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Letter from America

Fighting the previous battle?

Military theorists will often espouse that the tendency of all armies is to be prepared to fight the last battle. Because it takes time for large institutions to change, because humans typically respond to experience, there is an inertia towards preparedness for yesterday’s battles. The classic example of this is the French army’s readiness to fight a World War 1 style of battle on the eve of World War 2.

Well, new data from the American Religious Identification Survey (March 2009) shows, it claims, that ‘the challenge to Christianity in the US does not come from other religions but rather from a rejection of all forms of organised religion’. If that is true, and it seems to have some purchase, then what we need as a church is a way of doing church that answers that question about organised religion. Instead, of course, what we find is a highly organised mega or traditional church that is geared to answer the question of felt needs through a multitude of programmes. We have an army ready to fight World War 1 on the eve of World War 2.

Pot shots at organised religion

I’m not sure it’s just American culture in this respect. The highly popular and (among Christians) controversial series of books, His Dark Materials, takes none-too-subtle pot shots at organised religion. While the author Philip Pullman has made no secret of his aggressive brand of agnosticism, the emotional focus and arguably the appeal of his brand of anti-God rhetoric is ‘The Magesterium’, or organised religion. Pullman, of course, is British.

This (I guess) is not just a vague old fashioned ‘I like Jesus but I don’t like the church’. The ‘mime’ or the mutated virus now appears as ‘the church is nothing like Jesus.’ For an interesting record of conversations along these lines, and a stimulating read, you might try Dan Kimball’s They like Jesus but not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations.

New Testament model

Certainly, the way we do church is to be guided by biblical principles not by market concerns. We are not to set up our church to fit the sinful tastes of non-Christians. But nor are we to set up our church to fit the sinful tastes of less-than-holy Christians either. Ironically, I suspect, if we dug back into the Bible and looked at a church we would find the New Testament model of church a lot better set up to answer the questions of this emerging World War 2 of postmodernism than we might have thought. After all, most of the New Testament letters are written to correct the church from its tendency to slip into being more like the world. And what the emerging generation, Pullman, and others very widely according to the American Religious Identification Survey, criticise in the church is, when you really think about it, worldliness. We become a power structure for certain personal biases and cultural preferences within a particular sub-culture. We are rarely a bride purified by the washing of the word, with Christ at the heart, and his Spirit clearly animating everything that goes on. If our churches were more like that on the whole (set up to battle World War 2) then I’m not sure there would be so much to criticise, for the church is the body of Christ himself.

Preach to ourselves

Which brings up another point: it’s more than possible that what non-Christians and those outside the church today find unappealing about the church at the very least overlaps with what we in our rebellious nature all find unappealing about God. Yet, certain as there must be some truth in that, we should not escape to the happy thought that ‘it’s just their fault and they need to repent’. My guess is that many of us also need constantly to, as it were, ‘preach the gospel to ourselves’ (and our churches) and become more like him who called us and more worthy of his calling.

So, some thoughts from a new survey: postmodernism is morphing. We need to be ready to fight the current battle, not the last one.

Josh Moody,
Wheaton, Illinois