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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
What does it mean to provide leadership for the church in an increasingly secular context? When religion is privatized and secularism reigns in the public square, Christians are often drawn toward either individualist escapism or constant cultural warfare. But might this context instead offer a fresh invitation for the church to adapt and thrive? Gordon Smith is passionate about the need for capable, mature leaders to navigate and respond to a changing society. In this book, he draws on his extensive experience as a university president, pastor, and international speaker to open a multidisciplinary conversation about the competencies and capacities essential for today's leaders. After analyzing the phenomenon of secularization in the West and charting common Christian responses, Smith introduces four sources of wisdom to help guide us through this new terrain: the people and prophets of Judah during the Babylonian exile, the early church in its pagan environment, contemporary churches across the Global South, and Christian thinkers in post-Christian Europe. From these resources he identifies practices and strategies—from liturgy and catechesis to mission and hospitality—that can give shape to faithful, alternative communities in such a time as this. In cultures fraught with fear and division, Smith calls for leaders who can effect change from the margins, promote unity and maturity among Christians, and provide a non-anxious presence grounded in the presence of Christ. Educators, church leaders, and those seeking to understand the times will find this book to be an indispensable resource for cultivating distinctively Christian leadership.
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WISDOM FROM BABYLON
LEADERSHIP for the CHURCH in a SECULAR AGE
for joella
Contents
INTRODUCTION
THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP FOR THE CHURCH requires the capacity to read the times—to have some understanding of the social, cultural, and economic context in which the church is located. And then, with this insight, it is necessary to cultivate the competencies and dispositions that will provide appropriate guidance for the church in that time and that place.
This means we need to think very intentionally about theological education and formation for leadership to assure that it is consistent with the times—that is, that we are thinking about the ways in which our approach to cultivating leadership equips women and men to lead effectively in the world in which we actually live, our circumstances as they present themselves, not as we might wish them to be.
If Bob Dylan is right and “the times they are a-changin’,” then it only follows that we ask: What has changed? What do these changes mean? And how do we respond appropriately and effectively? When it comes to the formation of leaders for the church, we must ask about the competencies needed for church leadership—not for a previous time, but for this time. And we must also ask about the spiritual dispositions that we need to cultivate if we are going to provide quality leadership in this particular context.
There are universals, of course. In all times and in all places, there are certain capacities that are inherent in what it means to provide pastoral leadership for the church. We can reflect on the life and mission of the church across cultures and recognize that leadership for the church in both Indonesia and Norway will require certain commitments and capacities, even though the cultural and social context may be very different. It is fruitful to read Martin Luther and Francis de Sales and realize that there are common themes for leadership for the church between the sixteenth, seventeenth, and twenty-first centuries. And yet we need to be particular to our times and to the social, cultural, political, and economic context in which the church is located. This means that we get beyond any nostalgia or wishful thinking. It means that we honestly and courageously engage the world into which we are called, seeking to ask: For this time and this place, what does it mean to provide effective leadership for the church? What are the competencies and dispositions that are needed?
We urgently need qualified, capable, and mature leadership. This does not happen overnight; it takes time, and there are no shortcuts. Speed is rarely a pedagogical virtue. The church in the secular West is facing a very challenging context. It will take time to nurture and cultivate the kind of leadership that can navigate those challenges. Many denominational bodies are facing a dearth of capable leaders for the church, both clergy and lay. Some speak of this as a crisis, and in response there is a propensity to find a quick solution. But nothing is gained, and much is lost, if we do not appreciate that our circumstances are rather complex and that this has significant implications for the formation of leadership.
What follows, then, is meant to provide input for denominational bodies and theological schools who are thinking about leadership formation. But we also need to recognize that, while leaders are taught and mentored and guided, emerging leaders also need to take personal responsibility for their own formation. They cannot be passive; they need to be intentional and self-directed. These emerging leaders will recognize where there are gaps, perhaps in their own formation or in the curriculum of the theological school in which they are enrolled, and they will find what they need wherever it can be found—in an online program from another school or through a short-term continuing education program or through a field experience. Thus what follows also provides a taxonomy for emerging leaders, asking them to consider: If these are the times in which we live, what are the capacities and dispositions that I need to be cultivating? Further, a congregation might ask a similar question. An elders board might work with the pastoral staff to ask if the cohort of pastoral and lay leaders has the requisite capacities and, if not, whether these will be found through training current staff or hiring someone who brings that capacity to the leadership team.
The primary focus of this book is the church in such places as North America, Australia, and New Zealand—those cultures and societies that are in the midst of the shift to a secular society (on the assumption that most of Europe has already made the shift). Much of what I offer here will no doubt be of value to the leadership for the church in other contexts and settings—from Hong Kong and Singapore to Latin America and Africa. But while there are indeed universals, church leaders in each social and cultural context need to ask, for their time and for their place, what it means to provide leadership in their context—even though, of course, we can and must learn from and with one another. In this case, I am asking: What does it mean to provide leadership for the church in an increasingly secular context?
1
SECULARITY
AN INTERDISCIPLINARY CONSIDERATION
I GREW UP IN LATIN AMERICA as the child of missionary parents. Every five years we would take a year back in Canada for what was then called “furlough,” a time to reconnect with supporting churches. That meant living for that year in Belleville, Ontario, near my grandmother. There we would attend the Alliance Tabernacle, my mother’s home church. Since then, that church building has been sold and the church community now worships in a newer facility on the outskirts of Belleville. The original building is now a mosque and Islamic center.
The university where I serve as president is located in Calgary, Alberta. If you take the light rail from the city center to our campus, the last building you see before you head underground is a mosque. And in Richmond, British Columbia, just south of Vancouver, you can drive along No. 5 Road and see an amazing sequence of buildings: a mosque, a Hindu temple, a Sikh temple, a Jewish learning and community center, a Buddhist temple, and a string of churches.
These are merely indicators that highlight the religious pluralism of Canada. Here Christianity is but one of many religions—perhaps the largest, but still only one of many. What does it mean to be Christian in this pluralist context? And what does leadership for the church look like in such a context?
In addition to religious pluralism, there is another dynamic at play: secularization. In many respects, the growth of a secular mindset is the most significant development of the last fifty to sixty years. Secularity does not mean no religion; it means rather that religion is privatized, no longer occupying a privileged voice in the public square. It is different from secularism—that is, the assumption in the public square that the default response to any issue or concern is a secular one, whether it be political, economic, or ethical. On the one hand, this means that the state does not endorse any one religious tradition or perspective. But it also means that secularity has become the arbiter of the public square, in effect negating the religious voice. We not only live in a time and place of religious pluralism in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and so many other societies (for the moment setting aside Central and Western Europe, who are much further along), but we are also increasingly secular.
Secularity is a highly complex issue, of course. But we need to get some kind of handle on it before we can consider the implications for theological education and leadership formation for the church, so that we are cultivating the kind of church leadership that is needed for this time and in this place.
In this chapter, we will begin to get a read on secularity using an interdisciplinary approach that looks at history, sociology, and philosophy. First, we will consider historical perspectives and how historians document and make sense of the “decline of the church” and the end of Christendom. Second, sociology provides the perspective of those who examine the social and cultural dynamics in which the church is now located. Then philosophers take us to another level, inviting us to look beneath the surface of these developments and giving an additional lens through which to understand our times.
HISTORY AND SECULARIZATION
In the West, notably in Western Europe and those nations whose original settlers came from Western Europe—New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States, for example—each nation was at some point largely Christian. In Europe, this meant a tight link between church and state. But even in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it was assumed that a Christian perspective and ethic shaped the national vision. Christians dominated the political stage, and it was taken for granted that Christian morality would be evident in the nation’s legal system.
Students of Christianity in the West consistently point to the 1960s as the significant turning point away from Christendom. While many of the signs of a growing secularization were evident as early as a century prior, this decade—including the late ’50s and early ’70s—was clearly significant. Callum G. Brown puts it this way: “For the historian of religious decline, there is no period of history as important as the 1960s.”1 He goes on to stress that previous levels of religious decline had been, as he put it, “non-simultaneous, appearing staggered between different nations,” but with the 1960s we see a collapse of religious culture as a whole.2 The contrast or shift in the 1960s was perhaps most dramatic in British culture and British institutions, and Brown makes the point that in the case of Britain at least the change was permanent. Trends were cemented. A century earlier there was an unquestioned consensus regarding what one should believe and how one should live and behave. Anyone who challenged or questioned this was viewed as marginal or even as deviant. By the end of the 1960s, it was almost the reverse: the default religious position became that of the agnostic, at best; religious convictions and perspectives were moved to the margins.
Historian Mark A. Noll is an astute observer of developments in Canada, which he compares to trends in the United States. He noted in 2006 that any semblance of a “Christian Canada” was gone; any reference to God in public documents was at most a concession to a historic legacy. Now the privileged principles that shape the public square are privacy, multiculturalism, tolerance, and public religious neutrality. Religious language was once standard; it is now absent.3 Church attendance has plummeted, particularly since the 1960s—a benchmark decade in the de-Christianization of Canada. Quebec, once deeply influenced by the church, is now dominated by what Noll calls “secular nationalism”; public symbols and rhetoric are no longer religious but instead represent “a vision of universal multicultural toleration.”4 Tensions between Catholic (Quebec) and Protestant (English Canada) that defined early Canada are now framed along political and economic lines5; any measure of Quebec separatism is now entirely a secular aspiration.6
What about the United States? Was it a Christian nation that is now increasingly secular? If the answer is “yes,” it is often assumed that it is on the same trajectory: Western Europe is secular and Canada increasingly so (though Quebec is remarkably similar to Europe on this score), and now it seems that the United States is also becoming secular such that Canada is at about the halfway point between Europe and the United States.
And yet there are differences. One important point of reference is that the original founders of the United States were unequivocal that theirs was not to be a Christian nation; they insisted on the separation of church and state, saying that no religious expression or entity would be privileged. The aspiration toward life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, was hardly a Christian vision—not explicitly so, at least. This was the language of John Locke and the Enlightenment.
And yet religious rhetoric has dominated the national identity and aspirations of the American people. Further, until the 1960s at least, most Americans would have said that their country was and is unequivocally Christian, such that only a person of Christian faith should be the president. It was also assumed that Christian institutions, Christian sacred holidays, and a Christian ethic should continue to guide the national consciousness. That is, there is a strange dual identity to the United States. On the one hand, there is the insistence from the beginning that it is secular, with the formal and even essential-to-American-sensibilities separation of church and state. And, on the other hand, there are voices that persist in calling America a Christian nation. For our purposes, we can ask the question: Is the secularity that was built into the DNA of the United States—the insistence that church and state are separate—becoming more and more evident in public life in the last fifty years? Even if the answer is yes, we still need to acknowledge that just as Europe and Canada are not monolithic, the same can without doubt be said of the United States: secularism would be more tolerated and affirmed, for example, in Oregon than Alabama.
To answer the question of whether secularity in the United States is increasing, Daniel Cox’s 2017 study “America’s Changing Religious Identity” is telling.7 He observes that those who are religiously unaffiliated —that is, those who self-identify as atheist, agnostic, or with no particular affiliation—represent one quarter of all Americans, three times what it was twenty-five years ago. This is predominantly so among younger Americans. The same study confirms what anyone following the news of American elections hears again and again: evangelical Christians—more specifically white evangelicals—consistently vote Republican. This voting pattern arises from a conviction that with the Republicans they have a greater chance of keeping America what they have always viewed it to be: a nation under God, evident in a particular moral orientation and with the continued prominence of Christian religious symbols in the public square.
But if the growth of the “nones”—that is, those with no particular religious affiliation—continues in the United States, secularity may well be a definite trend. If so, the United States will follow Western Europe and Canada. Despite government policies that limit Muslim immigrants, for example, this country will become increasingly secular, even if there are pockets—so called Bible belts—where a preponderance of Christians creates its own religious ecozone.
Thus while the establishment clause of the First Amendment is about the neutrality of the state regarding religion, it increasingly means that religion is to be kept out of the public square and that non-religion will be the privileged voice. In 2017, for example, a forty-foot cross in a Washington, DC, suburb was declared unconstitutional. It stands on public land and is a memorial to World War I veterans. The court ruled that “the cross unconstitutionally endorses Christianity and favors Christians.” In other words, however much it has been the experience of Americans that Christian faith—including the symbols of Christian faith—are given prominence in public spaces, courts in the United States are beginning to apply the establishment clause consistently.
What all of this means for the church in North America, and I am suggesting as well for New Zealand and Australia, is that the Christian voice will no longer be a privileged voice in the public square. We can no longer speak of these countries as “Christian” nations. The dynamics between the United States and Canada are of course different, and historians (including Brown and Noll) stress that there are significant differences. Those leading the church in Quebec are in a rather different cultural context than those who serve the church in Alabama. Yet in both places there is a reality that one and all need to recognize: the rise of secularity, particularly since the benchmark decade of the 1960s.
SOCIOLOGY AND SECULARIZATION
Sociologists who study the phenomenon of religion in the West—beginning with Central and Western Europe and then North America and Australia and New Zealand—consistently observe that religion is in decline in Western societies, and this decline is irreversible. If there are exceptions, they are at most only temporary or, perhaps, aberrations. Any religious affiliation is entirely through voluntary association. Religious influence in the public square is limited at best and, in time, will be nonexistent. Sociologists of religion, in short, observe that Western societies were once highly religious and specifically Christian. Now these societies are increasingly secular.
Joel Thiessen, Canadian sociologist of religion, references the work of Belgian sociologist Karel Dobbelaere, who focuses on Belgium as a kind of core example within Western Europe. Thiessen notes that for Dobbelaere there are three kinds of secularization: societal, organizational, and individual.8 This trend or development signals that “Christian influence over several other social institutions, such as education, health, or the family gradually diminished, and religion lost its taken-for-granted status in . . . public life.”9 Over time, religion is marginalized; it no longer informs the public square. Religious conviction and expression are no longer assumed or even recognized in schools, in the political arena, and in the judicial-legal system. Thus Thiessen notes: “[Peter] Berger and [Steve] Bruce argue that if religion plays a diminishing role in key social institutions it is only a matter of time before individuals look on the world through a lens that does not include much religion.”10
David Martin offers another perspective. He recognizes the general theory of secularization advanced by Bryan Wilson, Steven Bruce, and Karel Dobbelaere, but he also references such voices as Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge, who speak of the persistent presence and power of religion in societies. Secularity has marked Western Europe, and church participation has dropped off dramatically over a generation—he references France and Holland as primary examples. But Martin is not convinced that this pattern will be followed necessarily in Canada and the United States. He believes that what makes Europe different is that in Europe the church was intertwined with the structures of power. When all the cultural institutions were being challenged starting in the 1960s, the church was included in that challenge: “All the main institutions were subjected to criticism.”11 Rather than the model of secularization seen in Europe, instead Martin sees what we might speak of as the individualization of religion: religion becomes nothing more than a personal preference, and the religious communities that flourish are those that emphasize this more consumerist approach to faith.
And yet Martin gives examples of where religion does have a voice and even an influence in politics.12 In other words, he is not convinced that there is “a single [secularization] track to a common terminus.”13 Having said that, Martin does not doubt that there are substantial changes afoot. His points of comparison are intriguing; for example, he notes, “Throughout Western Europe the secularizing process has accelerated since the 1960s . . . even above all in the mainstream churches.”14But again he insists there is not a set pattern or trajectory; secularity looks very different in different contexts. Thus, for example, Martin contrasts Scandinavia and Britain, noting that while they are similar in terms of the level of religious practice, Scandinavia ranks low on practice but high on formal identification with the church. By contrast, Britain is low on “belonging” but a higher percentage of British people affirm that they believe. Thus, “Britons believe without belonging while Scandinavians belong without believing.”15 Then also, Martin acknowledges that in Catholic societies there is significant evidence that Catholic Christians recognize and affirm the pope and other religious leaders, but even when there is a strong Catholic identity such as in Poland and Ireland, this “does not imply recognition of ecclesiastical authority or a desire for its embodiment in secular law.”16
In other words, while secularization theory—the idea of an irreversible trajectory—can be challenged, secularity is still the cultural context for the church, even though it may look very different in different settings. The cultural and social dynamics of Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand have changed in fundamental ways. We live in a different world—with a different set of dispositions, defaults, and assumptions.
It is no surprise that this will not look the same in every context and setting. Further, it is important to stress that this does not mean that religious expression cannot flourish. It merely means that with secularization religious people cannot look to society for reinforcement of their personal religious identity and sensibilities. Religious expression can still flourish as long as the church and the individual are attentive to the changing social and cultural dynamic and then intentional in that response.
In light of all this, we need to ask: Is secularization a master narrative? That is, can we genuinely speak of it as a trend? If so, just as Britain and Europe are increasingly secular, it is just a matter of time before the same will happen in the United States, with perhaps New Zealand, Australia, and Canada further along on the secularization trajectory. If it is a master narrative, this does not mean religious expression has declined. There is not necessarily less religious experience; there might even be more religious activity. Rather, what is meant is this: secularity is now the default mode in the public square. Secularity speaks not so much of the decline of religion as that religious faith no longer has a privileged voice within a society. It is for this reality that we are being called to be the church and to provide leadership for the church.
We will look at this in more detail in the chapters to follow, considering the diverse ways in which the church and Christians have chosen to respond. But first we need to consider the response to secularization that comes from the discipline of philosophy.
PHILOSOPHY AND SECULARIZATION
There are many voices that consider the phenomenon of secularization through the lens of the ancient discipline of philosophy—asking about the meaning of life and doing the work of making sense of our lives and our situations while fostering our capacity for wisdom and understanding. I will mention two: the older Catholic Louis Dupré, professor emeritus at Yale University, and the younger Reformed Protestant James K. A. Smith, notably in his interactions with the philosopher Charles Taylor.
Dupré’s most cogent contribution to the conversation about secularization is his attention to the religious impulse that cannot be suppressed or sublimated. In his Transcendent Selfhood: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Inner Life, he insists that there is within each human person a longing for transcendence. He refers to the opening of Augustine’s Confessions and that great line, “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”17 Dupré insists that with secularization this sense of the transcendent is not lost; indeed, it cannot be lost because this impulse is too integral to human identity to ultimately be suppressed. However, it is obscured by what Dupré calls “the inward turn.”18 Religion becomes a private affair: “In a secularized society the religious person has nowhere to turn but inward.”19 He observes that “the center of human piety has moved from a shared and community oriented faith to a personal, expressive, indeed inward orientation where the self encounters its own transcendence. The modern believer sacralizes from within a world that no longer possesses a sacred voice of its own.”20 Thus he concludes:
While in the past nature, verbal revelation, and ecclesiastical institutions determined the inner experience, today it is mostly the inner experience which determines whether and to what extent outer symbols will be accepted. The religious person embraces only those doctrines which cast light upon his inner awareness, joins only those groups to which he feels moved from within, and performs only those acts which express his self-transcendence.21
Thus, if I am reading Dupré correctly, spirituality is not gone; there is no less of a religious impulse or longing. Rather, it has become personal-expressive: individual, internal, and subjective. Of course, the good news for those who care about religion is that there remains an affirmation of the interior life—the mystical dimension—the reality that the essence of religious experience is located in the interior human consciousness. A nominal or merely formal religious identity will be less and less likely to be the norm. People will as a rule only participate in religious activities if there is meaning for them in these activities. They will not be going through the motions or merely attending church as a cultural norm. Religious expression will be more authentic.
But there is also not-so-good news. This orientation toward the personal, subjective, and interior is not sustainable. We cannot in the end be spiritual without being religious. Authentic spirituality needs the sustaining power of a community with a shared faith, conviction, orientation, and accountability. Religious belief is inherently communal.
The other bit of not-so-good news is captured by a phrase from Gregory Baum in an essay on secular Quebec. In it, he speaks of “an unexpected secularization of personal consciousness.”22 This is where the magisterial work of Charles Taylor is so significant.23 In A Secular Age, Taylor speaks not so much of the decline of church attendance or the ways in which religious influence has waned in the West. Rather, what we learn is that secularity is a different consciousness. There is a secular way of being—of thinking, seeing, feeling, and acting. It is not merely that there is less religion, and not merely that now religion is marginal—that Christianity and the church no longer have a privileged voice. It is that secularity has become a way by which the world is seen and engaged.
I am going to engage Taylor through the lens of James K. A. Smith, notably through his How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. Smith has provided us with an accessible and insightful read of Taylor and effectively sets up our agenda here: to ask what it means to provide leadership for the church in a secular age. As Smith notes, Taylor recognizes the way in which the social, cultural, and religious landscape has changed, speaking of the massive shift from a world where the default assumption was some form of belief to the default assumption now of unbelief or the lack of belief.24 In this, Smith—building on and interpreting Taylor—seeks to highlight something that must be attended to. It is not so much that there is secularity “out there” as that we are all secular. That is, unwittingly we have drunk the water and breathed the air; rather than Christianity maintaining a presence in a secular society, secularity has infiltrated the church.
In this way of thinking, the Christian faith is being lived out in an essentially secular way. Yes, Taylor acknowledges that we live now in a pluralistic context and setting. And yes, the sociologists and the historians are right that secularity is now the default perspective within these societies. But what Taylor is saying is that this has also changed the way that the faith is being lived. And it is in this context that Smith, in response to Taylor, is asking the necessary questions: What does belief look like now? How is the faith communicated and taught? And, How does faith formation happen—for this generation?25
In the remainder of this section, I will highlight two things that emerge from Taylor and Smith. More could be said, but at the very least these two realities need to be identified.
Disenchantment. Taylor notes that we now live in a world that has lost a sense of transcendence. We live in a world of immanence; everything that counts and matters is what we see and feel and touch. Human flourishing is defined entirely in mundane terms.
Smith notes that this immanent frame “both boxes in and boxes out, encloses and focuses.” And for many, this frame is impenetrable.26 Some live in an entirely closed immanent frame—what Taylor calls “closed world structures.” We have changed from a social context in which the default was religious faith and identity to a social context where belief is the exception and not the norm. And yet Taylor and Smith—like Dupré—insist that we are haunted by transcendence; secularity and secularism cannot ultimately squelch the longing for more than mere materiality. For Taylor, the catalysts for this sense of transcendence are beauty, death, and moral obligation. These are simply inescapable in the human consciousness; there is within each person a longing for more, a longing for meaning and purpose. N. T. Wright speaks in similar fashion when he says even the most secular people have within them a longing for spirituality, a hunger for relationship, and a yearning for beauty.27
Two things must be noted in this regard. First, conversion is as much as anything about at some point being open to the possibility of transcendence. And second, those who do believe do not believe uncritically; they have chosen to believe in the face of negative odds. This means that Christian faith—indeed, all faith—has to now be intentional and thoughtful. The default mode in our societies is immanence, not transcendence; and thus those who believe are going against the grain.
In working against this disenchantment, we might consider the way that time is perceived and also reference the artists in our midst. It is a sign of secularity that we are inclined to view time in linear terms, as something that can be controlled and managed. In a secular universe, days have no particular meaning other than as “space” to get things done. As part of our Christian formation, we might ask how we communicate a sacred perspective on time. We also need to value the work of artists, especially poets. The genius of these poets is that faith is not reduced to mere morality. One cannot but recognize the extraordinary role that the poetry of George Herbert played in the conversion experience of Simone Weil, for example.28
If conversion and belief mean that we must first come to some measure of acceptance that there is indeed another sphere of reality, we must speak of “thin places” where the intersection between the two spheres of reality are remarkably close. Might it be that awareness of these spaces is more vital and essential and necessary that ever before?
The buffered self. Second, in speaking of a “secular age” we must refer to the mechanism for living or surviving in this context—what Taylor calls “the buffered self.” In this secular age we are no longer truly connected, either to others or to ourselves. If we are to have a sense of transcendence, we necessarily need to belong. We cannot know and embrace transcendence if we are isolated and insulated from the world around us. We need to find a faith that is grounded and expressed in community. We cannot hope to encounter transcendence if we are nothing but spiritual monads.29
But more, one of the deep marks of our age is that any spirituality that we might have is self-constructed: we create our own meaning and follow our own inspiration. Tolerance means that we let each one “affirm their own way.” This view of the world is summarized in the apt phrase “expressive individualism.”30 In this context, there is only one authority: the authority of one’s self as the ultimate arbiter of one’s life and existence. The challenge for the church is to locate authentic spirituality within an authoritative community that has the capacity to foster a true sense of meaning and transcendence.
CONCLUSION
Emerging leaders for the church in a culture and society that is increasingly secular should be reading historians, sociologists, and philosophers who have wrestled with secularization. In so doing, several questions will emerge: Can the church survive—and more, actually thrive—in this context? Can we speak of vibrant Christian communities in this time and place? Can we flourish as individual Christian believers? What does Christian witness look like, and what might this mean for the way in which we engage the practices of evangelism, Christian initiation, spiritual formation, and liturgy? What does Christian mission look and feel like in such a time? And, bottom line: What does leadership for the church look like? What are the key capacities and dispositions needed for leadership in the church for a secular age?
We ask these questions recognizing three dangers or temptations that we might face as a Christian community. The first is that with secularization, religion is privatized and becomes little more than a personal, subjective, and individual experience. One of the perhaps unintended consequences of the marginalization of religion is that people tend to approach religion in a consumerist manner, asking if it meets our felt needs and believing that what works for one person might be different than what works for another. Further, some sociologists have noted that with the secularization process, more subjective forms of Christian spirituality seem to actually thrive. By subjective, I mean an emphasis on interior experience—perhaps a very intense personal experience of the “Spirit” or the spiritual—at the expense of a spirituality of genuine engagement with the world. It is a spirituality that, ironically, actually reinforces the secular agenda by being personal and interior and subjective.
Alongside the danger of subjective escapism is the propensity to fight. When religion does go public in a secular age, it does so in an adversarial manner, eager to “win our country back.”31 The danger here is that the church is forced into a posture of constantly being at war with its social and cultural context. This adversarial posture also potentially becomes focused toward other religious groups. Those who are “antisecular” are, as often as not, praying that the “house of Islam” will fall, and thus equating the threat of secularism with the threat of Islam. In this, they fail to discern—and are indeed blind to—how the call to Christian witness has changed in an increasingly pluralist context.
Finally, we are in danger of not recognizing how secularity has become second nature to the society at large and thus so easily to the church as well. We do not realize how secular we have become in the patterns of our shared life, worship, and mission, and in the assumptions that shape what it means for us to be the church.
2
FOUR CONTEMPORARY RESPONSES TO SECULARITY, PART 1
BEFORE WE ADDRESS THE QUESTION of how we ought to think about what it means to be the church in a secular age, and what implications this might have for the way in which leadership is cultivated, it is helpful to observe that not all Christians respond to secularity in the same way. Naming the responses and identifying which actually make the most sense will help us to frame the question of leadership and the competencies needed for leadership in this context.
There has always been a diversity of responses to the social, cultural, political, and religious context in which the church has found itself. One of the most defining and seminal publications to demonstrate this was H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, published in 1951.1 Niebuhr argued that it is helpful to think in terms of five distinctive responses—each of which, he noted, had historical precedent.
For the first response, “Christ against Culture,” Niebuhr used the example of the early church father Tertullian, along with more contemporary perspectives like the Mennonites. These have postured their faith in terms of a rejection of human culture and systems. The emphasis is on discontinuity between the culture and the Christian faith. With the second, “Christ of Culture,” Niebuhr identified a contrasting perspective that emphasized continuity, rather than discontinuity, with the culture. Christ in this case fulfills the aspirations and longings of human society. This was Niebuhr’s observation regarding Protestant liberalism: all it did was confirm culture rather than challenge and truly redeem it. “Christ Above Culture” is the perspective that calls the church to be bilingual and “bi-cultural,” speaking to the need to be fully present to our society and culture but also have a distinctive religious or Christian identity. Niebuhr noted that the danger here is that the church would live in two bifurcated zones, never truly inhabiting either or seeing the points of deep connection between them. “Christ and Culture in Paradox” is a posture that emphasizes constant tension, even conflict, between culture and faith. And finally, “Christ the Transformer of Culture” has a vision of cultural redemption: that all aspects of human life, society, and culture could be infused with a Christian vision of human flourishing. This perspective assumes that the created order is good, and that thus culture and human society are redeemable.
Part of what made Niebuhr’s book so interesting was that for each of these views, he identified a church father or a Reformer or both who advocated for it. Though he clearly himself leaned toward the last view, he recognized that in certain times and seasons all five of these might have viability.
I want to suggest that in our own day there are four distinct responses to the phenomenon of secularity. These are not meant as a parallel to Niebuhr; rather, inspired or encouraged by Niebuhr, I want to describe how it appears that Christians, churches, and Christian institutions are choosing to respond to the rise of secularity.
The focus of this chapter, then, is describing these four responses to secularity. Each of the next four chapters will speak to a source of wisdom for how we might make sense of these four responses. Then in chapter 7 I will come back to these four responses and reconsider them in light of the insights that have emerged.
OPTION A: THE “GO ALONG TO GET ALONG” RESPONSE
In many respects, the most common response of Christians—particularly in North America—is to accept that they now live in a secular context and to live essentially a bifurcated way of life, occupying two ways of being that are kept separate. In the one, at home and within the context of Sunday worship and church activities, they are Christians. And Monday through Friday, they are essentially no different in their approach to life and work than their secular neighbors. The church essentially functions as a placeholder for religious sensibilities; it is a place to come away from the world and culture and be in a Christian zone. But the church itself has little if any orientation to the world.
Secular voices essentially demand this. They are willing to tolerate religion as long as it is kept private and out of the public square, and many Christians go along. Their religious identity or faith is private and thus siloed from their life and work outside of home and their church community. They choose to lie low, blend in, and accept that their Christian identity has at most a marginal impact on how they live their lives and how they engage their vocations in the world. Their approach to business, for example, would be no different from that of a non-Christian colleague or neighbor—meaning not that they are dishonest, but rather that civility and good approaches to doing business are as much about cultural norms as they are about faith informing their work.
When it comes to the culture around them, Christians with this approach accept that society is changing and choose to see this as “just the way things are.” They also are inclined to think that there is little or nothing to be gained by fighting secularism. Some may actually see it as better than what they view as the alternative—religious fundamentalism. They view their faith as very real, but it is best kept private and personal. They accept the secular assumption that religion is tolerated as long as it does not seek to have a voice in the public square. For an individual Christian, the message is simple: “You are free to be a Christian, of course; we have religious freedom in this country. But leave your religion at home when you go to school or work.”
