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The Macdonaldization of the Church: Spirituality, Creativity, and the Future of the Church

Do you want fries with that?

THE MACDONALDIZATION OF THE CHURCH:
Spirituality, Creativity, and the Future of the Church
By John Drane
Darton, Longman & Todd. 203 pp. £9.95
ISBN 0 232 52259 6

John Drane is Head of Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of a number of books, including The Lion Illustrated Encyclopaedia of the Bible. Drane also contributed to the IVP Illustrated Bible Dictionary, and is an able writer and scholar, whose books have been read and appreciated by many people.

This book reflects the author's abilities as both a writer and a thinker, and his reputation will no doubt ensure a wide readership. It is clear from this and other works by Drane that he has a passion to reach contemporary people, and communicate with them on their terms. It is that passion that explains both the strength and the weakness of this book.

Definition

Sociologist George Rizer first coined the term MacDonaldization, and is defined as 'the process by which the principles of the fast food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world'. Rizer is dependent upon the observations of the 19th century German sociologist Max Weber who argued that the desire to identify the most efficient ways to achieve a given end would inevitably result in a collection of regulations and procedures and the emergence of a bureaucratic system to ensure smooth operation. This process or 'rationalisation' has certain benefits, but in the end it proves to be dehumanising, and rather than being a means to an end becomes an end in itself. Drane uses the example of recreation to illustrate this point because of the prevailing situation in which even our 'free time' is a product we purchase from someone else, and over which others have control. The author also cites education and sex as two further examples (Rizer many more) but states that they all have one thing in common: a human quest becomes a bureaucratic process.

This analysis is then applied to 'the Church', which according to Drane has bought into the process, and has ended up being enslaved and shaped by it. What else, he asks, accounts for the paradox of a culture in which Christians have talked more about change and renewal than at any other time in their history, and yet so little change has actually occurred?

Drane is concerned about what he calls 'spiritual searchers' who all too often find 'the church' unattractive because of the way in which it mirrors the dominant, rationalist culture. These people are those who recognise the value of the rational for things like shopping lists, but regard it with suspicion when it is applied to relationships and spirituality.

There is much about this book that I would want to commend, and it says many things to which we really do need to listen. Church attendance is falling off rapidly, and there are many groups within society that we are clearly failing to reach. What Drane proposes by way of response is interesting to say the least.

For example, he advocates the use of space for expression in worship services, which includes dance, mime, prophetic witness and clowning! As in an earlier book, he suggests two types of churches, one of which is the stakeholder model in which diverse types of people who might be at different stages of their spiritual journey join together to celebrate their spiritual search. It is here that I find the book to be at its weakest.

As evangelicals we are often prone to forgetting some basic biblical truths concerning human nature. Men and women are in open rebellion against God and the form that rebellion takes is almost infinitely varied. There are obviously secularists and atheists, but there are also the moralists and the religious. Spiritual searchers are often nothing other than sinners who express their rebellion in a pick-and-mix approach that denies the centrality and necessity of the cross. Adam and Eve were surely searching for the ultimate in spiritual attainment 'to be like God' when they disobeyed him in Gen. 3?

Question to Drane

I also have a question to pose to Drane and others who might call themselves post-evangelicals. If 'the church' has been guilty of reflecting the values of a rationalist and scientific culture, why will we be any less guilty if we buy into and reflect the values of a post-rationalist culture?

The Bible calls us to love God and love people, and we should reflect God's passion for the lost. But lost they truly are, no matter how earnest their spiritual search. For all that I appreciated about this book, it was, in the end, disappointing. What I was left with, almost in spite of the material, was a renewed conviction that God's method of reaching people is still the good news of Jesus simply told and adorned by transformed lives of radical holiness and costly love.

Steve Timmis, Sheffield