Dave and Abby raise the intriguing question in their comments to Charles' post from two days ago that perhaps churches will never be a good idea for folks hoping to pursue stage 4 faith, because stage 4 is, by definition, individualistic.  Institutions, by necessity, need to be stage 2--they need to set limits, draw lines, create structure.  Or perhaps, as Dave suggests, they need to be stage 1.

So what do you think?  Do we need to avoid others in this journey lest we institutionalize?

I see it pretty much the other direction.  Yes, institutions can rigidify in stage 2 (or stage 1, I suppose), but that's why we're talking on this blog at all, so we can figure out how to transcend that.  In Peck's view of the stages, it's not that you or I are in one stage and thereby have left the others behind.  His point is that, as we move through the stages, we retain the previous stages as we move on.  So a parent would be a fool to play the stage 4 card with their four-year old.  It's stage 2 all the way, baby!  And wisely so.

Over the years our church has seen some neat things happen with people, usually men, who were formerly homeless or nearly so.  One thing we often need to help these often middle-aged men with is boundaries in terms of how they relate to young women.  On the street, these men were often very direct with such women.  In our church small groups, they would sometimes creep such women out.  What was needed was clear structure and boundaries on our part.  Stage 2.

Just yesterday I got in touch with some noteworthy anger at one group of people I regarded as unreflectively stage 2, to disastrous results.  I wasn't sad about their alleged failings, I was angry.  Seems remarkably like stage 3.

And my take on churches is that the ones we're describing here will need to play the cards of each stage well.  (Stage 1 is always the hardest to talk about here, but it seems to me that the healthy church and the healthy spiritual leader will always be very in touch with and transparent about their stage 1 side.  It's as we're open about our stage 1 selves that we win trust, it seems to me, even as, of course, we're doing our best not to live there.)

Of course a church will need to establish structure and draw the occasional line.  That's a card that will have to be in their deck.

The key, it seems to me with the communities we're describing here, is that there will also be other cards they can play.  If the only card is the stage 2 one--as I believe is often the case--then, yes, we are dreaming here that there would be more to a church community than that, that that would be a community without the kind of transparency, honesty and spiritual depth to attract and hold the kind of stage 3 people that fill the towns of many of us reading this.  But even those stage 3 people are going to want to know that the community does have some structure and some standards, however enlightened.

And, to my mind, with Charles I'd agree that the fundamental nature of God's universe is that it's relational.  Relationships that work--between people, between us and God and between us and ourselves--are a bottom-line good thing, the greatest good thing.  Alienation is the ultimate bad thing (CS Lewis picked up on this with The Great Divorce's vision of hell as isolation.) 

So, with Charles, I'm a church guy.  Going our own way is not a stage 4 choice, as I see it.  We do need connection and partnership--something this blog is shooting for as well.

Yes, again, I'd like these churches to be places that can serve all people, not least those in stages 3 or 4.  And so we talk about such things.  But I wouldn't want to abolish them.

Your thoughts?

I'm intrigued by your comments to Charles' post--Abby (and Dave, to some degree) raise whether churches have a role in this endeavor at all, which seems worth some consideration.

But for now I'm wondering how you all think about prayer in this endeavor.  We've been throwing out that maybe our objective could be summed up as something like, "to help facilitate a stage 4 revival in the secular west."  Given that most of what we've seemed to be doing recently is define terms, this begs that same question.  What do we mean by "revival," most notably.  But I'm bogging down with defining things just now, so we'll leave that unanswered. 

So, however you think about "revival," what role do you feel prayer will pray in it?  Are you pursuing that kind of prayer in any fashion?

A few churches represented here are fasting and praying as whole churches right now for something at least along these lines.  Their thinking has been that cleverness and savvy cultural interpretation and good leadership and preaching skills can indeed take us somewhere down the path to this dream.  But limits will invariably set in.  Our smarts and skills and normal devotional practices can only take us so far.  Perhaps prayer and fasting will bump this up a level.

But what do you think?  Has prayer for your community (or the secular west) been part of your repertoire?  Has God spoken to you about this along the way?  What's God said to you? 

How does prayer fit in?

So, as I commented on Friday, I think we've run aground on our latest string of posts, which might reflect the degree of difficulty of the enterprise.  I'm not sure I can fully frame what the enterprise is, exactly, but it's something to the effect of proposing a way forward for faith in Jesus in a secularizing western world.  We've used terms like "stage 4" or "centered set" along the way to try to characterize what this way forward might feel like.

Not all of us would agree that that's needed.  Maybe just learning from all the best thinkers in the church and theological worlds will do the trick.  If that's your take, fair enough!  I don't believe it, though, and that's been the spirit of the last posts.

But, just to clarify, it was clear to me we'd run aground when the last post drew impassioned defenses of theology or studying the Bible.  I was taken aback.  Was I arguing for anything but that?  This whole chain of posts, after all, had started with a post I'd done comparing the theologies of the Pietists, early Methodists, Lutherans, and reformation-era Catholics.  That sounded...theological to me. 

And it seemed to ground our conversation, if in a glancing way, with some historical thought on the subjects at hand, even as we attempt to press forward, which is what theology has historically done.  It did mention some traditions that evangelicals rarely look at, but perhaps that can reflect on the thinness of some evangelical theology rather than on the uselessness of Pietists, early Methodists, Lutherans and (though they were the villains in this post) reformation-era Catholics.

My point, in conception at least, was not that the way past the alleged deficiencies in evangelical theology was to scrap theology or the Bible, but to transcend the (to my mind) culturally-bound terms that have rendered it less than useful.  My enemies in the last post, you'll recall, were the Pharisees.  I don't see the Pharisees as our model for good theology, but rather as our model for lots of bankrupt proof-texting from scholars who'd lost sight that God was knowable. 

When I talked about people in our church from evangelical backgrounds occasionally complaining about wanting more "meat" from me or from our church, I wasn't conceding their point that there was more meat where they'd come from, but that I refused to feed them.  My take: the perceived "meat" they were looking for was thin stuff indeed, pumped full of steroids and sawdust, but the rich repast being offered them was unappealing because they'd become so accustomed to the other gruel.  (That sounds, oh, immodest.  I'll figure out a way to rephrase before we're done.  But...to make the point.) 

As I mentioned in one of my comments in the last post: I'm in conversations about starting a whole theological institute, costing big money and big effort in the end.  Three cheers for theology!  It's a good deal of what I regard myself as doing.

A lot of our road through these last few posts has involved questioning accepted definitions of terms of interest, like "love," "religion" and "Christian."  This could seem, I suppose, like a jettisoning of thought, because a renunciation of terms could seem like heading into...nothing.  But most theological steps forward throughout the history of the church have involved questioning terms.  The most famous thinker in the last century to talk about a "religionless Christianity" was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, nobody's idea of an anti-intellectual.  

So, hey, we'll need to figure out another way to have this conversation someday, because it's a central one to our enterprise.  Clearly the terms I laid out just didn't work and generated more heat than light. 
At the moment, I'm not coming up with better ones, but that's been true along the way with a number of subjects, and we have been able to find ways profitably into those subjects just a short time later.  May it be true here.

PB, yesterday, asked me to clarify a passing comment I'd made that we'd changed the terms of what faith in Jesus over the last century or so--both abandoning how people thought about this before and then lobbying that these new ways of seeing things were in fact the only ways.  I commented that, line-drawing as this might seem (and I was lobbying against line-drawing), this view also misread what the Bible was driving at.

Brent, as well, like the thoughtful and dogged thinker that he is, kept pressing that we DO need to draw lines in terms of how we think about God, that that's a separate question from whether we broadcast those views or judge people who disagree with how those lines fall.  (He agrees that those things pose challenges.)  He especially presses that we need to do this with a certain sort of ultra-conservative Christian who uses his or her faith as a club to bludgeon people.

Interestingly, those two comments come together for me.  If I were to give a shorthand in answering PB's question, I'd do it this way.  In the last century or so, church leaders have--in fact if not in their intentions--made the Pharisees the good guys in the gospel story.  The Pharisees, you'll recall, were the folks who pressed to have Jesus killed and were the only people Jesus was consistently scathing towards.

This is the basis of my point that reclaiming being "religious" as a good thing is an ill-fated idea.  The Pharisees were the religious people of the gospels, and look how they turned out (and what Jesus thought about them).

But--or so it seems to me--a century or so of evangelical expansion started just great and then turned, all based on this issue.  Evangelicals started great as a force lobbying both for important, gospel-based social reform (evangelicals played a major role in the abolitionist movement, women's suffrage and the civil rights movement) as well as for insisting on the centrality of embracing and believing in Jesus and studying and obeying the Bible.  It's hard to argue with that legacy, and it's no surprise at all to me that this formula ultimately left the evangelicals as the big winners, growth-wise, by the second half of the 20th century. 

But the seeds of implosion were there as well.  The constant cultural battling that was central for those crucial benefits I've just mentioned, to my mind, hardened into a shell of its former self.  The reflexive instinct towards cultural battle caused many faith-filled churches--and ultimately a large chunk of the entire culture of faith-filled churches--to turn inward and endlessly battle for and teach "orthodoxy."  The emphasis that, in the end, what was most important was "right belief"--rather than faith, obedience to Jesus, and concrete acts of love--to my mind made for an aggressive emulation of the Pharisees rather than of Jesus or any of his subsequent interpreters (Paul, John and Peter, in particular).  Being "the guardian of orthodoxy" turns out to have a major downside. 

I do think this is central to the knee-jerk cultural battles that have become assumed as central by evangelicals (and, to emphasize, in my own strange way, I regard myself as an evangelical).  In my experience, it's on this point that the challenges that Otto so eloquently described in his post this week show themselves.  The "meat" of faith in Jesus has been twisted over the last century or so to be "a sort of Bible discussion that helps me understand the right way to think about 'x' cultural issue." 

To briefly (one hopes) work out what I'm sure is my own wound on this last point: Several times a year I end up in a discussion on this with someone who wants more of this "meat."  What always seems unarguable afterward to me is that, unless I'm missing it, by the assessment of the person I'm talking with at the time themselves (though it usually takes them awhile to see and concede this), we actually talk more about the Bible in the average sermon than was true in that biblically "meaty" church that they're yearning for.  We employ more scripture, talk about it in more depth and teach it in more settings (right now our executive pastor Brian Housman is offering our small groups month-long in-depth experiences of a biblical book; he's just finished his time with those of our Tuesday groups looking for this experience and will be working his way through to the other days that have a lot of groups).  

So what's the disconnect?  Usually, after we talk this through, it's this issue.  We don't use all that Bible time to empower sharper opinions about social issues or about right belief.  We exclusively use it to encourage action.  (In my most-recent discussion on this, a very hostile woman visiting us from a Bible church cursed me repeatedly for our lack of use of scripture.  I was a little dumbfounded.  In the sermon she'd just heard, I dealt with a full chapter of a difficult text, had painstakingly worked through it over maybe half the time of the sermon, and then had told vulnerable stories about my own faltering attempts to put this scripture into practice.  Where had I gone wrong, on her terms?  How much more "Bible" could she possibly have gotten in her Bible church than she'd gotten that morning?  "You didn't do it RIGHT!" was her basic shout back my direction.  "You didn't do it like any good Christian would!")

Now I'm sure I have blind spots on this, and those of you either currently or formerly in my church could, I'm sure, point them out to me in some very accurate detail.  But my larger point is that this really is a divide. 

Where has how we present biblical faith gone wrong in the last century?  To my mind it's that we've emulated the Pharisees and have prized, above all, being "right" about a million things--a given verse in the Bible, a social position.  We're putting tons of effort into teaching a reductionist view of "orthodoxy" rather than empowering and modeling living faith in a living God.

But, hey, I'm just one quirky voice.  What's your view?