The Business of Church

are we still making "children of gehenna"?

Once upon a time I wrote about the ways in which a person is formed for a pastoral vocation. I was taking a macro look at the question, “How does a person become a pastor?” I wrote about the healthy and unhealthy ways people are formed and my research included a look back over the last 2000 years and the various ways different generations and different sects within Christianity have answered the question of pastoral formation. While I argued that there are “best practices” that have been true over two millennia, the simple truth is that as culture changed, church culture changed, and as church culture has changed, the dominant approach to creating pastors for the Church has morphed and evolved.

Here's a simple example. During my time in Bible College in the 80s, preparing for ministry within the Christian Church/Church of Christ tradition, the school I attended added a staff member to teach counseling courses. The message at that time was that people preparing for a pastoral vocation needed to have a basic understanding of counseling techniques and best practices. We were told that the future of pastoral ministry in the Church would require us to be prepared to respond to the mental health needs of church members as a central part of our vocation. At the very least, we were encouraged to learn enough about counseling to keep ourselves out of trouble by recognizing what we weren’t trained to deal with.

This was new. And it was controversial. At the same time there were a pile of books coming out on Christian counseling while another pile grew right beside them of books calling psychotherapy and psychology the “dark arts.” Popular books like The Seduction of Christianity and Psychoheresy warned Christians against various counselling practices. In a more scholarly conversation, Thomas Oden, in his book, Care of Souls in the Classic Tradition, bemoaned the seminary curriculum at that time trading theology courses for psychotherapy courses and graduating candidates for pastoral vocation that were more familiar with Freud than they were Gregory the Great.

Oden wrote, “What curious fate has befallen the classical tradition of pastoral care in the last five decades? It has been steadily accommodated to a series of psychotherapies. It has fallen deeply into a pervasive amnesia toward its own classical pastoral past, into a vague absent-mindedness about the great figures of this distinguished tradition, and into what can only generously be called a growing ignorance of classical pastoral care.” (Classic Tradition, chapter 1) Oden wasn’t so much concerned about the “seduction of Christianity” as he was the loss of these great traditions and insights into pastoral care that were being left off the table (or the bookshelf) in the seminaries of the late 70s and early 80s in favor of the ascendance of counselling and psychotherapy.

(another criticism that was fairly leveled about this trend was that we who were being formed for pastoral vocation were getting just enough education about psychotherapy to make us overconfident and dangerous as we lacked much of the training and practical experience required of those actually studying to practice psychotherapy and counselling.)

Without going any further down that bunny trail (which would be well worth exploring some time) the point I want to make is that just like this moment in the early 80s, over and over and over again in the last 2000 years, what a pastor is supposed to be and know and do has changed subtly and by times dramatically. Researching pastoral formation necessitated similar reading in Church history and how the Church itself has struggled with meaning, purpose and identity over the last 2000 years. Two simple questions: why does the Church exist? And what are pastors supposed to do? (or more simply, what is a pastor?) have been answered a multitude of ways with very diverse answers – sometimes even contradictory answers – as common culture has changed, and Church culture has changed with it.

I have a bookcase dedicated to exploring this question and I am regularly adding new books being written to address the meaning of the Church and the role of pastors (ministers, priests, preachers, elders) in the Church. I have physical shelves and a folder in my Kindle for collecting books that offer a new and best description of what the Church is meant to be about and how the Church is meant to be doing whatever it exists for. As a pastor, I’m constantly bombarded with offers for the latest, newest, freshest take in book, webinar, seminar, conference and retreat form that promises to sharpen the focus on what my work really is and what the Church is meant to be and know and do.

I don’t think this is unique to the Church. Doctors used to bleed people. Teachers used to beat students. Some lawyers in some cultures still wear wigs at work. The mottos, “the Church reformed, always reforming” and “the Church must always be reformed,” are true of both the Catholic Church and Protestant churches. In Divine Renovation, Fr. James Mallon offers the Roman Catholic Church a respectful invitation and blueprint for a kind of reformation or course correction that is needed in this generation. Protestant churches could benefit from the insights Fr. Mallon offers as well. Reformation, renovation, reorganization, reconstruction – all these “re” words are beneficial for all of us as we learn, unlearn and relearn things in this brief moment in which we find ourselves as active agents in this story in which we find ourselves.

Unfortunately, what we tend to do, at least in my vocation, is act as if we are operating in a God given tradition handed down from saint to saint with clarity and precision over two millennia. We are not. None of us. And this thing we call the “Church” today has changed and multiplied by division over and over and over again for at least 1500 years. Still, we like to present a face to the world that’s orthodoxy up front and all sectarian mullet in the back. We’re the proverbial duck that love to appear calm and serene gliding across the water of history while under the surface our little feet are going at a feverish pace. In my lifetime, and judging by the “how to do church” books lining my shelves, we’re flailing, trying to latch onto something, anything, that will keep our heads above water.

In his excellent book, Canoeing the Mountains, Tod Bolsinger makes this insightful observation, “What happens when what you’ve always done doesn’t work anymore? What we tend to do is double down and just keep doing it. And so that becomes the mistake.” Do what you’ve always done, Bolsinger says, describing our tendency in the Church, but do it harder. In an article published by the Lausanne Movement, Is Christianity Shrinking or Shifting, we read that “The percentage of the world that is Christian has changed very little over the last 120 years. In 1900, 34.5 percent of the world was Christian; in 2020, the figure is 32.3 percent. This relative stability, however, masks dramatic changes in Christianity’s demographics. The bar chart below reveals that 82 percent of all Christians in 1900 lived in Europe and North America; by 2020 this figure had dropped dramatically to 33 percent.” That “stability” also begs a lot of questions. And the reality that we are experiencing in North America is that Church is shrinking. Pew Research Center, a well-respected research group writes, “In…telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.”

What we want to do is blame our culture and social media and the sin du jour and the lack of commitment to Jesus and blah, blah, blah. We want to bemoan “deconstruction” and talk about how we used to call it “backsliding.” But we don’t really like to look at ourselves. Sure, we’ll assess the size of our screen, the length of time we sing in worship, the songs we sing, our need to autotune our worship band, our program offerings, the length of our sermons, the balance between “life skill” sermons and “theology” sermons – but we rarely question the nature of the Church and pastoral ministry itself. We’re almost ALWAYS open to considering something fresh that promises to increase our attendance or to move attenders into fully devoted followers of Jesus who tithe, but the big question – “Is this what Jesus meant for us to be doing?” isn’t given much time or contemplation.

An “industrial complex” is defined by our friends at Wikipedia as, “…a socioeconomic concept wherein businesses become entwined in social or political systems or institutions, creating or bolstering a profit economy from these systems. Such a complex is said to pursue its own interests regardless of, and often at the expense of, the best interests of society and individuals.” Back in 2012, Skye Jethani wrote in Christianity Today about the Evangelical Industrial Complex. He wrote, “Evangelicalism is a very, very large business…that’s why I call it an industrial complex.” Ben Francis describes the rise of the EIC, “…in the 20th century, people (Americans in particular) began to realize that the Christian market for Bibles, books, and study guides was potentially massive. Therefore, marketing to Christians became big business…lots of potential revenue and profit sources. An industry was born…an industry that has become an industrial complex. And it’s now a self-insulating, self-protecting machine.”

We’ve become such a big business that we have developed the “too big to fail” mindset. We are so intertwined with business that when we recruit church planters and pastors we are comfortable using words like “entrepreneur” which I suspect would make Oden gag, or we use “leader,” a word I know Eugene Peterson hated to hear used for pastors. Books and seminars on business leadership have become the present-day norm for evangelical pastors looking to find guidance and inspiration. Pastors are bound to operate as CEOs when the Church becomes a business. The implications of this way of being the Church aren’t neutral or net positive, but they are so much a part of our culture that we don’t wonder if they are right or wrong, good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. We say silly things like, “God can use any model or approach…” as if the way we do things doesn’t affect our outcomes. We have all these cautionary tales now, epitomized by Bill Hybels. But we want to say he and the hundreds like him are “bad apples” and it’s not how we do this but these bad actors who get into our church systems. But we’ve had so many damn bad apples over the last decade that we really should be suspicious that the whole orchard is poison.

Julie Roys at the Roys Report website, has a whole page with articles about the Evangelical Industrial Complex. The Holy Post podcast had an episode about it. There is an awareness that it exists. Examples are multiplying. But it’s the aquarium we’re all swimming in. Even the fish who know they’ve been stuck in this aquarium are part of this ecosystem and in some ways we are complicit with the damage that it does. It’s a seductive aquarium, it is the mythological lotus tree and we are addicted to the fruit.

But the people running the complex keep assuring us that the system is not the problem.

(In an upcoming post I will write about the implications of being part of this EIC and how we experience the harmful consequences in the Church.)