I’m in FT on Andrew Root and “the church in the immanent frame”

Today First Things published my review of Andrew Root’s new book, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age. Here’s how the review opens:

If there is one thing everyone agrees about in America, it is that churches are in decline. Agnosticism and apostasy have, as ideas and as habits, been trickling down from Western elites for three centuries. First they came for the mainline; then they came for Catholics; now they have come for evangelicals. The “nones” are rising and long-time parishes are shuttering. One hears of consultants being brought in to help local churches “die well.” Even in the Bible Belt, for every thriving congregation there are five on hospice care.

Andrew Root’s new book is therefore a timely one. Titled Churches and the Crisis of Decline, it speaks directly to churches and pastors looking to survive, if not thrive, in a time of disorienting collapse. The book offers a theological vision for faithful pastoral ministry and church life that draws upon the writings of a young Swiss pastor who lived in similarly trying times a century ago: Karl Barth. Root wants us to see Barth’s theology—especially his commentary on Romans—as pastoral above all: that is, written by a minister for ministers tasked with the proclamation of the gospel and the care of a congregation. Just as St. Thomas wrote the Summa Theologiae for the practical tasks of his fellow Dominicans, so Barth wrote the bullet-stopping volumes of the Kirchliche Dogmatik for fellow preachers of God’s word. Rather than leave Barth to the systematicians, Root wants to reclaim him for the pastors.

Click here to read the rest.

On pastors embarrassed to say the great word “God”

Inside the immanent frame, there is a sneaky temptation for the pastor. She is often tempted, and somehow invisibly formed, to take God less seriously than her people do. The pastor can feel embarrassed to say the great word “God” or to even see the word “God” as a great word. Inside the invisible immanent frame, the word “God” feels meaningless, even immature. The pastor feels the temptation to run the congregation as a small business, even a little self-conscious of all the enchantment and dogma. But her people, who more directly bear the contradictions of modernity, and at times spit out the dry sawdust of the immanent frame, yearn to know that God has a purpose for their lives. They yearn to know that God can still speak. Secretly, and maybe with a little shame, the pastor finds herself doubting this, wanting at least one foot to rest squarely inside modernity, fearing she’ll be overtaken by superstition. The moral vision of immanence becomes more tempting for her than for her people.

—Andrew Root, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age (2022), 31. Preach, brother.