If you’re new to my newsletter, you can read a bit more about me, the work I do, and why I write here.
Also if you’d like to read my sermon from this morning you can do so here. I wrote the whole thing over coffee this morning so excuse any typos or grammatical errors. Also excuse me if it’s not good.
“Thinking about whether or not something will work out is not always a reasonable substitute for trying to work it out.” - Agnes Callard
Earlier this week I read Kieran Dahl’s “The Brand is Belief.” It’s a profile of C3 NYC, a branch of a global Pentecostal network of churches. C3 is a Cool Church. You know what I mean by Cool Church. They meet in a concert venue. The pastor wears fashionable clothes and reads his sermon notes (never manuscript) from an iPad. There’s laser lights and rock guitars that play poppy worship music. They talk a lot authenticity, vulnerability, and restoration. All of this obscures C3’s more conservative theological convictions regarding the goods of sexuality and marriage. I thought Dahl did a good job showing that though it’s easy to focus on the pastors of these churches and portray the church as a personality cult, the reality is that these instagrammable, Jesus-flavored communities are typically about more than just the pastor and his shoes. You get that there’s also a sense of belonging amidst loneliness that they cultivate well even if you disagree with the ends towards which they cultivate it.
I saw several people tweet that they’re tired of these kinds of “I was surprised at how these Christians try to be cool!” profiles. We all know Cool Churches exist and that they’re basically all the same.
But this speaks to a larger issue. At this point it feels like there’s basically only two or three kinds of (Protestant) churches right now. And what’s funny is that in the particular they all talk about themselves as creative, innovative, and on the cutting edge of ministry. I should add I see these paradigms most clearly in white Protestant churches and don’t know nearly enough about minority churches to know the points of similarity or difference I imagine theres a good bit of both.
The first one is the Cool Church I wrote about earlier. In addition to the attractive pastor, the instagram content, and the laser lights, these usually have small groups and complain about religion that’s too exclusive in spite of the fact that, as Dahl points out, a lot of them have pretty conservative theology when you dig down on the beliefs section of their websites. They also have a capitalist-corporate style of institutional structure: the pastor as CEO with some board of elders to oversee things and then a bunch. They almost always feel like being inside of a hip coffee shop inside of a West Elm.
The other is what I call (with some help via twitter) “Updated Mainline.” Updated Mainline churches are older and established within larger denominations, but they’re trying to get younger. They’ve hired younger ministers that do things like host theology discussions in breweries and are generally the kind of people you’d like to hang out with. The ministers still wear robes. The churches still have a choir and some type of more formal liturgy in their worship, but they also have someone on staff that can post on instagram and a great program for kids and families. Institutionally, they still have some board of elders made up of a rotating group of church members and teams and committees run by congregants that the church nominates and elects. Theologically they might be conservative to liberal-progressive, they usually brag about being a church for everyone, that welcomes differences of opinion and honest dialogue.
Now I know that’s not every church, but it is a lot of them. And I’m trying to figure out not just why every church feels the same, but why every church feels the same even as they tout themselves as innovative and creative.
I was reading Eric Hayot’s 2014 address to the ACLA this week. In it, he wonders why every literature department as an institution seem the exact same. Why is every PhD program the same length? Why is the hiring process at every school the exact same?
Hayot says that the job of institutions is to keep “from the realm of consciousness the immense diversity of the possible.” By keeping us from having to think about everything that’s possible, institutions “allow one to concentrate on a small enough set of mental data to begin the process of acting or thinking.” A finance committee oversees the funds so that not everyone in the church has to deal with the money. Someone watches the front desk and folds the week’s bulletin so a pastor can go out and visit congregants. But because they limit the possible for the sake of freedom, without some sort of self-reflection, institutions and those of us in them can get stuck in auto-pilot.
Here’s a good example of the problem from Hayot’s perspective. He claims that if you looked at the work produced in his discipline, you’d pretty quickly come to the conclusion that he and his colleagues cannot produce a 50 page idea. They communicate all their ideas in either 10-15 page journal articles or 150 page books. But ideas don’t just come in 15 and 150 pages. Sometimes someone has a 38 page idea. What about the institutions that make up the discipline of comparative literature limits the possibility of 38 page ideas? Why have they just accepted the limits of journals and the books as the only way to do things?
It feels the same with churches, right? If you looked at all the churches in America you’d assume that pastors learn that they can only preach two or three types of sermons: The feel good part pep rally, part TED Talk that’s read off an iPad at the Cool Churches, a lengthy verse-by-verse sermon, and one where the pastor reads a manuscript, essay-type sermon that includes a cute story about their kids, a folksy story drawn from literature or a movie, at least one mention of how the original languages in the Bible illuminate what it really means, and one nod to the previous week’s latest happenings to come across the news feed.
I do not mind these different styles of preaching and I don’t think that they make necessarily bad sermons. I also know that these styles might only that apply in their specificity to white churches and I know those churches best. My own sermons may not be the most unique. I just want to know why, at a time when every church innovates and creates in totally unique ways, we’ve only got a couple types of sermons and they all sound the same?
Here’s another example. Every Updated Mainline church that I know of has spent sometime in the last 2-4 years updating what they do for “missions.” Twenty-five years ago they used to go on church-wide mission trips either abroad or domestic that centered mostly on evangelism to non-Christians. About ten years ago they dropped much of the emphasis on evangelism and international travel and focused more on church-wide, church organized mission projects in their local community. The last year or two they made the move to work with “partner agencies” and now just funnel volunteers their way, support them financially, and have some sort of missions highlight once per month to talk about the work they do. Both Cool Churches and Updated Mainlines do “missions” this way now, and they’re all the same everywhere.
Now maybe you just read that and you go “Hey, that’s what my church did! I’m really proud of our innovation and change!” I’m not saying you did anything wrong. I’m just saying you didn’t do anything terribly unique. You did what every church did, and if your church is so very innovative, why did you do what everyone else has?
Every church somehow manages to innovate to exactly the same point.
I’m also not saying that we should just tear these churches down. I’m sometimes accused of a strong anti-institution-as-such attitude. But I don’t oppose institutions-as-such. I just wonder why we have to settle for basically two or three forms of church instead of four or five. Same with innovation and change. To quote Mark Fisher, “I don’t intrinsically object to change. I just object to the fact that everybody’s change is shit.”
So now you might think, “Okay so what do you have in mind? What would this look like in a church that actually wanted to innovate and create some new institutional forms?”
As some of you know, I work as a co-pastor at a church that decided to re-plant in the fall as Jubilee Baptist. Read more about it here. We have a lot to figure out about what we will do but the way I have described what we will do as worship, eat together, struggle for justice (with a particular focus on workplace organizing), and pay off people’s debts. I want to shoot for paying off about $35k in the next year.
As I’ve told people about our plans they almost always reply that they think I have a good idea, and after a beat ask some or all of the following:
“So how will you do that?”
“Will you pay the debts of members or non-members?”
“How will you fundraise for it?”
“Will you offer financial counseling of some kind?”
“Who do you get to oversee the funds?”
“Will you pay off my debt?”
I think these people ask institutional questions. How do we plan to institutionalize this?
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed thinking through this, and I’m currently working with some church members and friends to look at what it’ll look like. What I’ve enjoyed most is the way that creating a new institution within an old one requires thinking through how we relate to one another especially when you’re dealing with money because being open about the fact that you have debt carries a lot of shame. We’ll have to find ways to institutionally and routinely break that shame, but also to just normalize the fact that just about everyone has debt and that debt drags a lot of us down and we can only get out if we work together with the powers provided by some sort of institutional auto-pilot.
We’ll have to form a team or committee to oversee the thing. They’ll have to not only plan it out, cut checks, and fundraise but also determine what it means for us as a church to live with one another in a way that we regularly liberate people from the bondage of debt. We’ll have forms and timelines and fundraising strategies but we’ll also have to work out how to love one another differently because we’ll love one another in and through a different type of institution.
Right now I keep asking myself, “How do we make liberation from debt the new altitude we fly at and then put the auto-pilot back on?”
Ultimately I think these people’s questions come up because we have gotten so used to having the auto-pilot on in our institutions and not at all accustomed to possessing the authority to take it off in a way that fundamentally changes the institutions of which we’re a part. That’s my experience at least.
So why do all these churches innovate their way to the same place? Why do they all feel the same right now?
I would say you get this cycle where people just don’t want to turn off the auto-pilot because it takes a lot of hard work to change institutions and a lot of people think that just changing the temperature in the cabin counts as truly innovative change. Every pastor has to imagine the future of their church and think about whether or not a proposed change will work out. They have to consider whether people will leave, money will dry up, or they’ll just get fired. And for a lot of us, we don’t have the time or energy to do that so we leave the auto-pilot on and don’t even think about how to work a new thing out let alone try it. At times with other churches when I’ve pitched the project of debt payment the fact that it’d take a lot of effort to work out the institutional part means people just give up or put it off until we’ve thought about it more. Taking off the auto-pilot means taking the plane in a new direction and a new altitude and that takes a lot of skill and time and energy.
At this point I’ll wrap up by saying this. I don’t know what will happen when we start paying off people’s debts. I don’t know how we’ll institutionalize it. Maybe pick names out of a hat. Maybe a cohort of six to twelve people over a period of time. I really don’t know. But either way we will take the auto-pilot off for a bit, chart a new course, and see where how it goes. I find that absolutely thrilling because I think we can do things differently. I’m not positive that a lot of churches don’t have their auto-pilot calibrated straight for the side of a mountain. I’m not convinced that just two or three types of churches all doing the same thing cover what people need right now.
I’ve spent years thinking about how all this will work out. Now it’s time for us to try.
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Things I read this week that I liked:
The Brand Is Belief on Cool Church C3
What I’ve Learned From Collecting Stories of People Whose Loved Ones Were Transformed by Fox News felt incredibly pertinent for pastors trying to figure out what’s gone on with some of their more conservative congregants
Already Great helped me figure out why Parks and Rec is so hard to watch now but also why its politics are a dead end