christ Church Waco, only four of the adults (and only one of the four five priests) was raised Anglican.

This is very different from when I joined the Episcopal Church at age 8 in a previous century. (My dad was Presbyterian, mom Episcopalian and we switched for good when we moved to Palm Springs). But it's not exactly a new phenomenon: Robert Webber, a formerly Baptist theology professor at Wheaton College, wrote about this in his 1985 book, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail.

The topic of accessibility came up today in the monthly call of a church planting committee I belong to. How do we explain what we are doing — and why — to someone who’s never been in a liturgical church before? We compared notes of our parishes and those we’d visited, but in the end it came down to three options. From least to most intrusive:

1. Add a written explanation to the service booklet — whether a weekly seat bulletin or a preprinted liturgy booklet.
2. Make remarks at the beginning of the service — either weekly or on special occasions such as a change of liturgical seasons — about what we are doing and why.
3. Insert transitional remarks during the service every week so people know what’s happening at all times.

The third option feels wrong to me: although I lack both the formal training or clerical experience to justify that opinion, it seems more like the evangelical churches that are more focused on presenting a service for the seeker than growing and deepening the faith of the believers. However, I know the priest who uses this approach has good reasons for doing so, and the character of his (charismatic-flavored) Anglican parish is very different than the bells-and-smells high church where I’m a member.

The final point is that church planters are entrepreneurs. Being entrepreneurial means trying experiments, and by definition some experiments won’t work; also, in my experience, parishioners are more tolerant of experiments and mistakes in a young (or rapidly growing) church that hasn’t done something before. So — as with everything else — it’s really up to the planter to try things that work in his particular context, and get prompt feedback to change things if they’re not working.

Missional challenges of the modern world

By J. West

Tonight I was meeting with local Anglican church planters for a social event. At the end our host asked us to articulate our major frustration or challenge.

One theme was the challenge of creating and maintaining relationships with future members of our flocks. This included the challenges of maintaining ties in a highly mobile society, and losing members passing on in aging congregations.

We also discussed other challenges in modern urban and suburban society here in Southern California. One is — reminiscent of Western Europe — the ever-smaller proportion of Christians in our communities. The other is the tendency of Americans to drive past many other churches for the denomination, program, preaching or whatever features they demand as church consumers. Together, this means that we don’t have the sense of community — and ongoing ties between Sundays — that one might have seen in small town America or a medieval England village.

As it turns out, this ties back to an email conversation I had today with the clergy at my own church, sharing a few of the many recent articles written in response to Rod Dreher’s publication earlier this month of The Benedict Option.   (An excerpt was reprinted in Christianity Today and Dreher had a great interview with Dr. Al Mohler). The clergy and I have been discussing the book and its critiques, because this parallels our own shared vision of using Mission Communities as the path to forming deeper Christians and the nucleus of future churches.

One of these articles, called “Benedict in the Suburbs,” was by Fr. Stephen Freeman, an Orthodox priest on the Ancient Faith website, who questions whether Benedictine communities can be constructed in consumerist American communities. A few excerpts from his important arguments:

The origin of the Benedict Option (Rod’s creative title for all of this) comes from the final paragraph in Alasdair MacIntyre’s classic, After Virtue (1981). Having analyzed and detailed the collapse of modern society in terms of its ability to produce virtuous people, MacIntyre likens our time to that of post-Roman Western Europe. With the end of empire and the dominance of barbarity, small enclaves of monastics (primarily Benedictines) began what would become the seeds of civilization’s return to virtue.
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We are a consumer economy, highly individualistic with a deep regard for sentiment. The landscape of our world has evolved in response to these fundamental realities. Values and practices that fall outside of that model are difficult to nurture and sustain. Human beings are largely creatures of habit. If the structures of our world support a certain form of virtue, then that is the most likely path we will follow. We do so because it is the most natural way to live.

It is here that most aspects of a modern “Benedict Option” flounder. An American suburb is not a European village of Late Antiquity. Every aspect of a suburb’s existence is designed to serve and nurture consumers.
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Religious institutions that thrive have adapted themselves to these (and other) suburban virtues.  The evangelical mega-church is, by far, the fastest growing religious phenomenon in our area (I think my Episcopal neighbor is now attending a mega-church). It is said that such Churches are popular because they require so little commitment. They flourish for the same reason as the big-box stores. Their gospel is tailored for quick consumption. “Holy Days” are generally designed to mimic cultural holidays without the dissonance of an ancient calendar.

Traditional Churches (such as the Orthodox) are also strongly marked by a suburban mentality. Sundays are well-attended, and the major feasts, with the exception of Christmas and Pascha, much less so. There is constant pressure to create “program” and various strategies to nurture piety. The integration between hearth, home and Church is quite minimal. Of course, the very structure of suburban life is constantly at war with the traditional notion of parish. I have families who travel over an hour-and-a-half to attend Church. It is only natural that their attendance is sporadic. My own family is probably the only one who lives in comfortable walking distance to the Church. I once calculated that the parish uses over 100-200 gallons of gasoline on any given Sunday.
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St. Benedict’s communities “worked,” because what grew up around them were very natural, villages and towns, integrated in the life of parish and monastery. Of necessity, the economies were small, as though E.F. Schumacher himself had served as economic advisor to St. Benedict. Benedict’s entire work presumes poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability. The villages of Benedictine Europe embodied these virtues in large measure in accordance with their circumstances.

The other related article was in the Catholic journal of letters, First Things. Bethany Mandel, a writer for the century-old Jewish newspaper the Forward, offers “Going Benedict, Orthodox Jewish”; a few excerpts:

Readers of a new book by Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option, may decide to “go Benedict,” dropping out of society in some fashion, for religious and moral reasons.

Dreher’s subtitle is A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. A fascinating component of the book, however, is the overlap between what Dreher proposes and what already exists within the Orthodox Jewish community, in North America and across the world. The communal makeup of the Orthodox Jewish community was built not in response to cultural upheaval, but from a desire to maintain the continuity of the Jewish people.
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Thanks to the need for homes to be within walking distance of the community’s synagogue, Orthodox Jewish families often live in close proximity to one another—another recommendation Dreher makes in The Benedict Option. He acknowledges: “Geography is one secret to the strength and resilience of the Orthodox Jewish communities. … Christians don’t have the geographical requirement that Orthodox Jews do, but many of those who choose to live in proximity have found it a blessing. … Why be close? Because the church can’t just be the place you go on Sundays—it must become the center of your life.”

In addition to the Orthodox believers creating the sense of community and belonging, Mandel notes two other practices that conform to the goals articulated by the (Eastern Orthodox) Dreher: separating from the corrupting effects of modern mass media (at least on the Sabbath), and replacing secular public schools with local private schools controlled by the believers. For the latter, she confirms the risk identified by Dreher — that with the high price of private secondary schools, Dreher says the result is a “materialistic, status-conscious culture within the schools.”

Dreher, Mandel and my colleagues point back to fundamental challenge we face in building strong churches in post-Christian American society. How do we create communities that transform people’s lives by prayer and fellowship with their fellow believers — not just two hours a week, but seven days a week? I believe this is a crucial (and as yet unanswered) question for the church in 21st century America.