Jason Clark: “Consumerism, Social Imagination, and Ecclesiology”

Abstract:
This paper suggest that a previous freedom within mission for understanding the nature of church, has given rise to a situation where it is the imagination of consumer for life, that often determines the forms of church life. Where previous forms of church became captive to the nature of market forces, new emerging forms of church are seen as further captive to this logic. This paper, traces the emergence and nature of this western individualism and agency, and it’s self creating nature, seeing identity free from commitments to any others. Examples of this are shown with:

1. Blueprint Ecclesiologies:  where idealised models of church are made, that are never realised
2. Any understanding of Church becomes pathological, where Christians form church life around ideas of what is wrong with Church, with no confidence in Scripture or mission
3. The naive belief that church can be non-instutional, when what is needed is not the absence of institutions, but an articulate institutional imagination
4. The imaginations for any of these forms of Church are often taken from consumer culture
5. What is called ‘revolution’ is often not revolution at all, but a pandering to consumer ‘authenticity’
6. And the collapse of Church into the creation of private God spaces within which people make their own isolated meaning of God, that do not lead to new christian conversion

It is suggest that the solution to this problem is to re-discover the ‘giveness’ of church life, that Church is something that is necessary to Christian identity and formation.  And that is best found in a scriptured and traditioned understanding of Church organisation, life and mission.

Interview With Jason

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: Through the planting of a church, and by doing some theological reflection on the power of consumer imaginations of what life is about, and how that shapes what people give themselves to and expect the Church to support. Also through the day-to-day in pastoral life, seeing people have prayers answered and have experiences of God that seemed to lead to God becoming just one resource amongst many to get the consumer dream. In this way, you might have Oprah, but I have Jesus and he trumps Oprah to get me the life we are both trying to pursue: that is, the consumer dream. I wanted to explore what was it about consumerism that causes all of life, including the Christian life so often, to be bent around those ends. Finally, after 10 years of seeing many friends explore that dynamic by moving away from any form of Church at all, it seemed that the new post-church forms of church were pandering even more to that problem, and continuing to enable people to use Christian resources not for mission but for consumer life identities and constructions. I began to ask: Was there anything in theology and church history to help respond to this problem?

Technorati Tags: Church, Consumerism, ecclesiology, Jason Clark, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS

Steven Hamilton, “Signs and Wonders: Wisdom and the Reign of God”

(Incidentally, Steven was snowed-in at the Baltimore airport during SVS, so he was unable to present as scheduled. I’m pleased to be able to remedy that somewhat by profiling his paper here.)

Abstract
In New Testament studies, the topic of Wisdom has gained real momentum recently, after many years of neglect. Yet as most scholarship has seemingly focused in the areas of Wisdom Christology, conventional Wisdom in James, the interaction of sapiential and apocalyptic thought in other New Testament literature, and the issues surrounding sophia in 1 Corinthians, there are many areas to which a wisdom-orientation can be brought to bear. What of Wisdom and the heart of Jesus’ message: the Reign of God?

The wisdom-orientation has a surprisingly significant impact in terms of the theology and praxis of the Kingdom of God.  This consideration will explore the frontiers of wisdom, seeking to understand how insights from the Hebrew corpus can be brought to bear in our present New Testament context of the Kingdom being both ‘now’ and ‘not yet’. While biblically-speaking, we access wisdom through an encounter with God rooted in awe and reverence, humility and worship, wisdom is not only found in the realms of religious gatherings, but all of life. The Reign of God is holistic, and as we experience the powers of the age-to-come inaugurated in Christ Jesus, the wisdom-orientation can aid the consideration of the Reign of God in our lives at our most charismatic as well as our most mundane.  In fact, the way of wisdom, much like that beheld in Job, is sought fervently, encountered with His Presence in surprising, satisfying ways, and then further shaped through interaction, devotion and contemplation.

Utilizing James Crenshaw’s point of departure –hokma as a shared paradigmatic approach to reality – we contemplate three major issues that a wisdom-orientation brings to the foreground: (1) a Trinitarian perspective vis-à-vis wisdom and how theologian-practitioners and scholars in the Vineyard movement may be uniquely positioned to explore our somewhat atrophied but burgeoning understanding of a Wisdom Pneumatology; (2) the shaping-nature of Wisdom and the Spirit connected to an underlying and holistic spiritual formation; and (3) how this wisdom-orientation dwells in the tension of ‘both/and’, bringing to the foreground our perspective and experience of the ‘now-and-not-yet’ of God’s Reign.  The Transcendent and Immanent modalities of wisdom are considered along with convergences of the sapiential, prophetic and apocalyptic in scripture, in Christ and in the Church.  Brief explorations of the further implications of a Wisdom Pneumatology on other areas like missiology, charismatology and ecclesiology are briefly considered.

Interview With Steven

Q: How did you become interested in your topic

A: I was studying Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Civilization at the Baltimore Hebrew University.  I had a really great graduate group there with lots of great explorations and exchanges.  My advisor was Barry Gitlen, one of the lead archaeologists at the Philistine Ekron dig site and an expert in Philistine material culture and the 10th century, which is the time period of the rise of the monarchy under David.  This was a time when the ‘Wisdom’ perspective and tradition emerged as fairly distinctive in the history of Israel.  This emergence of the role of the Sage and Scribe can be seen to have had a rather significant impact on history, especially on the writing and transmittal of our ancient scriptures. I think that is where my deep interest in wisdom first took hold.

Q: How do you think your paper is relevant to the Vineyard movement at large?

A: I think a fuller Trinitarian aspect has been lacking in scholarship, the neglected third being Wisdom Pneumatology and I think the Vineyard – loaded with Kingdom theologian-practitioners and scholars – is primed for a major contribution to this field. I also think the wisdom-orientation recommends itself to the Vineyard as a ‘radical middle’ perspective that brings to the fore our Kingdom theology and praxis, especially the ‘both/and’ and ‘now-and-not-yet’ perspectives. I would even say that it dwells in this tension to the point of clarifying that this Kingdom tension is inherent to our place in this present aeon. Genuine Wisdom moves toward the essence of the musterion of the gospel of the Kingdom of God in Christ Jesus. I think the Vineyard has gathered a lot of wisdom from the praxis of the Kingdom of God, and applying that to the formational aspect in the theology of the Reign of God might be fairly helpful to the larger movement.  I have the feeling that this is a ‘Wisdom’ season for the Vineyard, not just in terms of leadership and culture, but in a distinctive way that Caleb Maskell outlined in his perspective at the UK and Ireland Vineyard National Leaders conference. Caleb even recommends Peter Leihart’s book Solomon Among the Postmoderns to the pastors and leaders in order to reach out to understand this emerging generation…and this book is essentially a commentary on Wisdom. Thus, I think that further explorations into the depths and riches of the biblical wisdom-orientation has much to recommend itself to the Vineyard movement.

Q: What do you think might be the practical implications of what you’re exploring?

A: Holistic Spiritual Formation. A balance that includes our most charismatic experiences and our most mundane.  Too often, I think many people think of their spirituality in a limited way, that the Kingdom really only breaks through in ‘prayer ministry times’ or when they can feel the Presence of God or even just on Sunday’s.  The wisdom-orientation can help us discover the transcendent and immanent aspects of the Kingdom, and also that we are ‘formed’ via these experiences, really all experiences, since spiritual formation happens as the Holy Spirit uses everything we experience to form us toward Christ; which includes our best and our worst, the felt Presence and Absence of God, our easiest and our most difficult seasons

Cross-training. I think a wisdom-orientation can help us bring issues together that have mostly been considered ‘either/or’ and bring them into a ‘both/and’ perspective. This experience just might propel us into new horizons vis-à-vis the theology and praxis of the Kingdom. For instance, a few years ago I was in Cincinnati at a small gathering and ended up in a group with Rose Madrid-Swetman talking about bringing together the charismatic and contemplative.  I have been trying to do this with a series of spiritual formation cohorts at our church, and the results have really been surprising and challenging, with real depth and new possibilities emerging for ministry, devotion, and experiencing God.

Steven will be available for further questions and dialogue in the comments.

_________________________________________________________

Steve Hamilton lives in Annapolis, Maryland and is married to Chaundra; they have three lovely girls together. A bi-vocational leader at the Central Maryland Vineyard, member of the Justice Response/VAST national leadership team with VineyardUSA and also a founding member of the Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force, he has spent almost 20 years in diverse endeavors as a civil servant with the U.S. government. He has studied bible and ancient near eastern civilization at the Baltimore Hebrew University and spiritual direction at the Sustainable Faith School of Spiritual Direction.

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Society of Vineyard Scholars, Steven Hamilton, SVS, Vineyard, Wisdom

David C. Kushner, “Echoes in Scripture: Joel in Acts 2″

Abstract
In Acts 2 Peter cites Joel 3 (2:28-32) as his preliminary text. Joel 3 is mis-quoted, and appears to be related only as a proof-text. The contention of this paper is that Joel echoes throughout the context, theological concerns and imagery of Acts 2, which itself outlines the over-arching themes of Acts. The sum result of the Joel 3 citation is an overlay of complementary contexts that enables readers to appreciate the development of early church theology, hermeneutic, nascent pneumatology of the Spirit’s role and power in the kingdom of God, and the groundwork for how God’s justice will be meted out through the community of faith.

A literary-theological investigation of the context of Joel, reveals an expectation of the Day of Yahweh signaled by the outpouring of his Spirit, which establishes justice, calling the faithful out from among the nations.  Joel portrays Israel in the midst of exile, experiencing alienation internally, spiritually and from foreign forces. Joel 3 functions as a crux for the parallel structures of the book, and centralizes the outpouring of the Spirit as the inauguration of the re-establishment of Israel as Zion, which is concomitant with Yahweh’s justice among the nations. As in the case of the Exodus, the calling of the faithful from among the nations brings both salvation to those who call upon the LORD, and judgment upon those who defy him. Furthermore, evidence suggests that some prophetic thinking (Joel and Ezekiel) envisions the Spirit being directly related to the dispensation of justice within Zion and outward to the nations (as in Numbers 11).

Acts 1-2 embeds the events of Pentecost in the context of the exodus.  Israel still awaits for the completion of her exile to be signaled by the installment of God’s Messiah on Jerusalem’s throne and the eradication of Roman domination. The theophanic imagery of God’s Spirit upon the disciples signals the return of God’s presence from Exile and “the last days” (ie, the day of Yahweh).  The citation of Joel, whose own context expects the day of Yahweh to be signaled by the outpouring of the Spirit and the subjugation of hostile empires to God’s righteous kingdom, allows all of these themes to be brought to the reader’s attention, without requiring explicit comment. Furthermore the subsequent sermon serves as an exposition on the final two verses of Joel3, bringing the rhetorical force of imminent judgment and the epiphany of Joel’s prophesy of God’s messianic kingdom into sharp relief for the hearers.

Technorati Tags: Acts, Christianity, David Kushner, Joel, New Testament, Old Testament, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS

Batter My Heart Three-Person’d God

Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Technorati Tags: John Donne, Poetry

But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the LORD, “O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, O LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

But the LORD replied, “Have you any right to be angry?”

Sometimes, it seems, God is too merciful. Its one thing to relieve the suffering of those who are sick, or injured, or suffering unjustly, but what about those who are lazy or wicked? Aren’t we sending the wrong message when we extend a helping hand to those who seem to refuse to work, acknowledge God, or do what is right?

This is Jonah’s problem exactly. God sent him to the Assyrians – a wicked and morally depraved people – with a message of repentance, and Job, knowing full well the abundance of God’s mercy, does everything he can to avoid bringing that message of hope. Why? Because he knows God will forgive them completely, and Jonah has decided they don’t deserve God’s mercy.

We have a problem with genuine mercy. We’d much prefer people earn our alms, if not through their efforts then at least through their overwhelming gratitude. But sometimes, our hardness runs even deeper. Sometimes we have simply judged certain people to be beyond the privilege of mercy. We all do. What is it for you? Perhaps its people who seem lazy or ungrateful, or wear certain clothes or have certain jobs, or have no jobs at all; perhaps its people who have committed a certain kind of crime; or perhaps its people of a certain religion.

Our problem is that we often come to believe that mercy is the privilege of certain kinds of people, but, in fact, mercy is God’s privilege alone and He extends mercy to whomever He pleases. Just as He said to Moses “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” (Ex 33:19)

By displaying his anger in the sight of the repentant Assyrians, Jonah reveals not only his judgment of the Assyrians, but ultimately his judgment of God. Jonah simply believes he knows best who should and who should not be granted mercy. Like Jonah our problem is that we often judge God.

Its no surprise then that God responds by challenging Jonah’s anger. Our response to the mercy of God should always be rejoicing, for mercy is never the vindication of peoples sins, rather it is the demonstration of God’s power and glory at work in the world in spite of sin.

Technorati Tags: Jonah, Mercy

Quite a lot has happened since then in Matt’s life that caused him to stop blogging in 2007 2006. I won’t get into that here because it’s not my story to tell, but his absence has been more than understandable. Still, perhaps selfishly, I’ve missed his voice and I’m sure others have too.

Today Matt decided to tentatively start writing online again and he’s looking for dialogue partners. Do me a favor: put him in your RSS reader or bookmark his address (click here). And comment from time to time. You won’t be sorry.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Christianity, Friends, Matt Self

What I liked best was how Ferwerda cuts to the heart of the issue: are we as parents just walking our kids through life as usual, or are we raising them up to impact the world for the Kingdom? There’s an important quote on page 43 that punctuates the urgency of that question:

One concerned educator and youth ministry expert, Alvin Reid [...] shares his observation: “For the past three decades youth ministry…has exploded across America accompanied by a rise in the number of degrees in youth ministry granted by colleges and seminaries, and abundance of books and other resources, and a network of cottage industries devoted solely to youth ministry. Yet those same three decades have failed to produce a generation of young people who graduate from high school or leave youth groups ready to change the world for Christ.” Add to that Reid notes, that our churches are starting to show a startling decline of youth ministry effectiveness.”

Julie points out that when she was growing up it was the youth pastors job to educate Christian kids and lead them to have an impact on the world for the gospel. But now she realizes that this job is far bigger than local churches and fundamentally belongs to Christian parents.

I couldn’t agree more.

Christian parents must see themselves as their child’s spiritual teacher first and foremost, with the rest of the community of faith playing a supporting role (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). Perhaps the best part of the book is that Ferwerda doesn’t allow it to descend into a simplistic formula for raising Christian kids. It’s full of excellent tips and contextual examples, but mostly drives home the message that parenting is a task of discipleship, and leaves the reader to freely work out how that might look in their own home.

I only have one minor concern: the tone is highly triumphalistic. Throughout, Ferwerda’s emphasis is on immersing your children in scripture, prayer, and what I would call a vision for missions, all as a means of ensuring your child’s commitment to the Kingdom. It might seem strange that as a pastor I would find this concerning, so let me explain.

As a minister for more than 15 years (10 as a youth pastor) I’ve observed that those households who were the most spiritually fervent tended to produce two kinds of kids: equally spiritually fervent or religiously rebellious – and more often the latter. In my opinion the reason for this was that many Christian parents take the scriptural admonition to “raise up a child in the way they should go” as a mandate to indoctrinate their children rather than disciple them, and in my experience most youth will, sooner or later, resist the process of indoctrination.

Nowhere in this book does Ferwerda recommend the simple-minded indoctrination of kids. However, neither is there any dialogue with how the typically-simplistic approach to bible-teaching common in Sunday school often leads those kids to an adolescent rejection of those very answers on the grounds that they simply don’t match up neatly with the actual experiences of life. Most youth go through a fatalistic “Ecclesiastes” phase, and it’s tempting to combat that with biblical certainty. Yet, what is needed most is to heed Solomon’s own advice – to not be too religious (Ecc 7:16) – and instead offer youth the freedom to question, explore, and even to be skeptical and fatalistic at times. Teenagers especially must be brought into an open and safe dialogue with the mystery and skeptical self-critique found in scripture, particularly through the alternative wisdom writings, the prophets, and, of course, Christ himself. When we gloss over the biting critique of these writings in an effort to counter the moody skepticism of adolescence, we rob youth of the raw honesty adolescence craves and invalidate their natural and necessary doubts.

In my opinion, this is one of the biggest problems with the Evangelical Youth Ministry approach, and I worry that if parents read One Million Arrows that way, they’ll simply duplicate a kind of dishonest certainty in their home, and thereby suffer the same rate of failure as Modern Youth Ministry.

But to be fair, Ferwerda never denies any of this scriptural complexity, and addressing it isn’t her project. Her goal is to affirm the centrality of the home as the place of discipleship, and she does an excellent job with that task. She tends to express the faithful optimism characteristic of Evangelical faith, and those who aren’t Evangelical might find this a bit off-putting – which would be a shame because One Million Arrows brings an important perspective to a critical issue facing the American church at this very moment. I recommend it for any Christian parent looking to engage their kids intentionally with the gospel.

Technorati Tags: Books, Christianity, One Million Arrows, Parenting

In my last installment I tentatively proposed that the minister’s wage isn’t money, it’s community care. Now, practically speaking that care must manifest as money, or food, or housing (or perhaps other goods and services), but strictly speaking the wage itself isn’t any of these things.

What Kind of Work?
However, understanding the essence of the wage doesn’t get us all the way to understanding how to appropriately convert our care into food and shelter for ministry leaders, or how to appropriately frame our expectations of the kind of work they do (an equally important issue). For that, we’ll need an understanding of what kind of work a ministry leader does. To gain it, we’ll go back to our original passages.

1 Timothy Chapter 5:17-18
Again, we’ll use Paul’s words to Timothy as our starting point:

The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, “Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain,” and “The worker deserves his wages.”

Paul is describing the gifts, and we have several passages concerning that topic (Rom 12, 1 Cor 12, 1 Pet 4:10). Indeed, the church is very comfortable talking about the roles of the people according to gifting, and there have been popular movements to identify the role of everyone in the church by gifting because, in a critically important sense, everyone is a minister according to their gifts.

However there is little exploration, that I’m aware of, regarding how the nature of “gift work” may or may not be different than other kinds of work. If it is different, wouldn’t that have some bearing on the “how, why, and what” of wages for those who require compensation? (We’ll have to hold off, for now, on why some ministers are worthy of a wage while others are not.)

Gifts Are Different Than Skills.
It’s my proposition that gifts are significantly different than skills (based largely on the ethnographic work of Marcel Mauss and the thoughts of Lewis Hyde). A skill is a kind of property. You earn it and you own it. Under normal conditions, the skill-worker has mastery over their skills, that is, they control them completely. Therefore, you can reckon compensation for your skills fairly easily. Skills serve best when they are accumulated like capital, and like capital, they affect a kind of return on investment for their owner. Hence, the skilled trades-person accumulates skills as a kind of wealth.

But a gift is not a property. It cannot be earned or purchased, only freely received. Nor can it be mastered because it doesn’t belong to the gift-worker. In fact, gifts, because they are given for the purpose of creating relational ties, must be given away again, and often fade (or rot i.e. Ex 16) when they’re not used-up or shared. They come and go, and are notoriously difficult to control. Because the gift-worker cannot master the gift, they can only be good stewards of what they have been given, while they happen to have it – and to be a good steward specifically means to give it away, leaving the gift-worker in a perpetual state of spiritual poverty.

Therefore, it is also notoriously difficult to reckon the compensation of gift-work, because it’s production cannot be controlled. Often long hours (or days, months, even years) go into waiting and supplicating for true gifts to arrive. Yet once they’re received by the gift-worker, they typically “work” in a frenzy of productivity, giving generously to all who benefit from it, and (in a way curiously distinct from skills) are multiplied in the giving.

(Of course, there is a very important sense in which skill-work and gift-work cooperate, but that is not the important point here. I think we must begin by understanding the prior distinctive essence of ministry as a gift-work, before we can understand how to appropriately re-integrate it with trade skills.)

Let’s return to our other central passage to illustrate gift-work among ministers:

Luke 10:5-7
Let’s start by revisiting Jesus’ instructions, to the 72 disciples:

¹After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. ²He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. ³Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. ⁴Do not take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greet anyone on the road.⁵“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ ⁶If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you. ⁷Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.

⁸“When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is set before you. ⁹Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God is near you.’

This is classic gift-work, with several prominent features of gift-exchange occurring:

1. The Gift Is Transient: The disciples can only give away what Christ has first given them, namely peace, power, and kingdom. Again, these gifts are not a property to be held as capital. They must be given in order to multiply, so the ministers, although they are givers, remain as dependent as those to whom they give.

2. The Gift Requires Personal “Poverty”: The disciples go with nothing, demonstrating the “poverty” of gift-work, because receiving the gift first requires the emptiness of poverty, prayer, and sacrifice. This is congruent with 1 Tim 5 and echoed in the Beatitudes.

3. The Gift Provides Community “Wealth”: The hosts are sustained by the gift and the ministers live off the reciprocity typical of gift-exchange. They give what they have and are, in return, given gifts of food, hospitality, shelter, etc. This kind of return, as distinct from payment, is a way of demonstrating the communal abundance of the gift-economy through the multiplication of the gift as it is passed from one empty hand to another.

4. The Gift is Fertile: Characteristic of other gift-cultures, we have an illustration of an agricultural motif (v2). The enthnographic data from such societies shows that the cycle of planting and harvesting becomes significant as an embodiment of the economic gift-cycle, with it’s dependence on the ultimate giver (God or the gods), its sowing and reaping reciprocity, its abundant multiplication via fertility, and its sustenance. All are images of “the gift” at work.

5. The Git is Consumed: The 72 ministers literally feed off of the abundance of the gift. In this way they are not only consuming the multiplied abundance of the gift, they are also literally consuming the return gift of sacrifice made by their hosts.

This last two observations, I think, connect this passage with the function of the priests of the Old Testament, who eat of the meat sacrifices brought to the temple and burn the grain sacrifices (Lev 6). By eating the gift/sacrifice the minister/priest is simultaneously included in the sacramental community and demonstrating the role of God in the gift-cycle by returning a portion of the sacrifice to God (burning accomplishes this same latter function, though with an emphasis on faith-dependence rather than sustenance). Ethnographic data depicts this same eating/burning practices in the religious rituals of other gift-cultures, for example in the Maori tribe (eating of sacrifice by the priest) and the North American Native practice of Potlatch (burning of excess wealth).

There are many other passages I could connect to this theme, but this is a blog not a book : )

I think there are also, obviously, very strong Paschal tones here as well, reaching backward toward passover and forward toward Eucharist. But that is not directly tied to the subject of leadership vocation and wage, so we’d better leave those explorations for another time, and perhaps for a better commenter (I’m looking at you Geoff).

So, what are your thoughts? Do you agree with the characterization of a minister’s work as essentially gift-work, rather than skill-work (or property-work)? If so, does it matter? Are there implications to be explored, particularly for post-Christendom missional leadership with regards to how we treat vocational leadership?

Technorati Tags: 1 Timothy, Christianity, clergy, Jesus, Leadership, Luke, Paid Clergy, Paul, The Gift

• First, the introduction of the hologram pastor.
• Second, research published in Pediatrics suggests that childhood obesity in pre-school age children is directly linked to dislocated familial attachments facilitated by too much time in front of the television and too few communal meals with the family.
• Third, a second unrelated research project coming out of New Zealand suggests much of the same conclusions with regard to teenagers. Teens with more “screen time” have significantly lower attachment to their parents and peers (HT: Kara Powell).

There’s a fascinating sentence in the last summary:

“However, it is also possible that adolescents with poor attachment relationships with immediate friends and family use screen-based activities to facilitate new attachment figures such as online friendships or parasocial relationships with television characters or personalities,” the authors write.

I’ve written about this before, calling it the “mediation of experience.” If “screen time” inhibits our social interactions and relational attachments by replacing the real thing with “parasocial relationships” with unreal characters can the same be said to be true of other instances where we replace real live relationships with unreal characters or personalities?

Obviously I think the answer is yes.

One of the problems with the prevailing mode of church in America is that it has turned the pastor into a celebrity personality, complete with a performance-oriented and technologically mediated relationship with an audience. Once the church reaches a certain size, the pastor’s interaction must occur as a performance by a character through media. Cultural expectations about church structure coupled with assumptions about the virtues of media nearly require this. The trouble is, the character that pastor portrays, in my experience, in never quite the real thing. Some pastors try very hard to “be themselves” on stage, but others intentionally slip into a very different persona. But even for the pastor trying to be genuine, it’s very difficult in my opinion – perhaps impossible – to avoid some level of acting when you’re a preacher on stage, largely because of the entertainment-based expectations we currently impose upon the notion of what it means to be a “good preacher.”

One of the bizarre side-effects of this mediated relationship between the pastor and congregation is that, because of the high level of mediated exposure to the preacher, many in the church (most, in the case of very large churches),  actually feel a personal connection to the pastor that doesn’t actually exist. They don’t really know the pastor, in much the same way they don’t really know Oprah or Dr. Phil. They only know your stage persona. This is greatly magnified in those churches who embrace the personality-driven church model and use a charismatic pastor’s performance skills as a means of growing the church.

Hence, the church gathering becomes just another version of “screen time.”

Now consider how “screen time” becomes literally true in the proliferation of video venue churches, where many congregations only interact with a version of the pastor that is literally unreal. Now replace the video screen with hologram which remains unreal, but magnifies the level of illusion.

Moreover, much like the teens in the second study cited above who talk to each other about the fictional characters they’ve mutually engaged as relational surrogates, church members will often interact around the pastor’s persona. In this way a false persona can become a means of false social relationships. This is akin to kids talking enthusiastically about what “happened” to Hanna Montana in the latest episode (nothing happened…she doesn’t exist!). In celebrity-driven churches much of the social energy occurs around the campfire of a false persona.

Does it matter? Is there harm being done by moving church toward just another version of “screen time?” What are the consequences of this to discipleship? Perhaps, like the studies above, the consequences are spiritually obese, socially disconnected and disaffected Christians.

Technorati Tags: Church, discipleship, Media, Mega-Churches, Pastors, Teenagers

First, I recently conducted an interview with Dallas Willard on this book for Christianaudio.com. If you’re interested, you can download the interview for free by clicking here (registration is required).

Second, Dallas will be speaking at a conference in Anaheim CA called “Knowledge For Life,” on these same themes. The date is April 17, and you can register by clicking here. I’m planning to attend, so if you are too I’d love to connect, so shoot me an email!

Finally, in my recent series in Dallas Willard’s book, Knowing Christ Today we discussed what he calls “soft pluralism” or “inclusivism.” There was an excellent footnote in Chapter 7 that didn’t fit my post on that day, but is important enough that I want to quote it here and open it up for discussion.

Willard is talking about recognizing that other religions may indeed contain true knowledge about God that we can respect, saying:

“This “pluralism” might well concede that all of these features of religions involve important aspects of truth and goodness and should be respected as such. Those dead set against pluralism in any form would of course deny that. But disciples of Christ certainly would not have to do so. [...] outstanding spokespeople for Christ in the Bible have been more generous toward other religions than that and have held that the God of the Bible and of Christians deals lovingly and justly with those who fall far short of “getting it all right” in their understanding and in practice.”

This is where the footnote begins, and where it really gets good:

“In any group the vast majority of those in “good standing” do not believe many of the things the leaders of the group teach as “necessary.” More often than not they don’t even know about them, and if they did, they would not be able to understand them. An example of this would be what is stated about salvation it he Athanasian Creed. After laying out extremely subtle points about the Trinity, it is declared there that “he therefore that will be saved must think thus of the Trinity,…neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance” of the Trinity. The issues in this creed are extremely important. But if one must “think thus” to be saved, 99 percent of professing Christians are not going to make it. Try this creed on and see what you think. Groups and their institutions tend to confuse what they need to teach with what one must believe in order to be saved. This leads to their members professing lots of things they neither believe nor are committed to – indeed, do not even understand. That, in turn, makes it inevitable that they will not “live up to what they profess,” for they actually do not believe what they profess. The effects of this on genuinely trusting and following Christ is devastating. They can be abundantly observed in most Christian groups.”

What do you think might be the “devastating” effects of pressuring people to profess what they don’t actually believe and do you think they’re readily observable?

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