Church Issues: The Church as a Stool

Pastor and author Anthony Robinson, in his book, Transforming Congregational Culture, provides the church with a graphic illustration to help demonstrate the situation for the church in the United States. He uses the image of the church being the seat of a stool, which is held up by four legs. Forty years ago the stood up straight and strong, with the ability to hold up just about anybody. But for some reason today, the stool does not seem to be functioning in the way it once did. To understand what has changed we need to look at what each leg of the stool represents.

The first leg is represented by what churches do, worship, sacraments, Sunday school, board meetings, fellowship activities, weddings, funerals, baptisms, confirmations, holiday celebrations and the like. The traditions and rituals of the church represent the first leg of the stool.

The second leg represented how the U.S. government helped to hold up the church. This happened in many ways. First, all non-essential government functions were shut down on Saturdays and Sundays, which serve as the Jewish and Christian Sabbaths. Christian morals and values were infused throughout government agencies such as putting the ten commandments on buildings, placing, ‘In God we Trust’ on currency and in other places. The government also supported the church through allowing things like school readers to use bible stories to illustrate lessons and in referencing the bible through teaching aids such as A is for Adam and E is for Eve and S is for Sin. Prayer was allowed in schools and at sports event and no school sports practices or events could happen on Sundays. The government also supported churches by allowing them to be tax exempt as well as clergy to be tax exempt. There are many other ways in which the government supported the church.

The third leg is represented by the economy. Many know this support as the ‘blue book rules.’ Businesses were not open on Sundays. Factories and manufacturing plants were not in operation. All non-essential business was shut down on Sundays. Businesses also honored Christian holidays such as Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter. All production shut down by Saturday night and did not start up again until early Monday morning. Often times even city transportation was shut down for Sunday and resumed again on Monday morning.

The fourth leg is represented by civic society. The cultural teaching was that good Americans go to church. Participating in church was part of ones civic duty and made them a better person, hence a better American. Civic society all supported the church through media. Radio and TV stations began broadcasting with a prayer or a religious program. TV shows like Andy Griffith talked about church in episodes and even had entire episodes take place within a church. Church worship services were broadcast on the airwaves all across the nation on Sunday mornings. Church music was played on many radio stations before the invention of Rock N Roll music. Many churches were located at a prominent place in the center of each city’s down town. Elected officials were expected to be active members of prominent churches in the city the served.

Forty years ago all four of these legs were in place and were as strong as granite enabling them to hold up the church as a stool seat strong enough to support the weight of the world, or so we thought at the time. What has happened gradually over the past forty years is that three of the four legs have been removed as a support for the church. Government has significantly reduced its support, especially through the church’s influence on public education. The economy has dramatically changed in relation to the church by now having business operate seven days a week. Stores for shopping are now open on Sundays. Many services are now available on Sundays. Most businesses still honor Christmas and Easter, as holidays but no longer Good Friday and some businesses stay open even on these holidays such as gas stations, mini-marts, movie theatres, and even some grocery stores. Civil society has also abandoned the church by portraying Christians in the media as irrational, no longer talking about church at all in TV shows or on the radio. Civic society has said it is good for a politician to be religious but that it is a private matter so we shouldn’t know about it as the public. The church is used as a caricature to make fun of in movies and in television. Comedians use the church as a tool for mockery and athletes are lifted up for thanking God for their achievements and then shown to have lifestyles that conflicted with their thankfulness to God.

In short, what has happened over the past forty years is that three of the four legs are no longer adequately holding up the church and we as the church keep using our one leg as if it can hold up the whole stool. Sometimes we can even double are efforts at trying to make our one leg work for us, but alas we are starting to realize that one leg is not enough to hold up the stool. And trying to take back control of government with either a liberal Christian perspective or a conservative Christian perspective is not going to realistically happen any time soon. Nor are we going to get the economy to stop work on Sundays or civic society to only look at the church positively.

Another way to think about this is that all for legs recruited for the church and now only one of the legs is recruiting and we can see the aging of our churches and the drop in numbers in our church membership. We haven’t changed to pick up the recruiting slack left by the remove of the three legs from supporting the church. This too, then is a move out of Egypt into the wilderness.

Church Issues: Modernity and the Emerging Post-Modern Critique

Historian Phyllis Tickle in her book, “The Great Emergence,” illustrates by looking backward over thirty-five hundred years that there is pattern to human history. The pattern is that every five hundred years humanity goes through a transformation that changes who we are as people and how we function within the world. This transformation changes everything down to the core of being including all of our cultures. The last great transformation happened about five hundred years ago with the emergence of the renaissance movement in the west. Within the church the reformation was a parallel transformation that was taking place.

These transformations take about one to two hundred years to fully develop and then usually last about another three hundred years with the seeds of the new transformation showing up near the end of the three hundred or so stable years. Tickle mentions each major transformation in the west that has happened every five hundred years to illustrate this pattern and to provide a lens for our current situation. What she argues is that we moved from the renaissance into what historians call the modern world and have been in the modern world for about three hundred years and are starting to see the seeds of transformation emerging. What this means is that we are moving into a period of massive change that will reshape how we understand ourselves as humans and all of our cultures that we live within.

When these great transformations come, they arrive over a very long period of time in a barely noticeable fashion. What happens is we start to notice that things are changing and some things just aren’t right but we don’t know what is up. As more change begins to happen our anxiety rises and we begin to react to things around us without really knowing why. At a cultural level what happens is that the extreme right and the extreme left of a culture rise to the forefront and begin a yelling match at each other that then leads to a power struggle to take control with each side believing if they had control they could fix everything and make the un-named anxiety that everyone is feeling go away. At the same time a ground swell of silent people amaze directionless in the middle of culture swirling and growing until a final tipping point happens and everything changes.

Within the church what happens is four groups emerge to try and fix things forming a sort of quadrilateral. The first group is the “Liturgicals” who use the sacraments and liturgy as a means to save the changing church. The second group that emerges is the “Social Justice” group, which believes if we act in the right way on the right issues then people will see and respond and they will save the church. The third group to arise is the “Conservatives” who believe that if people would maintain biblical morality and a high moral standard that this would save the church. Finally the fourth group that emerges is the “Renewalists” who believe that the spirit of God will bring about the change through the charismatic and Pentecostal movements within the church. All four groups believe that they can help save the church if Christians would simply move in the directions that are trying to lead.

What Tickle is trying to tell us is that western humanity is one of these five hundred year major transformations. As a result, the church is also in a major transformation and if we think about the signs mentioned we know this to be true. What we would like to do for you to help you understand some of these changes taking place around us is to name a few of the ideas that became pillars for the modern world that we currently live in and how some of these pillars are no longer working as we move into what is being called the postmodern world. [Post-modern means things are changing but we don’t yet know what into.]

Here are five pillars that have been very important to the modern world for the last three hundred years or so.

Pillar #1: Reason is Superior to Faith

[We elevated reason to the utmost importance in how we functioned as a people. We believe that with the right tools, our minds, our senses, and our use of science, we should be able to eventually figure out how the world works and make sense of it in a way that does not really require faith. This works because we believe the world is knowable, and because we believe that there are unquestionable foundations that it is built on, and because we believe that the world functions like a machine. (God’s role, for the most part, gets relegated to the builder of the world and not much more.)]

Pillar #2: Science will lead to Morality

[We began to believe that if the whole universe is like a big machine, then at some point we would be able to make complete sense out of it. This being the case, at some point we should be able to map out what is write or wrong in a definitive matter once science and reason helps us to understand enough of how the world works. It is a belief in the universe being ordered and that order being able to reveal itself in terms that can be used to map out what is morally right or wrong.]

Pillar #3: Progress is Inevitable

[As we get smarter, people will see that the world is becoming a better place because we will be gaining more and more control over the world around us, over nature, and at some point we will be able to control the weather, time, and life itself giving us the power to live as long as we want. Hence the human genome project which is mapping out the human DNA. Once mapped out, it is believe that we will be able to eliminate disease and improve our bodies in whatever way we would like.

Pillar #4: Knowledge is Inherently Good

[All knowledge is good because it helps us to gain control over the universe. All knowledge is good because it is neutral. All knowledge is good because it can be used to benefit humanity. Knowledge gives us a sense of certainty for everything. We will prevail because we are smart enough to eventually figure everything out. So even if we use genetically modified food, which could eventually lead to genetically modified insects, we will eventually be able to find a new gene to fix the new insect problem.]

Pillar #5: The Individual is the Center of the Universe

[Up until the renaissance the western world believed that God was the center of the universe. God created everything and made everything happen. A philosopher named Descartes came along fascinated by reason, science, and began asking what do we know and what can’t we doubt? He concluded that, “I think, therefore I am,” as the starting point to what we know for sure. Descartes’ idea turned the western world upside down beginning the ascent of the individual over all other social roles.

These five pillars are not all of the pillars for the modern world but some of the most important ones. The emerging critique that is tentatively being called the postmodern world shows the limits to these pillars and brings into question what they can actually do for us.

Here are some of the ways that the emerging postmodern thinkers have begun to look at the five modern pillars and critique them.

Pillar #1: Reason

Postmodern thinkers have realized that reason is built upon language and culture which are both constructs and unable to full describe or explain all of reality that we experience in our lives through our senses. This means that reason its is as limited or even more limited than language. If language cannot fully describe all that is experience at the birth of ones first child then how can reason, which is dependent upon language do more? Postmodern thinkers realize that there is a lot more to life than reason and are especially skeptical when someone uses reason to assert certainty. The greatest myth of modern reason is that we are told that reason is objective and neutral.

Pillar #2: Science

Postmodern thinkers have realized that what science can do for us is paint a picture of reality based on a starting perspective and given methodology. Scientists have begun to realize that the world is not mechanistic but rather far more dynamic and alive; and that the laws of the universe are not as absolute as once thought. Postmodern thinkers are not opposed to science at all, only to science that claims certainty or truth rather than telling a story based upon a named perspective. Science, when it tries to legitimate itself uses reason; reason is built upon language and language must always be interpreted. This means that science does not come from a perspective of objectivity or neutrality.

Pillar #3: Progress

Postmodern thinkers look at the twentieth century as the century of death where humanity killed more people than all of recorded history combined. This brings into question the progress of humanity. Within this context the holocaust and many genocides’ raise even more questions about our progress as human beings.

Pillar #4: Knowledge

As postmodern thinkers have come to realize that there is no such thing as being objective and neutral the any view of knowledge as good or bad or neither has been dismissed. Knowledge is power and the digital age is remapping and enforcing this understanding of knowledge. The most important thing for a business is now information when fifty to a hundred years ago it was capital. If you know what people want and how to give them what they want you will have power.

Pillar #5: Individual

Postmodern thinkers are realizing that no one exists as an individual. Our language, ideas, and frameworks of thought, are all connected to the culture we live in and the people we interact with; as well as the physical world around us. As a result postmodern thinkers are looking for connection between people and the world around them and seeing the world as a complex set of systems with sub-system all interdependent. Postmodern thinkers are starting to see the need for conceiving of humanity as only existing with community.

Church Issues: Cultural Value Systems

Cultural Value Systems

A cultural value system is a set of beliefs that are reflexive to people so that when they act them out they do it without realizing that is what they do. It seems the natural way to think, the natural thing to do. [An example would be this: you are invited as a guest to someone’s house for dinner. They fill your plate with food, more than you need to eat. Do you eat everything on your plate or only the amount to satisfy your hunger? How you answer this reflects a value system that is a reflexive part of your person.]

Within our current US culture there are many value systems at play. Gil Rendle, in his Alban Institute book, The Multigenerational Congregation, maps out two of these value systems that are currently struggling to coexist within the church. One could argue that these two value systems, in many ways, are at war within our culture and at war within our churches. But Rendle is quick to point out that it is a mistake to think of the conflict as generational differences rather than as a value system clash. What he has learned is that there is more than one generation living out each of these value systems. What is important is to help you see the value systems and not to lay judgments as to whether one is better than the other. The reality is that they both exist and as the church we need to deal with both.

The first value system we will call the G.I. (General Issue) Value system. This system is primarily represented by the two oldest generations existing in our culture today, the G.I. generation and the Booster generation. The events that shaped this value system are the depression and World War II.

There are five basic traits that represent this value system. The first is that this value system values the Group and Sameness above everything else. [What is best for the group is best for the individual. Example: In the 1940s everyone had the black box phone. If you needed a second phone what did you get? Another black box phone. Why? Because what is good for the group is good for the individual. Did we have the ability to offer different colored phones back then? Yes. But that wouldn’t be best for the group.

The second trait of this value system is that of faith. Ones religion was tied to a Space, whether the church building or the sanctuary, it was tied to a physical space. One could act one way in the parking lot but once they stepped into the building (sacred space) they changed what they did or said.

The third trait is Differed Pleasure. You do not buy anything unless you have the money to pay for it in its entirety. Cash only, no credit. This was the lesson of both the depression and WWII.

The fourth trait is Goal Orientation. This value system believed in setting goals by discerning the problem that needs fixing, finding out who is on your side, then act out a plan to fix the problem, and finally not stopping until the goal is reached. Social security and retirement were the inventions of the group to try and take care of everyone in the society. We saw the problem, too many young people without jobs and too many old people with no money to retire. So we rallied and created a system to solve this problem.

The final trait of this value system is that of Membership. Membership in the right group or groups is of the utmost importance. One needs to belong to the right club in the right location, attend the right church in the right part of the city. What mattered was who belonged to the group. This also included the neighborhood you lived in as well as the job one worked at as a profession.

The second value system is called the Consumer Value System. The system developed between 1947-50 and arose out of the affluence of our economic development that took place during WWII and shortly there after. This system also has five main traits that define how it functions.

The first trait is a focus on the Individual and Difference. What is best for the individual is what is best for the group. How you are unique is what should be celebrated by our society and not how you fit into our society. [When you go into a coffee shop, how many flavors of coffee do you have? Many. Why? Because difference and individual choice is more important than sameness or the group.]

The second trait is how faith or religion is looked upon. For this value system, faith is a Journey. God can be found in many places and in many different ways. This makes the sanctuary or church building more of a tool to be used and adapted than a place to find God. [It is okay for the children to have fun in the sanctuary because God is a loving friendly God.]

The third trait is that of Immediate Pleasure. There is always more money and everything we buy devalues in worth so buy now and pay later. Use credit and mange your debt. Life is short and precious and one can die at any time so don’t waist the opportunity to live now and risk not living at all.

The fourth value is Personal Goal Orientation. It is not about the group or who is in it with you but about what you need to do for yourself to fulfill your own needs. This system focuses on the motto, ‘whatever works for you go with it.’ This also includes the idea that we should not force what works for us on anyone else.

The final value is Participation. This system does not care about membership but rather participation. Your active involvement is more important than your belonging. An example of this would be Elm Brook Church in the Milwaukee area. The church has less than three thousand members yet they worship between six and seven thousand people per weekend with a pastoral staff of twenty-one ministers. The church does not focus on membership but rather participation.

Neither of these systems was created in a vacuum. They arose out of the life lessons that were learned by each generation as they grew up. Both of these systems exist within most churches and unfortunately what happens is the people from each system try and control the church with their values and exclude the other values instead of learning to dialogue about each and finding a new way to be church that moves beyond the tension between the two value systems.

Ways to illustrate the tension between the two value systems: GI values: Children are expected to act like adults in worship. Children cannot vote until they are confirmed. Children cannot partake of communion until they are confirmed.

Consumer values: children should be children in the sanctuary, which includes during worship. Children should at least have voice if not vote in the church. Children should be able to participate in communion when ready.

GI values: Serving on boards and participating in circles and prayer groups is the best way to be involved in a church.

Consumer values: work groups rather than boards, and support groups and service projects are the best way to be involved in a church.

[A quick reference] Value Systems Lens

G.I. Value System Consumer Value System

Group/Sameness Individual/Difference

Space Journey

Differed Pleasure Immediate Pleasure

Goal Oriented Personal Goal Oriented

Membership Participation

A generational guide (sociologist are not in clear agreement on this)

GI generation people born from 1908 to 1926

Buster generation people born from 1927 to 1945

Boomer generation people born from 1946 to 1964

Gen X generation people born from 1965 to 1983

Gen Y or Millennial generation people born from 1984 to 2002

A bonus value system lens

There may be a third value system lens that the church will need to think about seriously, specially in terms of outreach and service to the world around us. This is not a well-developed lens but still may be very fruitful in understanding. This third value system I am calling the Multiplicity value system. It is birthed out of the reality of cyber space and the possibilities that this has opened up for humanity.

The first value is an Accentuated Individuality. This is about not only celebrating our individuality but marking it in unquestionable ways such as with body piercings and permanent art via tattoos all over our bodies. It is a move from being an individual to a self defined unique individual.

The second value is seeing our spirituality as a Way of Life. Our spirituality is a part of how we live every aspect of our live and not something that just happens at church. For most, church is probably not the place to go to learn about being spiritual. If you want to help out people in need then do so and you can save a lot of political headaches by not helping through the church but rather by volunteering at a local community program.

The third value is Sustained Pleasure. This is about creating a life style that give one pleasure all the time. In other words, pick a job that you enjoy at a lesser pay than working a job for the money. It is about doing what you do out of enjoyment and not out of necessity.

The fourth value is Segmented Goals. Because of the internet people can seek pleasures in many different ways and are segmenting their lives as a result. People can now have goals for themselves that exist within completely unrelated spheres of their lives. And if the goal from one sphere contradicts the goal in another sphere of their life, they simply live with the contradiction.

The final value is that of Virtual Reality. Cyber space is seen to be just as real as every day life. You can have and interact with friends all over the world through cyber space. You can shop for everything and more at Target or Walmart without every leaving your home. You can participate in chat rooms and social networks and on line games in ways that break down the modern divide between the body and spirit. Virtual Reality is expanding our reality beyond what our five senses told us was real or possible.

In general, this value system does not really see the need for the church. Those from this system may not have grown up in the church. When they do attend, they are usually made unwelcome by their appearance or by their fluidity in realities that are too foreign to most current mainline church members. Remember, this third lens is very theoretical and may not reflect an emerging value system without our US culture.

Church Issues

The Christian church is facing many struggles within the US culture today. As a minister I believe that in naming the issues, the church can better see what is happening and begin to discern pathways that God is opening to allow the church to move in new directions. Over the years through my own studying of many authors and attending many workshops have developed a group of lenses that I use to try and better understand our current culture. I am going to post some of these lenses under what I call what I call "Church Issues." Each lens I post I have developed borrowing from many people and used in various workshops and small group setting with the greater Church. The lenses are my interpretation of all the research I have put into understanding facets of our contemporary culture.

I am going to start with three lenses the firsts of which I will call, "Church Issues: Cultural Value Systems" which borrows heavily from Gil Rendle at the Alban Institute. In this I present three value systems. The first too are borrowed and modified from Rendle's work. The third is my own theoretical thinking on what may be emerging within our culture.

The second lens will be, "Church Issues: Modernity and the Emerging Post-modern Critique." This lens is borrowing from many authors and is a result of studying the post-modern critique over the past ten years plus in my ministry.

The third lens will be, "Church Issues: The Church as a Stool." This lens describes what has happened to the church over the past forty to fifty years. This lens is based heavily on the work of Anthony Robinson and describes how the church was propped up by four legs and now only one remains and the church keeps acting as if all four legs are still in place.

There will be more lenses added once I get them into a usable format.