The greatest threat facing the church today

In my latest piece for Christianity Today, I propose the following thesis:

The greatest threat facing the church today is not atheism or secularism, scientism or legalism, racism or nationalism. The greatest threat facing the church today is digital technology.

That’s a controversial claim for many reasons, and I’m not dogmatic about it. It could be wrong. Moreover, it’s not self-evident that there is a meaningful hierarchy of threats facing the church. Perhaps there are a handful, all on the same level; or a variety that are incommensurable. Finally, a year or two back Alan Jacobs and Andy Crouch took me (ever so kindly) to task for a claim like this one, proposing instead that Mammon, not Digital, is the principal threat; and, further, that Digital is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mammon.

With those caveats in place, what are the candidates for this particular category? What are the most significant threats facing the church today? By what measures should we judge them? And which church, or churches, or regions and cultures of the world, should we have in mind?

The range of answers would at least need to be large enough and systemic enough to threaten millions of believers at once, and in insidious and powerful ways difficult to suss out and extinguish. In the excerpt above I mention some “isms” that people are worried about. Let’s expand that list:

• Capitalism

• Progressivism

• Liberalism

• Secularism

• Atheism

• Scientism

• Legalism

• Racism

• Nationalism

• Imperialism

• War-mongering

• Industrialism

• Environmentalism

• Utilitarianism

• Individualism

• Nihilism

• Anti-natalism

• Technophilia

• Thanatophilia (i.e., the culture of death)

The important thing to see is that the nature of the threat doesn’t consist in discrete events or even types of events—famine, plague, poverty, war. These are evils and cause mass suffering, but they aren’t threats to the church, at least not in the way I’m using the term. These and other trials the church will always have her. They’re part of the way of the world, the world we long for God to redeem. They aren’t systems or structures or ideologies perpetrated by human beings (except when they are—but they are rarely reducible to ideology or policies, for the simple reason that they are insoluble, perennial problems of finite, mortal existence in a fallen world). More to the point, in the midst of great suffering the church sometimes rises to the occasion in service, courage, and sacrifice. In the face of danger, damage, and pain the church can fail, falter, or flourish. But she can’t be what God calls her to be if she isn’t prepared—if, that is, her foundations are so eroded that she forgets her own reason for being.

It is the question of what enacts such erosion that I am naming with the language of “threat.” A major threat to the church would snuff out its life whether it was the best of times or the worst of times; it would silence the gospel before anyone could hear it or live it out at all.

Another way to put it would be to ask, as I did recently, what idol or idols a given generation or place or people worships, and why, and what counterfeit blessings it receives in return, and how its worship and what it receives in turn shape and form it in the image of said idol(s).

I’m far from dogmatic on this question, as I said at the outset. If I had to pick five, I suppose I would choose technophilia, individualism, utilitarianism, capitalism, and progressivism. But then, how many of these are birthed from or contained within liberalism, understood as the ideology developed and advanced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Not to mention scientism, which arguably is concomitant with both liberalism and utilitarianism and, later, with the love of the future that finds concrete expression in progressivism and technophilia.

And is Mammon then the devilish father of them all? I leave the question open for others to chime in.

Update (seconds after pressing publish): I realize that I did not specify that I am here thinking exclusively about exogenous threats—if I were put on the spot about internal threats, I might say that church division is the single greatest threat to the church’s integrity and to the credibility of the gospel she proclaims to the world. Not in view here!

It’s publication day! The Church: A Guide to the People of God is here!

It’s out! It’s here! Order a copy! My second book in the same month! There are no more to come anytime soon, so buy them up while you can!

Buy one for yourself, for your spouse, your children, your grandchildren, your nephews, your nieces, your godchildren, your parents, your pastor, your youth pastor, your college pastor, your professor—or all of them!

Don’t take my word for it—listen to Andrew Wilson, Stanley Hauerwas, Ephraim Radner, Karen Kilby, Matthew Levering, Karen Kilby, and Mark Kinzer, all of whom endorsed it. They can’t be wrong, can they?

The first review of the book came out last week in The Gospel Coaliation. Samuel Parkison writes:

Gentiles don’t become Jews, but they can become the true seed of Abraham through adoption (see Gal. 3:16). This deep awareness of the church’s Old Testament connections is a welcome emphasis. All the more so because of the undeniably beautiful prose in which East develops this idea. Indeed, The Church can just as easily be labeled a work of art as a work of theology. For example, his reflections on the typological resonances between Eve, Mary, Israel, and the church are nothing less than riveting.

He concludes: “This is a beautiful book. Taken in such a way, The Church should receive a wide and appreciative readership.”

Come on: There’s just no way a book that looks that good can be bad on the inside. By way of reminder, here is the book’s description:

You belong to God's family. But do you understand what that means?

The Bible tells the story of God and his people. But it is not merely history. It is our story. Abraham is our father. And Israel's freedom from slavery is ours.

Brad East traces the story of God's people, from father Abraham to the coming of Christ. He shows how we need the scope of the entire Bible to fully grasp the mystery of the church. The church is not a building but a body. It is not peripheral or optional in the life of faith. Rather, it is the very beating heart of God's story, where our needs and hopes are found.

Buy it wherever books are sold. And while you’re at it, buy the rest of the volumes in Lexham’s Christian Essentials series—The Apostles’ Creed by Ben Myers, The Lord’s Prayer by Wes Hill, The Ten Commandments and Baptism by Peter Leithart, and God’s Word by John Kleinig. Kleinig also authored the seventh in the series, due next March, called The Lord’s Supper. The last two should come out sometime in the next 12-24 months…

Get the whole set! Starting with mine! Today! Now! Ahorita! S'il vous plaît!

Thanks to all. This one’s a love letter to the church—both the Church and the churches that I have called home over the last four decades. I hope it shows.

More screens, more distractions; fewer screens, fewer distractions

It’s a simple rule, but I repeat it here because it is difficult to internalize and even more difficult to put into practice, whatever one’s context:

In any given physical space, the more screens that are present, the more distractions there will be for people inhabiting that space; whereas the fewer screens, the fewer distractions.

So far as I can tell, this principle is always and everywhere true, including in places where screens are the point, like a sports bar. No one would study for the LSAT in a sports bar: it’s too distracting, too noisy, too busy. It’s built to over-stimulate. Indeed, a football fan who cared about only one game featuring one team would not spend his Sunday afternoon in a sports bar with a dozen games on simultaneously, because it would prove too difficult to focus on the one thing of interest to him.

Now consider other social spaces: a coffee shop, a classroom, a living room, a sanctuary, a monastery. How are these spaces usually filled? Given their ends, how should they be filled?

The latter question answers itself. This is why, for example, I do not permit use of screens when I teach in a college classroom. Phones, tablets, and laptops are in bags or pockets. In the past I have used a single projector screen for slides, especially for larger survey/lecture courses, but for the most part, even with class sizes of 40 or 50 or 60, I don’t use a screen at all, just markers and a whiteboard. Unquestionably the presence of personal screens open on desks is a massive distraction not only to their owners but to anyone around them. And because distractions are obstacles to learning, I eliminate the distractions.

The same goes for our homes and our churches.

At the outer limit, our homes would lack screens altogether. I know there are folks who do this, but it’s a rare exception to the rule. (Actually, I’m not sure if I have ever personally known someone whose home is 100% devoid of any screen of any kind.) So assuming there will be screens of some kind, how should they be arranged in a home?

1. There should be numerous spaces that lack a permanent screen.

2. There should be numerous spaces in which, by rule or norm, portable screens are unwelcome.

3. There should be focal spaces organized around some object (fireplace, kitchen island, couch and coffee table) or activity (cooking, reading, playing piano) that are ordinarily or always screen-free.

4. What screens there are should require some friction to use, i.e., a conscious and active rather than passive decision to turn them on or or engage with them.

5. Fewer screens overall and fewer screens in any given space will conduce to fewer distractions, on one hand, and greater likelihood of shared or common screen usage, on the other. (I.e., watching a movie together as a family rather than adults and children on separate devices doing their own thing.)

There is more to say, but for those interested I’m mostly just repackaging the advice of Andy Crouch and Albert Borgmann. Now to church.

There are a few ways that screens can invade the space of public worship:

1. Large screens “up front” that display words, images, videos, or live recording of whatever is happening “on stage” (=pastor, sermon, communion, music).

2. Small screens, whether tablets or smartphones, out and visible and in active usage by ministers and others leading the congregation in worship.

3. Small screens, typically smartphones, in the pockets and laps of folks in the pews.

Let me put it bluntly: It’s often said that Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America. In a different vein, it’s equally true that Sunday morning may now be the most distracted hour in America.

Why? Because screens are everywhere! Not, to be sure, in every church. The higher liturgical traditions have preserved a liturgical celebration often, though not always, free of screen colonization. Yet even there parishioners still by and large bring their screens in with them.

Certainly for low-church forms of worship, screens are everywhere. And the more screens, the more distractions. Which means that, for many churches, distraction appears to be part of the point. Those attending are meant, in a twist on T. S. Eliot’s phrase, to be distracted from distraction by distraction—that is, to be distracted from bad distraction (fantasy football, Instagram, online shopping) by good distraction (cranked-up CCM, high production videos, Bible apps). It is unthinkable, on this view, to imagine worshiping on a Sunday morning in a screen-free environment. Yet a screen-free space would be a distraction-free space, one designed precisely to free the attention—the literal eyeballs—of those gathered to focus on the one thing they came for: God.

I hope to write a full essay on this soon for Christianity Today, laying out a practical vision for screen-free worship. For now I just want to propose it as an ideal we should all agree on. Ministers should not use phones while leading worship nor should they invite parishioners to open the Bible “on their apps.” Do you know what said parishioners will do when so invited? They may or may not open their Bible app. They will absolutely find their eyes diverted to a text message, an email, or a social media update. And at once you will have lost them—either for a few minutes or for good.

The best possible thing for public Christian worship in twenty-first century America would be the banishment of all screens from the sanctuary. Practically speaking, it would look like leaders modeling and then inviting those who attend to leave their phones at home, in their cars, or in cell phone lockers (the way K–12 schools are increasingly doing).

I’m well aware that this couldn’t happen overnight, and that there are reasonable exceptions for certain people to have a phone on them (doctors on call, police officers, parents of children with special needs). But hard cases make bad law. The normative vision should be clear and universally shared. The liturgy is a place for ordering our attention, the eyes of the heart, on what we cannot see but nevertheless gain a glimpse of when we hear the word of the Lord and see and smell and taste the signs of bread and wine on the Lord’s table. We therefore should not intentionally encourage the proliferation of distractions in this setting nor stand by and watch it happen, as if the design of public space were out of our hands.

More screens, more distractions; fewer screens, fewer distractions: the saying is sure. Let’s put it into practice.

My latest: on the social effects of church, in CT

In 2016 David Brooks gave an address at the 40th Anniversary Celebration of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. Titled “The Cultural Value of Christian Higher Education,” the talk had a simple thesis: What every college in America is looking for can already be found at Christian universities across the country. In his own words:

You guys are the avant-garde of 21st century culture. You have what everybody else is desperate to have: a way of talking about and educating the human person in a way that integrates faith, emotion and intellect. You have a recipe to nurture human beings who have a devoted heart, a courageous mind and a purposeful soul. Almost no other set of institutions in American society has that, and everyone wants it. From my point of view, you’re ahead of everybody else and have the potential to influence American culture in a way that could be magnificent.

I happen to think he’s right about that, but in my latest column for Christianity Today, I use Brook’s remarks as a point of departure for thinking about another beleaguered American institution: the local church.

The piece is called “Worship Together or Bowl Alone”—a great title, kudos to Bonnie Kristian. Here’s an excerpt:

That’s why the instinct to meet our culture’s critique or ignorance of the church by downplaying its import is so misguided. Church is not an optional add-on to Christian faith. It is how we learn to be human as God intended. Indeed, it makes possible truly human life before God. 

Church has what we need, the purpose and community and cultivation of virtue for which the rest of our culture is grasping in the dark. It’s right here. It’s nothing to be coy or embarrassed about. It’s nothing to apologize for. Church is what people are hungering for, even if they don’t realize it. Sometimes we ourselves don’t realize it.

Click here to read the rest.

Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the Eucharist?

I take these two questions to be (a) the most urgent theological questions one can ask and (b) synonymous. They came to mind as I read Jeff Reimer’s essay published in Comment last year, titled “How Not to Be a Schismatic.”

That was more than eight months ago, and for eight months I’ve been working up the nerve to read the essay. I expected it to be painful, and it was. It was like looking in a mirror. I knew Jeff’s wilderness wanderings would be similar to my own, and I frankly didn’t want to put myself through the ringer.

I did, though, and the first thing to say is that the essay is beautiful. I can’t wait to assign it to students and share it with friends. It puts into words so much that so many people I know have gone through or are currently going through. It’s a melancholy story of genuine spiritual suffering, even if he wouldn’t want to put it that way. It is a special kind of mental and emotional torture not to know where you are meant to be and to feel ecclesially homeless as a result.

The essay is also self-critical and mordantly funny; the opening bit is pitch perfect. How many young (now approaching middle age) men with a dash of theological education does Jeff speak for? Sometimes it feels like most of us, though I know that can’t be true.

Here’s the one and only critical or unpersuaded question I want to put to the essay, sourced in the one and only unsatisfied reaction I had to it.

Jeff and I agree about the blessed sacrament. The Eucharist not only communicates grace to the baptized, it is the fount and apex of the faith. It is the heart of the liturgy. It is where Christ meets us, body and soul, in the flesh and blood of his real presence.

Jeff’s journey, like so many others, was about “finding the right church.” He ended up arriving at an uncomfortable Protestant position: in this life, there is no “right” church to find; that’s a matter of hope for the next life. So he comes round full circle, remaining in an evangelical Protestant congregation/tradition because, in the end, he just wants Jesus, and he can’t expect a historical institution run by human beings to be perfect.

Jeff is right to want Jesus. The question is where to find him. And the turn in the final part of the essay seems to me to beg the relevant question. This question is put one of two ways, as the title of this post has it: Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the sacrament of his body and blood? No Christian believes the answer is “anywhere you want.” Jeff doesn’t think that, nor do I. The answer also can’t be “wherever people say they have Jesus.” There are communities that truly believe they are a church but aren’t. Indeed, and by the same token, there are communities that sincerely mean to celebrate the Lord’s Supper but fail to do so.

Don’t suppose that I’m representing either sectarian or Catholic views here. This is a matter of ecumenical consensus. Ask yourself: What constitutes a faithful or successful celebration of the Eucharist? Are there any minimum conditions to be met? If there are—and it should go without saying that there are—I can point you to communities that call themselves churches that fail to meet them. Communities that celebrate without wine, or without unleavened bread, or without bread at all, or without any thought at all about the elements, or without an ordained celebrant, or without prayers, or without Scriptures, or without any ritual component whatsoever. Convert the disjunctives to conjunctions: I know of a mainstream church that invited an unbaptized non-Christian to “lead” the Supper. I’ve been present for one in which the name of Jesus wasn’t spoken, the cross went unmentioned, Scripture wasn’t read, and no prayer was offered. In all of these occasions, it hardly needs adding, the notion of the real presence was and is explicitly rejected, even laughed at and mocked.

Am I really supposed to believe that a “cupcake and Mountain Dew” Lord’s Supper, administered by oneself to oneself while home alone streaming Hillsong, is the genuine article? The question answers itself. There are failed attempts at Holy Communion. There are false churches. Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

I know that Jeff agrees with me on this. But I find that most of us—friends, colleagues, pastors, theologians—need the reminder. To say “I’ll stay where I am, because all I want is Jesus, to be fed by his body and blood” is already to presume that Jesus can be found “where I am” and that “his body and blood” are there with him, too. But for many, perhaps most, wayfarers today, that is the very question they are wondering: they don’t know the answer prior to investigating it. They aren’t trying to find the perfect church or even the “one true” church to the exclusion of all others. They just want Jesus. They therefore want to be confident that the meal they are joining is in fact the Eucharist, not a failed attempt—and since we’ve established that attempting the meal is not the same as successfully celebrating it, this is a legitimate desire that should not only be affirmed but should be able, in principle, to be fulfilled. Not with eschatological rest, but with a lack of simmering anxiety, a measure of peace that puts one’s pestering worries to bed for good.

In other words, the ecclesial journey narrated by Jeff is not an integralist fever dream, not limited to shouting commenters on Protestant apologists’ YouTube videos or to Orthodox theo bros convinced that Saint Luke was the first iconographer. Nor is it the purview merely of guys like us, theologically trained eggheads and liturgical devotees. It’s the journey of every single Christian on earth. Not to find the heavenly Jerusalem here below. Not to rest serenely in the arms of Mother Church, spotless and faultless and utterly pure and benign in all her ministrations and dogmas. Jeff is right to spurn such quests as bound to result in failure, denial, or a schismatic, sectarian spirit—wherever one lands.

No, the proper and faithful quest is to find, in one’s actual neighborhood or town, a gathering of the living body of the living Christ. You can’t have one without the other; you must have both. And since there are plenty of dead ecclesial bodies around pretending to a vitality they lack—corpses posing as Christ’s body when they have no life in them—the quest is at once necessary and universal. It belongs to all of us. Granted, it may sow doubt where there was none before: wondering, now, whether one’s church is legitimate, whether its Eucharist is valid. But it’s better than living in ignorance of the truth.

I for one want an answer to that question. I don’t expect to rest until I find it.

Protestant subtraction

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues against what he calls “subtraction theories” of secularism. A subtraction account describes secularism as simply removing, say, belief in God from the equation; hence, a secular age is the same world minus outmoded ideas about an all-powerful man in the sky. Against this, Taylor argues that secularism is in fact the proposal of something positive, something new and substantive that was not there before—regardless of its truth.

Now apply the concept of subtraction to the story of Christian division over the centuries. I first thought of the following exercise as “playing the Protestant game.” Most of my life I have been surrounded by people who believe, usually explicitly, that most of what the church did and taught from the apostolic fathers through the eighteenth or nineteenth century was erroneous. Here in west Texas, that’s still true. Sometimes this view is made out to be allied to the reformations of the sixteenth century, though typically in ignorance of the fact that, for example, the magisterial reformers did not abolish creeds or infant baptism or ordination or Christian government or other phenomena low-church American evangelicals take for granted as capital-C “Catholic” (and therefore bad).

At the same time, there seems to be a creeping openness among these very people to more and more of “the tradition”: to the church calendar, to saints and monks, to sacramental practice, to creeds and councils, to patristic and even medieval wisdom. This is part of the “loosening” I’ve identified before, which is non-ideological and thus works in every which direction—sometimes toward reclaiming sacred tradition, sometimes toward pursuing charismatic gifts, sometimes toward relaxing social conventions (regarding alcohol or gambling, for example), sometimes toward liberalizing long-standing teachings (regarding sex or male ordination, for example). There’s no one way this loosening is happening. Much is being shaken at the moment; how things will settle won’t be clear for decades, or so it seems to me.

But return to the notion of subtraction. Below I have formulated a list of fifty doctrines or practices that were more or less universally accepted and established by the time of the late middle ages. Many of them underwent serious development in the medieval period; most of them have roots in the church fathers; some of them are basically present in toto before Nicaea. So it wouldn’t be fair to say that the list is just “whatever the church believed from 100 to 1500”—though parts of the list do fit that bill. It would be fair to say that all, or nearly all, of these things described the church just before the Great Schism, and that all, or nearly all, of them continue to describe the faith and piety of two-thirds of the global church today.

So here is the exercise. Ask yourself: When do you hop off the train? When do you say, Yes, I reject items x through y, but no more from here on out? And what is the logic that informs your decision? Is that logic disciplined? arbitrary? a matter of preference? a matter of upbringing? of local social convention? Are there concrete, nonnegotiable biblical or theological reasons to hold back your Christian neighbor from striking through the next item on the list—or the next ten?

Let’s say that the Orthodox have questions about the first three items and that the Anglicans, at least the higher-church among them, have modest questions about a handful (but no more) in the first twenty. Say that, depending on whom you ask, Lutherans and Calvinists want to reject the first twenty to thirty (maybe thirty-five) items on the list. Say that American evangelicals are uncomfortable with every item through forty-five. Say that primitivists and restorationists have more than occasionally set a question mark next to forty-six and forty-seven, and that Protestant liberals have done the same for the final three items.

Where do you stand? Where does your church? Where does your tradition? Why? And, perhaps most important, what is the doctrine of divine providence, wedded to what doctrine of the church, that makes sense of God’s people having gotten so much so wrong for so long? What else have Christians gotten wrong over the millennia? How can we know? Is there a limit?

And if, as I’m less than subtly wanting to suggest, this sort of indefinite unrolling logic of subtraction is neither wise nor defensible; and if, as I mentioned earlier, there is a spiritual hunger behind the “loosening” we are witnessing, a hunger for unwinding these subtractions in favor of reclaiming what was lost—then what should be reclaimed, and on what basis? Call this last query an exercise in addition, even in restoration.

But I digress. Here’s the list. See what you make of it.

1. Papal supremacy

2. Roman primacy

3. Purgatory

4. Intercession of saints

5. Canonization of saints

6. Intercession of Mary

7. Veneration of Mary

8. Mary as Theotokos

9. Icons

10. Relics

11. Holy sites

12. Monasticism

13. Vowed celibacy

14. Vowed poverty

15. Masses for the dead

16. Private masses

17. The Mass

18. Eucharistic transubstantiation

19. Eucharistic adoration

20. Eucharistic change

21. Eucharistic real presence

22. “Deutero-canonical” books

23. Priestly absolution

24. Priests

25. Bishops

26. The sacrament of holy orders

27. The sacrament of marriage

28. The magisterium

29. Dogma

30. Signs and wonders

31. Miraculous healings

32. Exorcisms

33. Baptismal regeneration

34. Confirmation/chrismation

35. Infant baptism

36. Sacred tradition

37. Liturgical calendar

38. Creeds

39. Extra-congregational polity

40. Ordination

41. Liturgical order

42. Baptismal efficacy

43. Eucharistic presence

44. Regular observance of the Eucharist

45. The necessity of baptism

46. The doctrine of the Trinity

47. The divinity of Jesus

48. The inerrancy of Scripture

49. The infallibility of Scripture

50. The indissolubility of marriage

Jenson on catechesis for our time

I’ve done my best to read everything Robert Jenson ever wrote, but he was so prolific that I regularly stumble onto something I’ve never seen before (or, at least, have no memory of reading). The latest is an essay on catechesis.

It comes from a 1999 volume that Jenson and Carl Braaten co-edited, titled Marks of the Body of Christ. It consists of essays by a wide range of ecumenical scholars on Luther’s so-called seven marks of the church: the word of God, the sacraments, the office of the keys, the pastoral office, the holy cross, and the liturgy. The volume interprets the cross as discipleship and the liturgy as catechesis, since Luther uses the latter term to pick out the Creed, the Decalogue, and the Lord’s Prayer as central to the church’s public worship of God.

Jenson’s essay is called “Catechesis for Our Time.” It’s a barnburner. If I could, I would republish the entirety below. Since I can’t, I’ll limit myself to quoting some of the juiciest excerpts.

Jenson, for readers unfamiliar with him, was born in 1930 and died in 2017. He was a polymath, a Midwesterner, a Lutheran, and German-trained. He was deeply involved in international ecumenical dialogues throughout his career and taught at a variety of institutions. He remained an ordained Lutheran all his life, but was deeply catholic in piety, liturgy, doctrine, and ecclesial sensibility. He was an astute observer of late modern culture in all its permutations and depredations.

Here’s how the essay begins:

I began teaching in 1955, in a liberal arts college of the church. My students were mostly fresh from active participation in their home town Protestant congregations. In those days, I and others like me re­garded it as our duty, precisely for the sake of students’ faith, to loosen them up a bit. They had been drilled in standard doctrine — Jesus is the Son of God, God is triune but what that means is a mystery, heaven is the reward of a good life — to the point of insensibility to the gospel itself.

In 1966 I left undergraduate teaching. Then just 23 years later, I re­turned to teach at a similar churchly liberal arts college. My students were again mostly fresh from active participation in Protestant congre­gations — though now with more Catholics mixed in. During those years, the situation exactly reversed itself.

It is now my duty to inform these young Christians that, e.g., there once was a man named Abraham who had an interesting life, that then there was Moses and that he came before Jesus, that Jesus was a Jew who is thought by some to be risen from the dead, that there are command­ments claiming to be from God, and that they frown on fornication and such, and other like matters.

Well hello there, shock of recognition. It’s always good to be reminded that Protestant liberalism comes for everyone; evangelicals are not immune, they just lag the mainline by a couple generations.

Jenson comments on the development of the catechumenate and the logic that lay behind it. He writes:

[Following the initial apostolic generations] the church needed and was granted institutions that could sustain her faithfulness within continuing history. So the canon of Scripture emerged, and the episcopate in local succession, and creeds and rules of faith. And so also an instructional institution arose, situated between conversion and baptism.

For it was the experience of the church, after a bit of time had passed in which to have experience, that baptism and subsequent life in the litur­gical and moral life of the church, if granted immediately upon hearing and affirming the gospel, were too great a shock for spiritual health. Life in the church was just too different from life out of the church, for people to tolerate the transfer without some preparation.

Converts were used to religious cults that had little moral content, that centered often on bloody sacrifice, and that were oriented — as we might now put it — to the “religious needs” of the worshiper. They were entering a cult oriented not to their religious needs but to the mandates of a particular and highly opinionated God. They were entering a cult cen­tered around an unbloody and therefore nearly incomprehensible sacri­fice. And most disorienting of all, they were entering a cult that made ex­plicit moral demands. They needed to be coached and rehearsed in all that, if their conversion was to be sustainable.

Catechesis therefore involves a comprehensive instruction in three areas of life: worship, ethics, and doctrine. Here’s how Jenson puts it:

Thus they needed to study, for a first thing, liturgics, that is, how to do these Christian things, so different from what could appeal to their exist­ing habits and tastes. And they needed to be instructed in how to under­stand what they were doing.

And then there were those moral demands. Christian heads of household were not supposed to treat their wives as subjects, and both husband and wife were supposed to be sexually faithful — for converts from late-antique society such puritanism was a shocking violation of nature. More amazingly yet, Christian parents did not get rid of inconvenient children, not even of unborn ones. The list went on and on of things that converts’ previous society regarded as rights, that the church regarded as sins. If converts were to stand up under all these infringements on their personal pursuits of happiness, they needed some time under the care of moral instructors and indeed of watchful moral disciplinarians.

And then there were those creeds and doctrines. New converts were used to religions with little specificity, and so with little intellectual con­tent. You were expected to worship Osiris in Egypt and the Great Mother in Asia Minor and Dionysus in Greece, and all of them and a hundred oth­ers simultaneously in Rome, and if the theologies of these deities could not all be simultaneously true, no matter, since you were not anyway expected to take their myths seriously as knowledge. For a relatively trivial but historically pivotal case: Did you have to think that the notorious lunatic Caligula was in fact divine? Not really, just so long as you burnt the pinch of incense.

But with the Lord, the Father of Jesus, things were different. He in­sisted that you worship him exclusively or not at all. And that imposed a cognitive task: if you were to worship the Lord exclusively, you had to know who he is, you had to make identifying statements about him and intend these as statements of fact. You had to learn that in the same history occu­pied by Caesar or Alexander, the Lord had led Israel from Egypt and what that meant for the world. You had to learn that in the same history occu­pied by Tiberius one of his deputies had crucified an Israelite named Jesus and what that in sheer bloody fact meant for the world. You had to learn that this Jesus was raised from the dead, and try to figure out where he might now be located. It was a terrible shock for the religious inclusivists and expressivists recruited from declining antiquity. There was a whole li­brary of texts to be studied and conceptual distinctions to be made, if new converts were in the long run to resist their culturally ingrained inclusivism and relativism.

Catechesis was born as the instruction needed to bring people from their normal religious communities to an abnormal one. That is, it was born as liturgical rehearsal and interpretation, moral correction, and in­struction in a specific theology. Apart from need for these things, it is not apparent that the church would have had to instruct at all.

One more excerpt, this time about what it means for the church to catechize the baptized for liturgical participation in a post-Christendom cultural context, in light of the temptation to water down or eliminate what makes her worship unique, which is to say, Christian:

Instead of perverting her essential rites, the church must catechize. She must rehearse her would-be members in the liturgies, fake them through them step by step, showing how the bits hang together, and teach­ing them how to say or sing or dance them. And she must show them wherein these rites are blessings and not legal impositions.

Nor does it stop with the minimal mandates of Scripture. The church, like every living community, has her own interior culture, built up during the centuries of her history. That is, the acts of proclamation and baptism and eucharist are in fact embedded in a continuous tradition of ritual and diction and music and iconography and interpretation, which constitutes a churchly culture in fact thicker and more specific than any national or ethnic culture.

Now of course this tradition might have been different than it is. If the church’s first missionary successes had taken her more south than west, her music and architecture and diction and so on would surely have devel­oped differently. And in the next century, when the center of the church’s life will probably indeed be south of its original concentration, the church’s culture will continue to develop, and in ways that cannot now be predicted. But within Christianity, what might have been is beside the point; contingency is for Christianity the very principle of meaning; it is what in fact has happened — that might not have happened — that is God’s history with us, and so the very reality of God and of us.

We are not, therefore, permitted simply to shuck off chant and cho­rale, or the crucifix, or architecture that encloses us in biblical story, or ministerial clothing that recalls that of ancient Rome and Constantino­ple, or so on and on. Would-be participants will indeed find some of this off-putting; people will indeed drift into our services, not grasp the pro­ceedings, and drift out again. We will be tempted to respond by dressing in t-shirts and hiring an almost-rock group — not, of course, a real one — and getting rid of the grim crucifixes. Then we will indeed need less catechesis to adapt would-be participants to the church, because we will be much less church. If instead we are aware of the mission, and of the mission’s situation in our particular time, we will not try to adapt the church’s culture to seekers, but seekers to the church’s culture.

So, for an only apparently trivial example, it is almost universally thought that children must be taught childish songs, with which occasion­ally to interrupt the service and serenade their parents. They are not, it is supposed, up to the church’s hymns and chants. The exact opposite is the truth, and in any case the necessity. In my dim youth rash congregational officials once hired me to supervise the music program of a summer church school. I taught the children the ditties supplied me, but also some plain chant. When in the last days, I asked the children what they wanted to sing, it was always the plain chant.

Catechesis for our time, as the culture of the world and the culture of the church go separate ways, will be music training and art appreciation and language instruction, for the church’s music and art and in the lan­guage of Canaan. If we do not do such things, and with passionate inten­tion, the church will be ever more bereft of her own interior culture and just so become ever more the mere chaplaincy of the world’s culture. The recommendations of the “church growth” movement will indeed produce growth, but not of the church.

Coda: what is a CoC?

Based on feedback, a few more “family marks” to add to the original list of ten:

11. Anti-clericalism, i.e., no priestly caste set apart by holy orders or a white collar who alone can administer the Word and Supper of the Lord. (This is the obverse of egalitarianism, but more apt to historic CoC self-understanding, given egalitarianism’s range of meanings).

12. Cessationism, i.e., no charismatic gifts of the Spirit such as tongues, healings, visions, and exorcisms.

13. Amillennialism, i.e., no end-times speculation, no grand theories of Revelation, no in-case-of-Rapture church basements, no geopolitical dominoes to line up before the Parousia, no wedding of church and state to facilitate the time, times, and half a time.

14. Apoliticism, i.e., no stump speeches from the pulpit, no “how to vote” cards in the pews, no flags in the sanctuary, no mention of hot social topics in sermons, no sense that “America” is a “Christian nation” (after all, aren’t Baptists and Presbyterians and Catholics running the show?), no sense that government or military or elite institutions are where the highest Christian vocations are found.

15. Arminianism, i.e., an absolute principled rejection of Calvinism in all its forms, an allergy to predestination, a maximal commitment to and reiteration of personal individual free will and its necessity for salvation—so that a person past the age of accountability must choose Christ for him- or herself; absent this free choice, salvation is impossible.

Now take these in reverse order, as I did in the previous post:

15. Like congregationalism and weekly celebration of Communion, Arminianism is here to stay. In this Churches of Christ are most like their American evangelical cousins, and have been from the beginning. The difference is that, historically at least, one’s choice of Christ found public and saving expression in baptism; the choice itself was a prelude, a necessary condition for the salvation found in baptism’s waters, whereas for wider evangelicalism the choice that is faith is itself both necessary and sufficient condition for salvation. Having said that, evangelicalism’s influence on CoC practice can be found in (a) de-emphasizing baptism’s salvific efficacy, (b) lowering the age at which children can be baptized (from, say, mid-teens to mid-elementary), and (c) emphasizing the importance of children’s faith at very young ages.

14. From anecdotal conversations with elders and ministers, the newfound presence of politicization in Churches of Christ is a shock to the system. Whether that means Trumpism in the pews, saying Black Lives Matter from the podium, the polarization around masking and church closures, or hot-button topics like abortion, gender, and sexuality rising to the surface, politics are present in CoC-dom in a way they’ve never been before. It turns out that Facebook and Fox News have been running their own parallel catechesis programs this whole time. They work.

13. The elements of CoC life that my evangelical friends have always found most bewildering are these: high sacraments, low politics, and no end times. From what I can tell, the amillennialism is still present, aside from the occasional lay member who claims to have cracked Revelation’s nut. As a distinguishing mark, though, this one’s pretty weak; there are plenty of churches out there (low church and high) that lack Rapture basements and dispensation-charts and hell houses. Plus, I’m always surprised by the obvious latent interest in “end times” questions that students and peers pose to me, sotto voce, after a class or before service. Millennialism we will always have with us.

12. On one hand, there aren’t exactly hundreds of hyper-charismatic Churches of Christ out there, with flags and dancing and Spirit-slain tongues-speakers running in between the pews. On the other hand, the doctrine of cessationism is quite weak among CoC-ers under 50, in terms of its “givenness” as biblical teaching, and most folks my age and younger are either outright charismatic or at least spooky-curious. I predict that, in another generation, this one’ll be a dead letter.

11. Stone-Campbellite egalitarianism is an odd duck. In its ideal form it radicalizes the priesthood of all believers to include, quite literally, any and every baptized adult. In practice it has usually meant that the church should be led by well-spoken, biblically literate, and gainfully employed married fathers—a station in life to which all young boys without exception should aspire. (No shade; I’m a product of “Timothy Class.”) Some of these men would be preachers and evangelists and teachers; more would be elders; all would, or could, preside at the Lord’s Supper. Every one of the baptized, though, stood on an “equal footing” before the Lord, and was equally capable of reading the clear word of God in Scripture. No special class of seminary-trained priests could tell you what God would tell you himself; as in Luther’s day, the schoolmen were the enemy, sent to complicate and obstruct the sound doctrine of the apostles, unlettered men that they were.
–So where do things stand on this front today? Strangely, in my view.
–Some churches have unfolded the egalitarian impulse to its logical conclusion: not just men but women, not just adults but children, not just the baptized but any and all who report faith in Christ are full members and participants and may, given the occasion, lead, preach, teach, or preside. This is of a piece with wider cultural trends, a one-by-one relaxation or elimination of obstacles and conditions meant to exclude some from what is seen to be the prerogative of all.
–At the same time, there has been a concurrent professionalization of formal ministry, church leadership, and public worship that belies the apparent democratizating trends just outlined. Anyone at all can “preside” at the Supper—but music is in the hands of the professionals. Churches tend to prefer ministry hires to have degrees in Bible or related disciplines and often an MDiv as well. And while Churches of Christ have always placed a premium on preaching, they have not been immune from the impact of the internet. Podcasts, YouTube, and social media have made the best preaching in the world immediately accessible to anyone with a smartphone, even as they have shaped the sermon’s form into something less like proclamation and more like a TED Talk, delivered by well-coiffed preachers in skinny jeans and replete with slickly produced slides and reams of asides and jokes and stories. (All, naturally, live-streamed to the world. And, if you’ve got someone on staff to do it, quickly re-packaged into bite-size videos and disseminated onto social media platforms, fingers crossed for the next viral hit. I call this the tech-church show.)
–In a word, Churches of Christ are simultaneously highly professionalized and extremely egalitarian. So while the anti-clericalism persists at the doctrinal level—no one stands between me and my Bible—it’s far less powerful at the ecclesial level. This trend is exacerbated by the fact that, while most churches are small and getting smaller, the few big churches that remain are only getting bigger. The result is an optical illusion. “Successful” churches look huge, and with huge-ness comes a fleet of well-trained staff members. The message is clear: If you build it, the professionals will come. And when they come, they will run the show. Accordingly, churches we would be tempted to call “mid-size” (I believe, for example, that a church with 350 members is in the ninetieth percentile for congregational size in America) spy this trend and feel the need to professionalize themselves, too, lest they be left behind (like that 90-member church around the block). In this way a certain egalitarianism works in tandem to produce more, not less, professionalization—which is itself a kind of clericalism, albeit in the guise of a kind of corporate management expertise.
–I trust the irony is clear enough: Historically, both Catholic and Protestant traditions ordained pastors who alone could administer the sacraments and proclaim God’s word. The anti-clerical American evangelical genius is to repudiate ordination in light of the priesthood of all believers. So anyone can baptize; anyone can preside. But there arises a new priesthood in the wake of the old: charismatic speakers and talented musicians. Yet such a priesthood appears to be marked by native talent, which in turn comes to function like nothing so much as ordination by genetic lottery. So we have holy orders by other means, rather than its elimination, even as the celebration of the sacraments is moved farther and farther from center stage. (Its nadir being Covid-era at-home self-serve with “whatever’s in the pantry.” This, not from lack of catechesis, but from successful catechesis.)

So. Taking stock. The point of these descriptions, following the previous post, is to wonder (a) how Churches of Christ have changed over the last three or four generations, especially since the turn of the century; and in light of those changes, to ask (b) what if anything continues to mark Churches of Christ as distinct from American evangelicalism. It seems clear to me that the additional five historic “family marks” above do not alter my original verdict. Either they have evolved into alignment with evangelicals or they never distinguished Churches of Christ from evangelicalism in the first place. The absorption, in other words, continues unabated—if it isn’t already complete.

What is a Church of Christ?

Historically, Churches of Christ have been known by a range of formal and informal marks:

1. The name on the building.

2. Congregational autonomy, i.e., governance of a local church by a group of elders; this has entailed (or been entailed by) rejection of any and all supra-local governance, institutional centralization, and denominational hierarchy.

3. Some kind of genetic and/or genealogical and/or self-conscious and/or affiliative connection to the Stone-Campbell Movement.

4. Weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper.

5. Adult baptism by immersion for the forgiveness of sins.

6. The absence of any creed.

7. A cappella worship.

8. The rejection of sacred tradition.

9. Biblicist primitivism, i.e., a Bible-alone approach to doctrine, ethics, worship, and polity with the aim of restoring, discovering, or approximating the original pattern of the church’s organization, proclamation, and mission. (Call this “the restorationist vision.”)

10. A yoked sectarian ecclesiology and soteriology, in other words, salvation through faithful membership in the one true church founded by Jesus Christ—and not in “denominations,” such as the Baptists or Lutherans or what have you.

You could add other marks (strong cessationism, say, or the absence of ordained pastors alongside the lack of a scripted “high” liturgy), but these ten are strong candidates for the most important family of marks, granting that they never were or could have been etched in stone—given the nature of the movement and the tradition’s polity.

Given the lack of formal organization beyond the local, however, the movement was always bound to change and develop, mutate or evolve. After all, there aren’t any hard controls in place to keep such change from occurring. The question then becomes: Which of these is either necessary or sufficient to identity a Church of Christ today?

Run back through the marks in reverse order:

10. While a hardline soteriology is still present in certain Churches of Christ, over the last few generations a once-severe sectarianism has yielded in various ways to a bigger-tent (evangelical) ecumenism.

9. The same is true here: while a general biblicism is present, it’s more evangelical than primitivist. You can recognize true primitivism by the kinds of arguments it generates, and those arguments are largely a feature of the past.

8. So far as I can tell, many Churches of Christ today are quite open toward sacred tradition, whether liturgical (Ash Wednesday, Advent, the lectionary) or doctrinal (reading Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas or Calvin or Barth) or linguistic (words like “Trinity” and “incarnation” and “catechesis”). Tradition of this sort is no longer self-evidently anathema.

7. A cappella is still dominant, but more and more churches are introducing instruments into public worship.

6. I know more than a few Churches of Christ that recite, affirm, or endorse either the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed. And among those that do not, I don’t find many pastors who are theologically anti-creedal on principle, even if they wouldn’t impose a creed on their congregations.

5. Baptism is interesting. It retains its significance in many ways. Yet in two respects matters have changed (if only beneath the surface, as it were). On one hand, the age of children who are baptized has been moving “downward.” On the other, emphasis on immersion-baptism being necessary for salvation—that is, the very moment of being saved, apart from which one would be certainly damned—has likewise declined. “Emphasis” here is the key word: it’s about what is said and left unsaid. Baptism’s still a big deal. But CoC folks from a century ago would be shocked by what they would surely perceive as a lessening of emphasis on what matters most.

4. So far as I can tell, pretty much everyone still celebrates the Lord’s Supper weekly. Someone, though, will be the first to change: perhaps through the now-popular “optional communion in the back, self-serve as you please” approach, perhaps through moving to (an occasional) monthly observance. Having said that, across all ten of these marks, including the next three, I’ll go on record to predict that, at the macro level, this is the last one to go for most congregations.

3. Connection to the Stone-Campbell Movement is a tricky question. Many Churches of Christ today have simply forgotten their connection to the SCM; by the same token, many congregations that have dropped the “of Christ” from their name retain a clear genetic influence from the Movement. In either case, though, neither elders nor pastors are reading Stone and Campbell; and in terms of contemporary authors, they’re just as likely to be reading prominent evangelicals as they are to be reading CoC scholars. The once-tight networks of ecclesial kinship that prevailed among Churches of Christ have been laid waste over the last twenty-five years, with the demolition showing no signs of abating. Not a few Churches of Christ today are led by elders and ministers who have no investment in perpetuating something called “the Church of Christ,” and wouldn’t hesitate to tell you.

2. Congregational autonomy hasn’t gone and isn’t going anywhere—though one now sees, and can imagine, semi-formal relationships with parachurch organizations that once (even in the recent past) would have been unthinkable, organizations whose doctrine and practice depart widely from historic CoC doctrine and practice.

1. Plenty of CoCs have, as I’ve said, dropped the genitive modifier; those that remain, by definition, have kept it. Tautologically, the name endures with congregations that have chosen to retain it, and it does not with those that have not.

Now. Suppose I’m broadly right about all this. I’ll ask again: What are the necessary and/or sufficient marks of a Church of Christ today? How should they be identified?

Marks six through ten appear not to be necessary, since there are Churches of Christ one can point to that lack them. In addition, the fifth and third marks, on baptism and SCM-heritage respectively, are tenuous. Plenty of traditions practice immersive believers baptism; in itself that’s not a distinguishing feature of Churches of Christ.

What we’re left with, it seems to me, are marks one, two, and four. Including some other marks in revised form, I think it’s fair to say that we have a Church of Christ today if:

(a) it calls itself a “Church of Christ,”

(b) its polity is congregationalist,

(c) it celebrates the Lord’s Supper weekly,

(d) it baptizes by immersion (but not babies), and

(e) it belongs in some way to informal or affiliative CoC networks.

At the descriptive or sociological level, this appears accurate to me. But it raises some problems, or at least some questions.

First, apart from the name, aren’t there churches today that this definition describes that are manifestly not Churches of Christ? I know countless congregationalist churches that practice believers’ baptism and weekly communion. Typically they are “Bible churches” or “community churches” or non-denominational. Some of them even fall into (e), because for one reason or another they participate in CoC networks. They just don’t call themselves a Church of Christ.

Second, suppose a congregation drops the name but meets all the other criteria—including some of the others in the earlier list of ten marks. In other words, an ex–CoC that, for all intents and purposes, still looks and sounds and feels like a CoC. How should we think of such a church?

Third, are there today any material theological teachings or normative doctrinal claims that distinguish a Church of Christ from a non-denom evangelical church? It appears not—and this is in line with biblicism, not a contravention of it, since each believer as well as congregation is free to read the Bible for him/her/itself, minus the interposition of sacred tradition. And all the more if such folks opt to learn from concrete Christian traditions, whether Thomism or Eastern Orthodoxy or Calvinism or what have you. (Thus you have the irony of a biblicist-primitivist-congregationalist anti-tradition drinking deeply from the well of catholic tradition, and changing doctrine and liturgy accordingly.)

Fourth, what happens to contemporary Churches of Christ while, all around them, the informal networks that once sustained a thick CoC identity continue rapidly to decline? It’s not a secret that many Churches of Christ are on hospice care right now. The tight boundaries once drawn by editors, journals, preaching schools, the preaching circuit, famous ministers, widely read authors, colleges and universities, and other unofficial “denominational” organizations either no longer exist or possess a fraction of the power and influence they once exercised. In their absence, what holds the movement together, as a discrete, identifiable movement?

Fifth and finally, are the “family marks” that endure—(a) through (e) above—substantial enough to “pick out” congregations that a sociologist would agree form, or belong to, the same tradition/movement? Consider all the differences that mark Churches of Christ today: some worship with instruments, some don’t; some ordain, some don’t; some have women preachers, some don’t; some have women elders, some don’t; some are LGBT-affirming, some aren’t; some follow the lectionary, some don’t; some observe liturgical seasons, some don’t; some baptize Kindergarteners, some don’t; some “get political” (on Trump or race or gender or sex), some don’t; some say the Creed, some don’t; some “re-baptize” Catholics, some don’t; some practice open communion (i.e., inviting the unbaptized to partake), some don’t; some affirm the restorationist vision, some don’t; some affirm charismatic spiritual gifts, some don’t; some affirm military service, some don’t; some are biblicist, some aren’t; some reject eucharistic real presence, some don’t; some sing CCM “worship songs,” some don’t; some use a single cup, some don’t; some have statements of faith, some don’t; some affirm the doctrine of the Trinity, some don’t.

The list could go on. Interestingly enough, different items here that might appear to outsiders as coded “progressive” versus “conservative” are sometimes joined together. The results are fascinating. Very nearly all Churches of Christ are trending evangelical, but sometimes that very trend is a sign of a move in a politically progressive or theologically liberal direction, just as, sometimes, it’s the opposite. It’s case be case, congregation by congregation. Quite often a congregation is moving in two or more directions at once, and its own members don’t realize it until very late in the process.

I’ve written about all this at length elsewhere (and, I should add, I’ve drawn together and expanded those posts on Churches of Christ as catholic/evangelical/neither/both into an article that will be published soon in Restoration Quarterly). All that I want to say here is this. In the American context, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is well nigh impossible to know what “makes” a Church of Christ a Church of Christ beyond a given congregation’s self-definition. Any further necessary features—not to mention sufficient marks—will either immediately carve off a sizeable chunk of existing Churches of Christ or inadvertently include, as a Church of Christ, all kinds of “normie” American evangelical churches that the definition is meant to exclude.

Put it this way. If you learn that a neighbor or stranger or friend attends a Church of Christ, it’s not different in kind from learning that he or she attends a local evangelical or non-denominational church. You haven’t yet learned the relevant theological or moral or social or political information. What matters, what tells you something significant, is what comes next in the conversation, in answer to the following question: Well, what kind? Tell me about your church.

That’s how it is today, and only more so as each year passes. The transformation is happening, has happened, before our very eyes. It’s undeniable. But it has to be noticed, observed, commented on, to be seen for what it is. For it was not ever thus.

My latest: the ends of theological education

Sapientia is the online periodical of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding, housed at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. They regularly publish series organized around themes or questions, and the latest is on theological education. You can read Joshua Jipp’s introduction to the series here. My entry is the first to be published; it’s called “The Ends of Theological Education.” Here’s how it starts:

The first and final end of theological education is the knowledge of God. The God in question is not just any deity, much less generic divinity, at least if the theological education in view is Christian. Christian theological education is instruction in the Christian God, which is to say, the triune God of Israel. Theological education is about him, namely, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ revealed by his own Holy Spirit. Whatever else it may be, whatever other ends it may have, theological education aims at the Holy Trinity or it misses the mark entirely.

There are many genres and locations for theological education. The modern research university is only one among many institutional habitats for it, the latest and perhaps the most expansive home, if not the snuggest fit. The monastery is one ancient and abiding institution for instruction in divine knowledge. Sunday school is another. Sometimes theological education happens within the Church, sometimes not; sometimes taught by the ordained, sometimes not; sometimes in a catechetical or devotional spirit, sometimes not. There is no one right way to do it.

Read the rest here.

A loosening

Churches of Christ are evangelical-adjacent; sometimes trends in the CoC world reflect wider evangelical trends, sometimes not. In the following case I think they do.

It seems to me there has been, in the past twenty years, what I’m going to call a “loosening” in low-church American Protestant contexts. And the phenomenon appears to be widespread, not limited regionally or denominationally. Here’s what I mean.

For multiple generations—I’d say at least five, probably more—the following things were true of the sort of churches (I like to call them “baptist” with a lower-case “b”) I have in mind:

1. Alcohol was off limits.

2. Ditto for tattoos.

3. Ditto for gambling of any kind.

4. Cessationism was a given.

5. Salvation was sectarian.

6. Feast days were suspicious.

7. Sacraments were epiphenomenal at best, optional at worst.

8. Sunday morning worship was only one of many weekly congregational gatherings.

In my observation, most or all of these features have been forgotten, reversed, or weakened in recent years. Moreover, this loosening has occurred not only among Millennials and Gen Z believers; it has occurred also among Gen X and Boomer believers at the same time. In other words, the very same people who once shared in the “old way” have transitioned along with their children and grandchildren into the “new way.” The divide is not between parents and children; to the extent that the divide still exists, it’s located elsewhere.

This is important to note for two reasons. First, the battle is not cross-generational so much as cross-epochal. Second, the battle isn’t perennial, since this profound social, moral, and liturgical transformation hasn’t happened with each new generation of low-church believers. The old faith was handed down, generation to generation, until the last two decades or so. And then all at once “everybody” changed. (Not everybody—but a lot of them.)

Here’s how those eight markers play out today, in my experience:

1. Most low-church Protestants I know (from twentysomethings to grandparents) now drink alcohol, including those who for decades did not. In fact, all of a sudden it seems taken for granted that alcohol is not even a question for Christians to consider.

2. Tattoos abound in this Christian sub-culture!

3. Gambling gambling is still off limits. But every church I’ve been a part of as an adult has had men’s poker groups or similar gatherings where money is bet and exchanged. And nobody seems to talk about gambling online or on sporting events as a serious or pressing moral question.

4. Whether at church (with folks from their 30s to their 70s) or in the classroom, the Christians I talk to are either outright spooky, meaning unapologetically affirming of charismatic gifts, or agnostic. I regularly poll both crowds, and just about no one wants to defend cessationism as a doctrine. I actually can’t recall the last time I met someone who was willing, even casually, to argue the view that signs and wonders (“miracles”) no longer occur. This shift may be the most seismic on the list!

5. By “sectarian salvation” I mean, minimally, confessional-doctrinal-ecclesial boundaries on who can and cannot be saved. Historically capital-B Baptists in this country have readily admitted that, for example, Catholics are not Christians, or at least usually lack saving faith. For a century Baptists and CoC-ers did fierce battle over the necessity and efficacy of baptism for this very reason: it drew lines around who would and would not be saved! And yet today I find in almost every corner an enormous ecumenical tent beneath which just about any self-identified Christian is counted as “in.” Certainly nothing so archaic as a denominational line would count somebody out.

6. Until recently, Churches of Christ wouldn’t even acknowledge Christmas or Easter. Other churches would celebrate those, but not Advent or Epiphany or Pentecost or Lent. Those were for Catholics. And yet now Advent and Lent and the liturgical calendar are all the rage.

7. In my normie evangelical students, I spy sacramental minimalism as a default setting, but the moment we start talking and reading, their innate charismatic spookiness starts nudging them up the sacramental ladder. They see both the importance of the sacraments and the lack of any self-evident reason why sacraments must be purely symbolic, cordoned off from the grace they mediate as signs thereof. The more liturgical and charismatic this generation gets, the more sacramental they seem to become. They’re certainly far more open to it; they don’t share previous generations’ firm biblical and doctrinal priors on communion and baptism as non-efficacious.

8. Once upon a time, what it meant to be faithful in churches of Christ was to attend Sunday morning Bible class, followed by public worship, followed by Sunday evening worship, followed by Wednesday evening Bible class. Other churches have had similar arrangements. From what I can tell, both Sunday and Wednesday evening gatherings are dying. The trend lines are all pointing down. Some congregations, especially larger ones, and especially more conservative ones, are maintaining the meetings. But across the board they are less and less frequent; the social norm that this is what it means to be a member in good standing is no longer widespread. Naturally, this is of a piece with, and in turn creates a feedback loop with, decreasing biblical literacy and biblical study. The less “being a knowledgeable Bible reader” is convertible with “being a serious disciple of Christ,” the less “additional meetings” will seem necessary to the Christian life.

This is all anecdotal, I admit. Am I wrong? Do others see the same trends? Am I missing some? Is it right to call this a kind of “loosening”? I’m not looking for causes, only the effects (or symptoms) themselves. I welcome correction and addition.

Church leadership by generation

A friend of mine has a pet theory about church leadership—in this case, leadership within southern/Bible Belt low-church or evangelical settings. Nothing ground-breaking, but useful as a rule of thumb, especially for folks in ministry, I think.

It depends on generational markers, so let’s say these are roughly the four main groups that make up the church today, whether pastors or laity:

• Baby Boomers (60+)

• Gen X (mid-4os to late 50s)

• Millennial (late 20s to early 40s)

• Gen Z (under 25yo)

Southern Christian Boomers are different than the popular image of American Boomers in general. They weren’t at Woodstock. They weren’t hippies. They weren’t even disenchanted by Nixon and Watergate and public institutions of authority the way “the culture” was.

Instead, they were upstanding family men with jobs, wives, and kids. They went to church, and the churches they attended were theologically conservative, doctrinally firm, and morally rigorous. They knew what they believed, and what they believed was the truth. That’s the sort of household and spiritual environment their children, belonging to Gen X, were raised in.

Something happened to both these Boomers and their adult children. What happened was a sort of delayed social and spiritual shock. The Gen X kids found themselves beset by doubts that called into question the certainty of their fathers. Their fathers, in turn, unlearned their once certain confidence. Both, together, began to undertake the journey of faith less as a roadmap with all the landmarks known in advance and more as an open-ended wandering. Doubt became a virtue, not a vice. Wrestling with the unknown was an invitation and a compliment. Living with unanswered questions named the reality of Christian faith for everyone, whether or not they wanted to admit it. “We don’t know” was the pastoral watchword: an admission of humility before the great mystery of God.

There was good reason for this. The unquestioned certainties of the 1970s and ’80s turned out to be all too questionable, and an environment in which everything was known in advance and nothing was open to discussion was stifling, cramped, suffocating. A lot of people got hurt. Those Gen X–ers who remained in the church needed to avoid the mistakes of their fathers, lest their own children fall away from the faith. Crippling conformity was not the way.

So once Gen X began to assumed leadership in the church, around two decades ago, the two generations have largely worked in tandem: Boomers unlearning their hard-edged sectarian self-assurance, Gen X helping them toward a kinder, gentler pastoral presence. Both leading the church toward “accompaniment,” self-critique, theological modesty, and a well-developed allergy toward dogmatism and legalism both.

So far, so descriptive. I’m thinking of folks from about 45 years old to about 75 years old. I hope my portrait sounds sympathetic. It’s meant to be! There’s a reason why these folks are where they are.

Here’s the catch. Where the church is today is not where the church was in the 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s. Neither Millennials nor (especially) Gen Z grew up in sweltering swamps of dogmatic certitude. They certainly don’t—for the most part; I’m generalizing—inhabit those spaces at the moment. On the contrary. Granted, some older Millennials may be caught up in deconstruction. But most are treading water. They’re not firmly planted in gospel soil, however arid. They’re floating, tossed to and fro by the slightest of waves, the smallest of breezes.

And what do they see in their Gen X and Boomer leaders? What they see is people—men, mostly—fighting the last generation’s battle. They see church leaders who still spy fundamentalists around every corner. But that’s not what’s threatening young believers today. It’s an absolute lack of anything solid or firm to hold onto. It’s shifting sand beneath their feet. It’s nothing at all worth living for, much less dying for.

Gen Z and Millennial Christians aren’t leaving church because there’s too much. They’re leaving because there’s too little. Too little doctrine, too little dogma, too little firm and unbending teaching about the essential matters of God and faith, Christ and gospel, Spirit and Scripture, word and sacrament. What then shall we do? and How now shall we live? are the driving questions. “We don’t know” doesn’t cut it. “We don’t know” means they’re headed for the exits.

At any rate, that’s my friend’s theory. Boomer and Gen X church leaders are stuck in the past. The problems they battled and conquered in their younger days drive how they approach the problems facing believers today. But the problems are different. Millennial and especially Gen Z pastors understand this. They know young Christians are drowning. They know they need to throw them a lifeline. That lifeline must be sturdy enough to save; must be built to float, no matter how choppy the seas.

My latest: no to AI in the pulpit

I’m in Christianity Today this morning with a piece called “AI Has No Place in the Pulpit.” It’s in partial response to a CT piece from a few weeks ago about the benefits of using AI in pastoral work. A couple sample paragraphs from the middle of the article:

Pastors are students of God’s Word. They are learners in the school of Christ. He teaches them by the mouths of his servants, the prophets and apostles, who speak through Holy Scripture. There is no shortcut to sitting at their feet. The point—the entire business—of pastoral ministry is this calm, still, patient sitting, waiting, and listening. Every pastor lives according to the model of Mary of Bethany. Strictly speaking, only one thing is necessary for the work of ministry: reclining at the feet Jesus and hanging on his every word (Luke 10:38–42).

In this sense, no one can do your studying for you. I’ll say more below about appropriate forms of learning from professional scholars and commentaries, but that’s not what I have in mind here. What I mean is that studying God’s Word is part of what God has called you to do; it’s more than a means to an end. After all, one of its ends is your own transformation, your own awesome encounter with the living God. That’s why no one can listen to Jesus in your stead. You must listen to Jesus. You must search the Scriptures. This is what it means to serve the church.

Read the whole thing! And thanks to Bonnie Kristian, among others, for commissioning and sharpening the piece in editing.

Four tiers in preaching, denominations, other…

Two brief reflections on my post a month back about four tiers or levels in Christian/theological publishing.

First: I think the tiers/levels I identify there apply to preaching as well. But because preaching is different from writing and especially from the genres and audiences each publishing tier has in view, the levels apply differently. Put another way, it is appropriate and good that there is a scholarly level of writing that very few can or ever will read. It is neither appropriate nor good for there to be preaching like that. Perhaps, I suppose, a chapel connected to Oxford or Harvard could justify that sort of preaching—but even then, it should drop down to a level 3 or even a pinch lower.

The exception proves the rule, in any case. Preaching, in my view, should never be above level 2; and the best preaching hovers between levels 1 and 2. Preaching should not assume a college degree; should not assume much, if any, background knowledge; should not assume much, if any, familiarity with popular culture; should avoid jargon; should avoid mention of ancient languages; should not name drop authors; should not make erudite allusions to great literature. Instead, it should be intelligible, accessible, and immediately relevant to a high school dropout in her 60s who never reads and doesn’t watch much TV, whether Netflix or the news.

Does that mean such a sermon will lack substance, heft, weight, meat, sustenance? No. But it does mean faithful preaching, week in week out, is very difficult indeed.

Second: A friend sent me a link to someone on Twitter—his name is Patrick K. Miller—riffing on my four tiers in relation to both church conferences and church traditions/denominations. I don’t have a Twitter account so I’m not able to look at the whole thread, but (a) the conference tiers seemed both apt and funny, while (b) I don’t think the ecclesial analogues quite worked. Here’s why.

It’s true, in 2023, that American Christians self-sort into churches based on education, class, wealth, and culture. That’s a sad fact. Protestants with graduate degrees like high liturgy; whereas evangelicals on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum are more likely to attend charismatic, storefront, or prosperity churches. Granted.

The author’s implication, however, is flawed. I take Miller to be suggesting that the market comes for us all, churches included, and it’s best we accept this self-sorting and (for eggheads like me) avoid condescension. Agreed on the latter, less so on the former. Why?

Because this self-selection by class is neither inevitable nor universal. It’s contingent. It’s a product of a very particular moment in a very parochial ecclesial subculture. Catholicism and Orthodoxy and Anglicanism are all flies in the ointment here (I often group these together as “catholic” traditions). Both past and present, these traditions encompass high and low, rich and poor, over- and under-educated. Nothing could be “higher” liturgically than these communities, yet the type of person who regularly attends them is not indexed by income or number of diplomas.

It isn’t natural, in other words, it isn’t just the way of the world for well-off folks to go “high” and less-well-off folks to “low.” In fact, this very distinction doesn’t exist in many parts of the world. Go to Catholic Mass or Anglican liturgy in Africa and you’ll see charismatic gifts alongside smells and bells. Eucharistic liturgy is the common inheritance of all God’s people down through the centuries, not just the sniffy or effete. We err when we take our current passing moment as a kind of timeless law. Infinite sectarian fracturing, by doctrine and stye and personal preference, is not the rule in Christian history. Religious liberty plus capitalism plus consumerism plus the automobile plus evangelicalism plus populism plus seeker-sensitivity-ism plus so many other factors—all contingent, all mutable, all evitable—brought this situation to pass. We need not accept those factors. We can reject and oppose them, seek to overturn them.

We are not fated to the present crisis of Christian division. Our churches should not cater to it as a given, but fight it as an enemy. Self-sorting by class is only one way this enemy manifests itself. Let’s not pretend it’s a friend. Expel the evil from among your midst.

My latest: on holy orders

I’ve got an article in the latest issue of the Journal of Christian Studies. The theme of the issue is “Ministry and Ordination.” The editor, Keith Stanglin (a mensch, if you don’t know him), commissioned pieces from scholars that represent or argue for a position not found in, or at least exemplified by, their own tradition. So, for example, the article after mine is by a Roman Catholic on the priesthood of all believers. Whereas mine is called “The Fittingness of Holy Orders.” It presents just that.

The article was a pleasure to write. It scratched an itch I didn’t know I had. Its guiding lights are Robert Jenson and Michael Ramsey. And it opens with twenty theses—I call them “escalating propositions”— on the sacrament of holy orders that ramp up from the basic notion of some formal leadership in the church all the way to full episcopal-dogmatic-eucharistic-apostolic succession.

Subscribe to the journal (or ask your library to). If you want a PDF of my article, email me and I’ll send you a copy.

Reasons people stay, or leave, their church

• The preaching

• The music

• The leadership

• The politics

• The children’s ministry

• The youth ministry

• The college ministry

• The young marrieds ministry

• The singles ministry

• The senior ministry

• The education programming

• The weekday programming

• The small groups

• The community

• The sacraments

• The production quality

• The liturgy

• The location

• Family ties

• Family history

• Friends

• Children’s friends

• Denominational membership

• Lethargy

• Loyalty

• Class

• Education

• Money

• Feuds

• Ambition

• Employment

• Relative quality of other local churches

• Whimsy

• Personal history

• Hurt

• Social standing

• Peer pressure

• Theology

• Tribal affiliation

• Regional culture

• Looking for a mate

• A single memorable experience

• Inertia

• Childhood memories

• Muscle memory

• Need for God

• Love for God

• Spiritual paralysis

• Spiritual despair

• Spousal pressure

• Parental pressure

• Boredom

• No reason at all

A decision tree for dealing with digital tech

Start with this question:

Do you believe that our, and especially young people’s, relationship to digital technology (=smartphones, screens, the internet, streaming, social media) is healthy, functional, and therefore good as is? Or unhealthy, dysfunctional, and therefore in need of immediate and drastic help?

If your answer is “healthy, functional, and good as is,” then worry yourself no more; the status quo is A-OK. If you answered otherwise, read on.

Now ask yourself this question:

Do the practices, policies, norms, and official statements of my institution—whether a family, a business, a university, or a church—(a) contribute to the technological problem, (b) maintain the digital status quo, or (c) interrupt, subvert, and cut against the dysfunctional relationship of the members of my institution to their devices and screens?

If your answer is (a) or (b) and yet you answered earlier that you believe our relationship to digital technology is in serious need of help, then you’ve got a problem on your hands. If your answer is (c), then well done.

Finally, ask yourself this:

How does my own life—the whole suite of my daily habits when no one’s looking, or rather, when everyone is looking (my spouse, my roommate, my children, my coworkers, my neighbors, my pastors, and so on)—reflect, model, and/or communicate my most basic beliefs about the digital status quo? Does the way I live show others that (a) I am aware of the problem (b) chiefly within myself and (c) am tirelessly laboring to respond to it, to amend my ways and solve the problem? Or does it evince the very opposite? So that my life and my words are unaligned and even contradictory?

At both the institutional and the personal level, it seems to me that answering these questions honestly and following them to their logical conclusions—not just in our minds or with our words but in concrete actions—would clarify much about the nature of our duties, demands, and decisions in this area of life.

How the world sees the church

I’ve joked more than once on here that this blog is little more than an exercise in drafting off better blogs, particularly Richard Beck’s, Alan Jacobs’, and Jake Meador’s. Here’s another draft.

Last month Richard wrote a short post reflecting on a famous quote by Lesslie Newbigin. How, Newbigin asks, are people supposed to believe that the first and final truth of all reality and human existence is a victim nailed to a tree, abandoned and left for dead? He answers that “the only hermeneutic of the gospel,” the only interpretation of the good news about Jesus that makes any sense of him, “is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.”

Richard then writes:

In a lecture this last semester I shared with my students, “I hope for the day where, when the world sees Christians coming, they say, ‘The Christians are here! Yay! I love those people!’”

I pray for the day when our presence is proclaimed “Good News.” And this isn't just some vague aspiration, it's personal for me. Wherever I show up, I want that to be Good News, unconditionally, no matter who is in the space. And I push my church to have the same impact. This is the work, and really the only work, that should be occupying Christians and the church right now.

There’s a sense in which I couldn’t agree more with this aspiration. The body of Christ should strive to be, to incarnate, to offer the good news in the liberating power of Christ’s Spirit to any and all we encounter—first of all our neighbors and those with whom we interact daily. Yes and amen.

But there’s a reason Richard’s little post has been nagging at me from the back of my brain for the last six weeks. Here’s why.

It isn’t clear to me that the world should see the church and love, welcome, and celebrate her presence. It certainly isn’t clear to me that we should expect or hope that they do. The reason why is fourfold.

First, the only people who genuinely and reasonably see the church as a cause for celebration are believers. Think about it. Why would anyone unconvinced by the gospel be glad that the church exists? That she keeps hanging around? The only people plausibly happy about the church’s existence are Christians—and even many Christians are pretty ambivalent about it. Someone who loves and adores and honors and celebrates the church sounds a lot like someone who believes that Jesus is risen from the dead.

Second, what qualifies as “good news”? If I’m not a believer, I’m liable to find it pretty annoying to be surrounded by weirdos who worship an invisible Someone, follow strict rules about money and sex and power, and believe with all their heart that I should drop everything in my own life and sign up for their beliefs and way of life. Live and let live, you know? You mind your own and I’ll do the same. Yet Christian evangelism is a nonnegotiable, so a nonbelieving neighbor is sure (and right) to be perpetually low-key bored or bothered or both by the fact that the church “has the answer” for his life.

Third, the church is full of sinners. It’s a field hospital for sinsick folk, in the image of Pope Francis. The one thing about which we can be sure, then, is that the church is going to be monumentally, even fantastically dysfunctional. She’s going to cause a lot of heartache, a lot of pain, a lot of frustration. That doesn’t mean we excuse in advance our failure to be Christlike to our neighbors. What it does mean is that the church’s appeal to her neighbors is likely going to be a lot less “What a beautiful community of Christ-followers—I love it when they’re around, even though they’re dead wrong about everything important!” and a lot more “What a motley crew of unimpressive failures—I guess they might even tolerate my own humiliating baggage, given what I can see about theirs even from the outside.”

Fourth and finally, Jesus wasn’t exactly “good news” to everyone he met. Now that claim requires some clarification. Jesus was the gospel incarnate. To meet Jesus was to come face to face with God’s good news. And yet if Jesus did anything it was turn off a whole lot of people. He elicited modest approval alongside a metric ton of opposition and murderous hostility. Not everyone saw Jesus coming and said, “Yes! Hooray! I love that guy!” Some did—and they were his followers. Plenty others said the opposite. We know why. Jesus confronted people with the truth: the truth about God and the truth about themselves. He forced on them a decision. And when they declined his invitation to follow him, he let them walk away, sad or sorrowful or resentful or angry or bitter. In short, Jesus was a sign of contradiction.

Pope Saint John Paul II borrowed that phrase, taken from Saint Luke, to describe the church. Like Christ, the church is a sign of contradiction in the world. We shouldn’t expect anyone to be happy about us—up until the point at which they join us. We should expect instead for them to ignore and resent us, at best; to reject and hate us, at worst. Not because of anything wrong with them. But because that’s how they treated Jesus, and he told us to expect the same treatment. They’re only being reasonable. If the gospel isn’t true, the church is a self-contradiction; of all people we should be most pitied. We should be mocked and scorned and excused from respectable society.

We’re only Christians, those of us who are, because we believe the gospel is true. I’m shocked when anyone has anything nice to say about the faith who isn’t already a fellow believer. As I see it, that’s the exception to the rule. So while we should strive to be faithful to Christ’s commission, to embody and enact the good news of his kingdom in this world, I don’t think we should hope or even try to be seen as good news. To be seen as good news amounts to conversion on the part of those doing the seeing. Let’s aim for conversion. Short of that, in terms of how we’re perceived I don’t know that we can expect much from our neighbors who don’t already believe.

The tech-church show

A week or two ago a clip went viral of a prominent pastor lecturing his listeners, during his sermon, about treating Sunday morning worship like a show. I didn’t watch it, and I’m not going to comment about the pastor in question, whom I know nothing about. Here’s one write-up about it. The clip launched a thousand online Christian thinkpieces. A lot of hand-wringing about churches that put on worship as a show simultaneously wanting congregants not to see worship as a show.

Any reader of my work knows I couldn’t agree more. But I don’t want to pile on. I want to use the occasion to think more deeply about two issues it raises for the larger landscape of churches, public worship, and digital technology.

First: Should churches understand themselves to be sites of resistance against the digital status quo? That is, given their context, are churches in America called by God to be a “force for good” in relation to digital technology? And thus are they called to be a “force opposed” to the dominance of our lives—which means the lives of congregants as well as their nonbelieving neighbors—by digital devices, screens, and social media?

It seems to me that churches and church leaders are not clear about their answer to this question. In practice, their answer appears to be No. The digital status quo obtains outside the walls of the church and inside them. There is no “digital difference” when you walk inside a church—at least a standard, run-of-the-mill low-church, evangelical, or Protestant congregation. (The Orthodox have not yet been colonized by Digital, so far as I can tell. For Catholics it depends on the parish.)

In and of itself, this isn’t a problem, certainly not of consistency. If a church doesn’t think Digital’s dominion is a problem, then it’s only natural for Digital to reign within the church and not only without. You’d never expect such a church to be different on this score.

The problem arises when churches say they want to oppose believers’ digital habits, dysfunctions, and addictions while reproducing those very habits within the life of the church, above all in the liturgy. That’s a case of extreme cognitive dissonance. How could church leaders ever expect ordinary believers to learn from the church how to amend their digital lives when church leaders themselves, and the church’s public worship itself, merely model for believers their own bad habits? When, in other words, church members’ digital lives, disordered as they are, are simply mirrored back to them by the church and her pastors?

To be clear, I know more than a few Christians, including ministers, who don’t share my alarm at the reign of Digital in our common life. They wouldn’t exactly endorse spending four to eight hours (or more) per day staring at screens; they don’t deny the ills and errors of pornography and loss of attention span via social media and other platforms. But they see bigger fish to fry. And besides (as they are wont to say), “It’s here to stay. It’s a part of life. We can live in denial or incorporate its conveniences into church life. It’s inevitable either way.”

Personally, I think that’s a steaming pile of you-know-what. But at least it’s consistent. For anyone, however, who shares my alarm at the role of Digital in our common life—our own, our neighbors’, our children’s, our students’—then the inconsistency of the church on this topic is not only ludicrous but dangerous. It’s actively aiding and abetting the most significant problem facing us today while pretending otherwise. And you can’t have it both ways. Either it’s a problem and you face it head on; or it’s not, and you don’t.

Second: Here’s an exercise that’s useful in the classroom. It helps to get students thinking about the role of technology in the liturgy.

Ask yourself this question: Which forms and types of technology, and how much of them, could I remove from Sunday morning worship before it would become unworkable?

Another way to think about it would be to ask: What makes my church’s liturgy different, technologically speaking, than an instance of the church’s liturgy five hundred years ago?

Certain kinds of technology become evident immediately: electricity and HVAC, for starters. In my area, many church buildings would be impossible to worship in during a west Texas summer: no air and no light. They’d be little more than pitch-black ovens on the inside.

Start on the other end, though. Compare Sunday morning worship in your church today to just a few decades ago. Here are some concrete questions.

• Could you go (could it “work”) without the use of smartphones?

• What about video cameras?

• What about spotlights and/or dimmers?

• What about the internet?

• What about screens?

• What about computers?

• What about a sound board?

• What about electric amplification for musical instruments?

• What about wireless mics?

• What about microphones as such?

This list isn’t meant to prejudge whether any or all of these are “bad” or to be avoided in the liturgy. I’m happy to worship inside a building (technology) with A/C (technology) and electricity (technology)—not to mention with indoor plumbing available (also technology). Microphones make preaching audible to everyone, including those hard of hearing. And I’ve not even mentioned the most consequential technological invention for the church’s practice of worship: the automobile! Over the last century cars revolutionized the who and where and how and why of church membership and attendance. (In this Luddite’s opinion, clearly for the worse. Come at me.)

In any case, whatever one makes of these and similar developments, the foregoing exercise is meant to force us to reckon with technology’s presence in worship as both contingent and chosen. It is contingent because worship is possible without any/all of them. I’ve worshiped on a Sunday morning beneath a tree in rural east Africa. The people walked to get there. No A/C. No mics. No screens. No internet. Certainly no plumbing. Not that long ago in this very country, most of the technology taken for granted today in many churches did not even exist. So contingency is crucial to recognize here.

And because it is contingent, it is also chosen. No one imposed digital technology, or any other kind, on American churches. Their leaders implemented it. It does not matter whether they understood themselves to be making a decision or exercising authority. They were, whether they knew it or not and whether they liked it or not. It does not matter whether they even had a conversation about it. The choice was theirs, and they made it. The choice remains theirs. What has been done can be undone. No church has to stream, for example. Some never started. Others have stopped. It’s a choice, as I’ve written elsewhere. Church leaders should own it and take responsibility for it rather than assume it’s “out of their hands.”

Because the use and presence of digital technology in the church’s liturgy is neither necessary nor imposed—it is contingent and chosen—then the logical upshot is this: Church leaders who believe that digital technology is a clear and present danger to the well-being and faithfulness of disciples of Christ should act like it. They should identify, recognize, and articulate the threats and temptations of digital dysfunction in their lives and ours; they should formulate a vision for how the church can oppose this dysfunction, forcefully and explicitly; and they should find ways to enact this opposition, both negatively (by removing said dysfunction from within the church) and positively (by proposing and modeling alternative forms of life available to believers who want relief from their digital addictions).

What they should not do is say it’s a problem while avoiding dealing with it. What they should not do is leave the status quo as it is. What they should not do is accept Digital’s domination as inevitable—as somehow lying outside the sphere of the reign and power of Christ.

What they should not do is look the other way.

East/West Christianity: an unfinished love story

My brother texted this to me the other day, and he gave me permission to share it here. It’s about the relationship between Eastern and Western Christianity, i.e., Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism (or: Catholicism East and West). I’ve made a few modest edits. Enjoy.

*

Been reading lots on history of East–West divide lately, so here’s me thinking out loud and writing down my thoughts. My analogy that helps me think about the stormy relationship between East and West (obviously from my Orthodox-sympathetic viewpoint, though one that yearns for union!):

100-850 – Honeymoon period. East nods to “headship” of West; they have their differences, but nothing that love doesn’t cover; as Christ died for the church, the West leads through service and love

850-1050 – First big fight. Starting to grow apart; realizing they meant different things by “headship”; East losing trust in West

1054 – West files divorce papers. East says “so be it,” but doesn’t really mean it in her heart

1100-1400 – Trial separation. Ignore each other to avoid fighting; when they interact, it’s only words spoken in anger; in 1204 the West does something the East might one day forgive, but will never forget.

1400s – Marriage counseling. The East needs the West more than the West needs the East; while the East wants an apology and compromise, the West expects submission; the Easts grants it on paper, but doesn’t mean it and takes it back as soon as the West is out of earshot.

1450-1869 – Diverging paths. The West prospers; the East goes through hell.

1870 – Divorce finalized. Irrevocable words and actions taken by the West, followed by the East.

1870-1965 – Fallout. East descends deeper into hell; West also suffers while flourishing in other ways; whether fast-evolving changes count as maturation or backsliding remains to be seen.

1965-present – Second thoughts. Both lovers have regrets; the West realizes it may at times have overstepped its bounds and misses terribly the beauty of the East; the East realizes she’s really missed the West’s leadership of and organization for the family; they rip up the original divorce papers; they exchange meaningful gifts; they go back to counseling; could they make this work again?—they realize that in really important ways, the same candle has always burned in both their hearts; they’re even aligned more than ever in their worldview and beliefs; but they also discover their personalities and eccentricities make each of them feel foreign to the other; the East has had a really rough go of it since they separated and feels that the West sometimes took advantage of her weakness instead of reaching out to help; some words spoken by the West can’t be unspoken; can the East live with them? can the West soften them? can the East forgive and forget? can the West remember and reclaim its first vows? can the West compromise? can the East submit?