Models of Church Direction
Dear Friends and Leaders and assorted others who like this kind of stuff,
Below is a a summary of James Davison Hunter’s new book, To Change the World. While I am not in total agreement with his critique of current models, I think where he ends up is similar to where we are headed. He writes as a sociologist, which means he has spent years learning how to say simple things in complex ways. I hope you find it helpful.
Pastor Doug
Summary of To Change the World, by James Davison Hunter,
Oxford University Press, 2010. 353 pages.
For discussion: Are Christians supposed to change the world? Why or why not? What biblical support can you give for your position?
I. Christians are world-makers. They are commanded to change the world.
A. Genesis 2:15. “Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.” The first Hebrew word means to work, nurture, sustain, husband. The second Hebrew word means to care for, preserve, protect.
B. “The passion to engage the world, to shape it and finally change it for the better, would seem to be an enduring mark of Christians on the world in which they live.”
C. “I contend that the dominant ways of thinking about culture and cultural change (among Christians) are flawed, for they are based on both specious social science and problematic theology.”
For discussion: How do you think culture changes? How do Christians influence/shape culture?
II. The common view of how culture changes is wrong
A. The common view is that individual Christians who hold to the right values, have good hearts and embrace a Christian worldview change the world one person at a time.
B. “This account is almost wholly mistaken…The idea, suggested by James Dobson, that ‘in one generation you can change a whole culture’ is ludicrous.”
C. Ideas alone don’t change culture. Ideas that are supported by networks of powerful elites change culture.
D. Evangelical Christians think they are growing in their influence in culture, but actually are not. This is because their beliefs/ideas are not connected to the right social/political networks.
E. “The main reason why Christian believers today have not had the influence in the culture to which they have aspired is not that they don’t believe enough, or try hard enough, or care enough, or think Christianly enough, or have the right worldview but rather because they have been absent from the arenas in which the greatest influence in the culture is exerted.”
III. Three ways Christians try to change culture.
A. The Christian Right Representatives cited: James Dobson, Gary Bauer, Chuck Colson, Richard Neuhaus, Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Beverly LaHaye)
1. America was founded as a Christian nation, or at least faith has been actively present in the public square from the beginning.
2. America is moving in the wrong direction. Our Christian heritage has been left to the wayside.
3. America in general and Christians in particular are under attack from secularists and humanist forces. American civilization is at stake. “Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost.”
4. Christians can take our country back through prayer and action. Action is primarily a turn towards politics as a means of cultural change.
5. The Christian Right feels injured and approaches the culture through a strategy of negation. They use phrases like “the enemy”, “attack”, “drive out,” “overthrow,” and “reclaim.” This reflects language of loss, disappointment. Anger, antipathy, resentment, and desire for conquest.”
6. The Christian Right aligns itself with the values of the Republican Party
7. The Christian Right’s paradigm towards cultural engagement can be summarized as “defensive against.”
B. The Christian Left Representatives cited: Jim Wallis of Sojourners, Ron Sider, Randall Balmer, Tony Campolo, Tom Sine)
1. The key word in the progressive lexicon is justice
2. The biblical tradition that progressives appeal to is the prophetic tradition in its condemnation of the wealthy for their abuse of the poor, the weak, and the marginalized.
3. God is angry with America because we do not care for the poor.
4. Whereas the Christian Right as angry at secularists for taking America from them, the Christian Left is angry at the Christian Right for not representing Christianity fairly (being co-opted by militarism and nationalism.”
5. The primary way to make the world more just is through politics.
6. The Christian Left aligns itself with the values of the Democratic Party
7. The Christian Left has a narrative of injury (from the Right) that results in largely negative rhetoric.
8. The Christian Left’s approach to cultural change can be summarized as “relevance to”.
C. The Neo-Anabaptists Representatives cited: John Howard Yoder, Shane Claiborne, Richard Hays, Stanley Hauerwas, William Willimon, New Monasticism, The Ekklesia Project, Troy, “Yoder Boy” McNiel).
1. The main difference between the Christian Left and the neo-Anabaptists is found in their respective views of the state. The CL is committed to a strong state and will to press to realize its agenda in law and policy, the latter keeps its distance from the state, maintaining a basic distrust towards its structure, action and use of power.
2. They are inspired by the witness and social ethics of the church of the apostolic age—living in simplicity, sharing goods in common, caring for the poor and widowed, seeking reconciliation, making peace.
3. Jesus was an agent of radical social change.
4. The Constantinian error was fatal to the church as the people of God merged with the powers; instead of being a servant of the poor and oppressed, became the oppressor; instead of modeling a new kind of society, the church imitated the social structures of hierarchy.
5. The problem of today is that the American church is caught up in a dual allegiance to both Christ and the political economy of liberal democracy and consumer capitalism.
6. The primary witness of the church should instead be its life as an alternative community. “The church doesn’t have a social strategy the church is a social strategy.”
7. Christians must not pursue vocations that make them complicit in the violence that is embedded in capitalism and the political world.
8. The tone and character of their critique of the church and the world (according to Hunter) is relentlessly negative.
9. The neo-Anabaptist’s approach to cultural change can be summarized as “purity from.”
D. Each model is flawed.
1. Each model is marked by a “narrative of injury” and a largely negative approach to culture.
2. The Christian Right and Christian Left expect politics to deliver too much.
3. The neo-Anabaptists, in advocating powerlessness, do not understand what it means to have power. Everyone made in the image of God has power. The question for the church is not between choosing powerlessness or power, but, how will the church and its people use the power that they have?
E. Jesus as a model of how to use social power.
1. Jesus was completely submitted to his Father
2. Jesus rejected status, reputation and privilege
3. Jesus was motivated by his love for fallen humanity and creation
4. Jesus dealt with those outside the community of faith in a noncoercive way.
“If the flourishing of Christian faith and its cultures depends on a model of power that derives from Christ’s life and teaching, what does this look like in practice?
For Discussion. According to Hunter, how does each group try to change the culture? What are the strengths and weaknesses of his analysis? Do you identify with this approach over the others? Do you agree that Christians are overly optimistic about politics as a way of influencing culture? How much should we expect from politics?
IV. An alternative model: faithful presence
A. Two unique challenges of late modernity
1. The challenge of difference. Pluralism is a defining feature of the modern world order. Pluralism challenges the church and makes the culture suspicious of any “we are here to take over and impose our view on yours” language.
2. The challenge of dissolution. I refer to the deconstruction of the most basic assumptions about reality. In the contemporary world we have the capacity to question everything but little ability to affirm anything. The words we use simply fail to have the same kind of traction they once did. The cultural tendency is towards nihilism, which is a great challenge to faithful living.
3. “It is essential to come to terms with the enormity and complexity of the change (that is taking place in our culture) and to face its implications squarely, for it means that the context in which faithfulness if pursued today is quite different than anything seen before.”
B. The groundwork for an alternative way
1. Christians are to relate to the world within a dialectic of affirmation and antithesis.
a. We affirm that the world is good and shared in common by believers and non-believes alike.
b. We, even though we affirm the world, nonetheless live as a community of resistance, providing a different vision of human flourishing.
C. Toward a theology of faithful presence
1. Presence and place. The incarnation tells us that God is faithfully present in a particular place.
2. God’s faithful presence in the world is marked by pursuit, identification and the offer of life through sacrificial love.
3. Given these assumptions, faithful presence means:
a. We are to be fully present to each other within the community of faith and fully present to those who are not. We give particular priority to what is right in front of us, the community, the neighborhood, the city. “For most, this will mean a preference for stability, locality, and particularity of place and its needs.”
b. We are fully present and committed to our vocational tasks.
c. We are fully present and committed to our spheres of vocational influence – families, neighborhoods, voluntary activities and places of work.
4. Faithful presence entails not so much of a direct opposition through a contest of power as a bursting out of an alternative within the proper space of the old.
5. The practice of faithful presence generates relationships and institutions that are fundamentally covenantal in character, the ends of which are fostering of meaning, purpose, truth, beauty, belonging and fairness—and not just for Christians but for everyone. What might this covenantal commitment look like? He gives several illustrations.
a. An automotive company organizes its business model around the question: “what do we owe our customers and our employers?” When the company saw that the profit-margins of inner city dealerships where higher than suburban dealerships, they lowered prices in the inner city to better serve the lower income population. Incidentally, the company developed more business volume at those dealerships. The business also created a scholarship fund to pay for college costs for children of company workers.
b. A business in Kansas City restructured their leadership, replacing management with mentoring as the primary means of leading people.
c. Three college classmates started a rock and roll magazine that showcased “signs of life in music, film and culture” as an alternative to music magazines that depict the shadow side of that culture. The magazine is now the third largest music magazine in America.
d. A grocery store clerk, whose dominion was six feet in radius, rang up and bagged every customer’s groceries with enthusiasm, remembered their names and asked about their children. She would end every conversation by saying that she was going to pray for their family. She caused problems because so many people wanted to get in her check-out line. Her funeral was standing room only.
D. Toward a new city commons
1. In opposition to the “defensive against,” “relevance to,” and “purity from” paradigms, Hunter offers a model of engagement called “faithful presence within.”
2. Jeremiah 29:4-7 offers a model of faithful presence.
a. God had not abandoned Israel; Exile was the place where God was at work.
b. It would have been easy for the Jews to be either hostile toward their city, or assimilate into its culture. But God was calling them to something different – not to be defensive against, isolated from or absorbed into the dominant culture, but to be faithfully present within it.
3. We need a new language for how the church engages culture. It is essential to abandon all talk of “redeeming the culture,” “advancing the kingdom,” or “transforming the world.” These phrases imply conquest.
4. The ideal is to shift to a post-Constantinian engagement, which means a way of engaging the world that neither seeks domination nor defines identity and witness over against domination….America was never, in any theologically serious way, a Christian nation…Ours is now a post-Christian culture. Believers are now, more than ever, spiritually speaking, exiles. Christians must come to terms with this.
5. “The church will not flourish in itself nor serve well the common good if it isolates itself from the larger culture, fails to understand its nature and inner logic, and is incapable of working within it—critically affirming and strengthening its healthy qualities and humbly criticizing and subverting its most destructive tendencies.?
For Discussion: Do you think Hunter’s model of faithful presence is distinctively an alternative, new way of relating to the culture, or is it simply a more refined expression of old ways? Do you think the model of faithful presence is realistic and effective? Can you think of examples of Christians living out a model of faithful presence?
Below is a a summary of James Davison Hunter’s new book, To Change the World. While I am not in total agreement with his critique of current models, I think where he ends up is similar to where we are headed. He writes as a sociologist, which means he has spent years learning how to say simple things in complex ways. I hope you find it helpful.
Pastor Doug
Summary of To Change the World, by James Davison Hunter,
Oxford University Press, 2010. 353 pages.
For discussion: Are Christians supposed to change the world? Why or why not? What biblical support can you give for your position?
I. Christians are world-makers. They are commanded to change the world.
A. Genesis 2:15. “Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.” The first Hebrew word means to work, nurture, sustain, husband. The second Hebrew word means to care for, preserve, protect.
B. “The passion to engage the world, to shape it and finally change it for the better, would seem to be an enduring mark of Christians on the world in which they live.”
C. “I contend that the dominant ways of thinking about culture and cultural change (among Christians) are flawed, for they are based on both specious social science and problematic theology.”
For discussion: How do you think culture changes? How do Christians influence/shape culture?
II. The common view of how culture changes is wrong
A. The common view is that individual Christians who hold to the right values, have good hearts and embrace a Christian worldview change the world one person at a time.
B. “This account is almost wholly mistaken…The idea, suggested by James Dobson, that ‘in one generation you can change a whole culture’ is ludicrous.”
C. Ideas alone don’t change culture. Ideas that are supported by networks of powerful elites change culture.
D. Evangelical Christians think they are growing in their influence in culture, but actually are not. This is because their beliefs/ideas are not connected to the right social/political networks.
E. “The main reason why Christian believers today have not had the influence in the culture to which they have aspired is not that they don’t believe enough, or try hard enough, or care enough, or think Christianly enough, or have the right worldview but rather because they have been absent from the arenas in which the greatest influence in the culture is exerted.”
III. Three ways Christians try to change culture.
A. The Christian Right Representatives cited: James Dobson, Gary Bauer, Chuck Colson, Richard Neuhaus, Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Beverly LaHaye)
1. America was founded as a Christian nation, or at least faith has been actively present in the public square from the beginning.
2. America is moving in the wrong direction. Our Christian heritage has been left to the wayside.
3. America in general and Christians in particular are under attack from secularists and humanist forces. American civilization is at stake. “Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost.”
4. Christians can take our country back through prayer and action. Action is primarily a turn towards politics as a means of cultural change.
5. The Christian Right feels injured and approaches the culture through a strategy of negation. They use phrases like “the enemy”, “attack”, “drive out,” “overthrow,” and “reclaim.” This reflects language of loss, disappointment. Anger, antipathy, resentment, and desire for conquest.”
6. The Christian Right aligns itself with the values of the Republican Party
7. The Christian Right’s paradigm towards cultural engagement can be summarized as “defensive against.”
B. The Christian Left Representatives cited: Jim Wallis of Sojourners, Ron Sider, Randall Balmer, Tony Campolo, Tom Sine)
1. The key word in the progressive lexicon is justice
2. The biblical tradition that progressives appeal to is the prophetic tradition in its condemnation of the wealthy for their abuse of the poor, the weak, and the marginalized.
3. God is angry with America because we do not care for the poor.
4. Whereas the Christian Right as angry at secularists for taking America from them, the Christian Left is angry at the Christian Right for not representing Christianity fairly (being co-opted by militarism and nationalism.”
5. The primary way to make the world more just is through politics.
6. The Christian Left aligns itself with the values of the Democratic Party
7. The Christian Left has a narrative of injury (from the Right) that results in largely negative rhetoric.
8. The Christian Left’s approach to cultural change can be summarized as “relevance to”.
C. The Neo-Anabaptists Representatives cited: John Howard Yoder, Shane Claiborne, Richard Hays, Stanley Hauerwas, William Willimon, New Monasticism, The Ekklesia Project, Troy, “Yoder Boy” McNiel).
1. The main difference between the Christian Left and the neo-Anabaptists is found in their respective views of the state. The CL is committed to a strong state and will to press to realize its agenda in law and policy, the latter keeps its distance from the state, maintaining a basic distrust towards its structure, action and use of power.
2. They are inspired by the witness and social ethics of the church of the apostolic age—living in simplicity, sharing goods in common, caring for the poor and widowed, seeking reconciliation, making peace.
3. Jesus was an agent of radical social change.
4. The Constantinian error was fatal to the church as the people of God merged with the powers; instead of being a servant of the poor and oppressed, became the oppressor; instead of modeling a new kind of society, the church imitated the social structures of hierarchy.
5. The problem of today is that the American church is caught up in a dual allegiance to both Christ and the political economy of liberal democracy and consumer capitalism.
6. The primary witness of the church should instead be its life as an alternative community. “The church doesn’t have a social strategy the church is a social strategy.”
7. Christians must not pursue vocations that make them complicit in the violence that is embedded in capitalism and the political world.
8. The tone and character of their critique of the church and the world (according to Hunter) is relentlessly negative.
9. The neo-Anabaptist’s approach to cultural change can be summarized as “purity from.”
D. Each model is flawed.
1. Each model is marked by a “narrative of injury” and a largely negative approach to culture.
2. The Christian Right and Christian Left expect politics to deliver too much.
3. The neo-Anabaptists, in advocating powerlessness, do not understand what it means to have power. Everyone made in the image of God has power. The question for the church is not between choosing powerlessness or power, but, how will the church and its people use the power that they have?
E. Jesus as a model of how to use social power.
1. Jesus was completely submitted to his Father
2. Jesus rejected status, reputation and privilege
3. Jesus was motivated by his love for fallen humanity and creation
4. Jesus dealt with those outside the community of faith in a noncoercive way.
“If the flourishing of Christian faith and its cultures depends on a model of power that derives from Christ’s life and teaching, what does this look like in practice?
For Discussion. According to Hunter, how does each group try to change the culture? What are the strengths and weaknesses of his analysis? Do you identify with this approach over the others? Do you agree that Christians are overly optimistic about politics as a way of influencing culture? How much should we expect from politics?
IV. An alternative model: faithful presence
A. Two unique challenges of late modernity
1. The challenge of difference. Pluralism is a defining feature of the modern world order. Pluralism challenges the church and makes the culture suspicious of any “we are here to take over and impose our view on yours” language.
2. The challenge of dissolution. I refer to the deconstruction of the most basic assumptions about reality. In the contemporary world we have the capacity to question everything but little ability to affirm anything. The words we use simply fail to have the same kind of traction they once did. The cultural tendency is towards nihilism, which is a great challenge to faithful living.
3. “It is essential to come to terms with the enormity and complexity of the change (that is taking place in our culture) and to face its implications squarely, for it means that the context in which faithfulness if pursued today is quite different than anything seen before.”
B. The groundwork for an alternative way
1. Christians are to relate to the world within a dialectic of affirmation and antithesis.
a. We affirm that the world is good and shared in common by believers and non-believes alike.
b. We, even though we affirm the world, nonetheless live as a community of resistance, providing a different vision of human flourishing.
C. Toward a theology of faithful presence
1. Presence and place. The incarnation tells us that God is faithfully present in a particular place.
2. God’s faithful presence in the world is marked by pursuit, identification and the offer of life through sacrificial love.
3. Given these assumptions, faithful presence means:
a. We are to be fully present to each other within the community of faith and fully present to those who are not. We give particular priority to what is right in front of us, the community, the neighborhood, the city. “For most, this will mean a preference for stability, locality, and particularity of place and its needs.”
b. We are fully present and committed to our vocational tasks.
c. We are fully present and committed to our spheres of vocational influence – families, neighborhoods, voluntary activities and places of work.
4. Faithful presence entails not so much of a direct opposition through a contest of power as a bursting out of an alternative within the proper space of the old.
5. The practice of faithful presence generates relationships and institutions that are fundamentally covenantal in character, the ends of which are fostering of meaning, purpose, truth, beauty, belonging and fairness—and not just for Christians but for everyone. What might this covenantal commitment look like? He gives several illustrations.
a. An automotive company organizes its business model around the question: “what do we owe our customers and our employers?” When the company saw that the profit-margins of inner city dealerships where higher than suburban dealerships, they lowered prices in the inner city to better serve the lower income population. Incidentally, the company developed more business volume at those dealerships. The business also created a scholarship fund to pay for college costs for children of company workers.
b. A business in Kansas City restructured their leadership, replacing management with mentoring as the primary means of leading people.
c. Three college classmates started a rock and roll magazine that showcased “signs of life in music, film and culture” as an alternative to music magazines that depict the shadow side of that culture. The magazine is now the third largest music magazine in America.
d. A grocery store clerk, whose dominion was six feet in radius, rang up and bagged every customer’s groceries with enthusiasm, remembered their names and asked about their children. She would end every conversation by saying that she was going to pray for their family. She caused problems because so many people wanted to get in her check-out line. Her funeral was standing room only.
D. Toward a new city commons
1. In opposition to the “defensive against,” “relevance to,” and “purity from” paradigms, Hunter offers a model of engagement called “faithful presence within.”
2. Jeremiah 29:4-7 offers a model of faithful presence.
a. God had not abandoned Israel; Exile was the place where God was at work.
b. It would have been easy for the Jews to be either hostile toward their city, or assimilate into its culture. But God was calling them to something different – not to be defensive against, isolated from or absorbed into the dominant culture, but to be faithfully present within it.
3. We need a new language for how the church engages culture. It is essential to abandon all talk of “redeeming the culture,” “advancing the kingdom,” or “transforming the world.” These phrases imply conquest.
4. The ideal is to shift to a post-Constantinian engagement, which means a way of engaging the world that neither seeks domination nor defines identity and witness over against domination….America was never, in any theologically serious way, a Christian nation…Ours is now a post-Christian culture. Believers are now, more than ever, spiritually speaking, exiles. Christians must come to terms with this.
5. “The church will not flourish in itself nor serve well the common good if it isolates itself from the larger culture, fails to understand its nature and inner logic, and is incapable of working within it—critically affirming and strengthening its healthy qualities and humbly criticizing and subverting its most destructive tendencies.?
For Discussion: Do you think Hunter’s model of faithful presence is distinctively an alternative, new way of relating to the culture, or is it simply a more refined expression of old ways? Do you think the model of faithful presence is realistic and effective? Can you think of examples of Christians living out a model of faithful presence?
posted by David at 9:52 AM
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