Imagine (pt 1)

Can we dream a better dream for the Church?

Can we see what it would be like to imagine a different kind of future together?

I remember reading an article about a man who was brought in to do that for a very large, very established company in the tech industry. Imagine a different kind of future and then help them build it. You would recognize the brand if you’ve shopped for a computer. The man was specifically hired because he was known for innovation and revitalizing other companies for which he’d worked. But the article, written by himself as a post-mortem, detailed the spectacular failure of his attempt to fix the broken system he inherited.

I think about that article a lot as I think about the future of the Church.

Knowing how the story ends, or is predicted to end, promised to end, supposed to end, may be the kind of spoiler that makes us feel like we can come up with anything between here and there and the kids will be all right. Having a guaranteed outcome (Winning!) tempts us to ignore all the harm we can do as it might seem inconsequential. The harm we have already done, and maybe even the harm we’re causing people right now, is only “temporary.” However, God’s ability to bring about beauty from ashes, and love from hate doesn’t excuse us our part in extracting the precious from the worthless. The ability of God to bring about God’s own purposes despite the evil, free-will acts of Man, does not absolve us from our vocation as salt and light and imitators of Christ.

I don’t think the future of the Church depends on me, or even us, but it does involve us. Paul seems to tell the Corinthians that we are engaged in the building process ourselves and we choose the kind of materials with which we build, “Take particular care in picking out your building materials. Eventually there is going to be an inspection. If you use cheap or inferior materials, you’ll be found out. The inspection will be thorough and rigorous. You won’t get by with a thing. If your work passes inspection, fine; if it doesn’t, your part of the building will be torn out and started over. But you won’t be torn out; you’ll survive—but just barely.” (1Co 3:12-15 MSG) The kingdom coming isn’t something happening to us, it is a process in which we are actively engaged.

As C.S. Lewis described our influence, “…to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.”

The man who was brought in to bring the tech company into the future with expanded possibilities and healthy processes failed because, he said, he was being asked to do two things at once, which in the end, he determined were mutually exclusive interests. First, he was asked to innovate, to reimagine the company from the ground up. People, processes, plans, product - everything was supposed to be on the table. But he was also being asked to, with equal effort, keep the company going, keep it profitable, avoid layoffs, keep shareholders happy – and put out all the fires. The fires, he said, were what did him in.

In the article, he listed a number of fires, crisis points, collapses, major problems that ended up requiring so much of his time, attention and creativity to solve that he had nothing left for making something new.

There are always fires. We’re born for trouble as surely as sparks fly upward. But there are the troubles that come and there are the troubles we make for ourselves. One we can’t avoid. The other we can – at the very least – reduce, if not eliminate.

One of the challenges for us in finding our way to something new is that the bigger the institution the harder the course correction, and the longer it will take to get from where we are to where we hope to be. And American Christianity likes big things. We have embraced the false belief that bigger is better and the lie that living things grow, and that expansion is always preferable to maintenance. We’ve come to believe in these things so much that we struggle to make space to even consider that they might really be myths, lies and untruths. Perhaps even harmful ones. This means that we might recognize something obvious, a thing that needs to be done, but like a mosquito in a nudist colony, we’re deterred by the scale of the task and the potentially negative reaction to our attempt.

We have adopted the Modern notion that something can be “too big to fail” is a virtuous concept and that whatever action we must take to keep our Church institutions from failing are, by default, virtuous even when they require us to do harm, shame victims of abuse, tell lies or shades of the truth, bully others and practice what in other circumstances would be considered by us, sin.

Think of a single-family home in which you discover the walls are filled with dangerous mold. The only thing to be done is to strip it down to the studs, treat the space and restore it all. Now imagine that the home in question is Buckingham palace. Sometimes we become captive to our own success. We tell everyone that everything is fine here. All is well. There’s nothing to see behind that curtain.

Even when we know we’re hiding something horrendous.

When I think about where the Church in North America has been and is today and I try to imagine what kind of reforms are needed now for the sake of tomorrow, I feel stuck in the same dilemma as the tech exec – do we keep propping up a broken system in order to maintain employment, retain members, trying to satisfy stakeholders and attract new interest – or do we just move on and start the New thing while wishing the very best for the Old?

Historically, this isn’t a new dilemma.

While some of the examples we can cite didn’t start, go, or end well, major cultural shifts are not new to our story. Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbi Dei. A quick survey of Christian denominations is also a tour of our historic attempts to recognize that we have systemic problems and we need to get rid of the mold, right down to the studs. Even within the Catholic Church we have examples of movements like the one led by St. Francis, that brought about fundamental, grassroots changes in their time. A present moment example from the Catholic Church is the work of Father James Mallon which is described in his challenging book, Divine Renovation.

But if I stick with the example I started with, I’m suggesting we need to get rid of the mold while maintaining our residence, keeping everyone comfortable and under the same roof while putting out a several fires, patching some leaks, repairing cracks in the foundation and faults in the wiring as a funnel cloud forms overhead.

So often the work we can see needs to get done is being set aside so we can deal with that which feels, and might be, more urgent.

This is all preamble to what I think the future can and should look like for the Church here in North America. I have no illusions that my thoughts are “the Answer” or that I can save this institution. I’m not writing to change your mind. This is just me thinking out loud and inviting you to think along with me. More than anything, I would wish that the Church could collectively arrive at a shared conclusion and common identity. But we’re already too big for that, even most of our smallest collectives are too big for that and we’ve come to feel we have too much at stake to start addressing our broken system.

It could be that we are at yet another hinge of church history when a collective will rise up among us and have their Network moment, embodied by the character of Howard Beale in the movie:

We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

But we’ve taught you that you aren’t supposed to get mad, and certainly not mad as hell. Forgive. That’s what you and I are supposed to do if we’re Christians. And trust. Trust and forgive.

The irony, for evangelicals, is that we are all the legacy of protest movements. While churches may split over the color of the new carpet, denominations have tended to be born out of a conviction that the system is broken and the house is on fire. But today, as Walter Brueggemann observes through the story of Moses in The Prophetic Imagination, the protest singer, when the revolution is successful, becomes the next emperor of a system designed to squash dissent. This is the movement that followers of Jesus are meant to resist.

What if we look at this cultural moment through a different lens than that of being well-behaved? My wife’s favorite saying is that "well-behaved women seldom make history.” What if we gave ourselves permission to get mad at the powers and principalities, the systems, and the strongholds? What if rocking the boat was precisely what was needed to get us back on course? What if we saw turning over tables in the Temple as a legitimate vocation that we, in the Jesus following tradition, ought to pay attention to? What if the heroes of our story are the powerless and the marginalized who, rather than shouting, “I’m mad as hell!” from their windows, simply said out loud and together, “But he hasn't got anything on."

Next week I’m posting my modest proposal, a non-exhaustive description of what I believe a healthy Church for my children and grandchildren will look like. Imagine with me, what healthy reform would you like to see?