Christianity in North America

For 2006: The Church’s Brave New Brain—Part 2

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In the previous segment of this mini-series, we left off with the Church grappling with the transition from the Information Age (and its emphasis on data and logic) to the Conceptual Age (with its emphasis on design and empathy.) The fundamental switch here aligns with the move from left-brained to right-brained thinking.

Where the Church gets steamrolled in this transition is that it's been stuck in the tar of left-brained mode for a couple hundred years. When the Enlightenment made it all about what we thought rather than did, the Western Church bought into living totally out of its left hemisphere. The result has been an entire group of people within society disenfranchised by the one group tasked with disenfranchising no one.

If we were honest with ourselves, we Christians of 2006 should question where all our creative types vanished to. How many Christians do we know who make their entire living as full-time artists, novelists, musicians, and actors? Compare that with how many Christians we know who are middle managers, accountants, engineers, or computer IT gurus.

Two hundred years ago, Christians not only created the art, they supported it. I would dare say that the vast majority of art in Christian households today is not only NOT created by Christians, it's barely passable as art. Our slide to the left brain over the right created a dearth of Christian artists and their lack left us stuck with whatever was most easily mass-marketed. The result? Today's Christians are too often the people responsible for much of the kitschy garbage passed off as "art" that we see today. A gut-check is needed here. Compare what hangs on the wall of your local museum with that of your local Christian bookstore. I don't think I'm stretching when I say the artistic output of today's Evangelicalism might represent the nadir of artistic expression in all of Christian history.

Kinkade keeps on truckin'!

{Click on image to appreciate the full-sized horror of it all (pops)}

If we don't like the art that artists make today, we have our lack of patronage to blame for this, in part. Christian artists found the rising anti-art backlash in the Church meant that they could no longer afford to make a living as artists creating art solely for Christian crowds. As a result, Christian artists were stuck between putting food on the table selling art that appealed to secular crowds or starving to death trying to sell to an increasingly fickle Christian audience. Yes, many of them gave in to the prevailing nonsense that passes itself off as contemporary art today, but in the end we didn't support them and they had to eat. (Not trying to make excuses, just trying to point out reality.)

You know why the artist is different? Simple: he sees the world through a different part of his brain. Where the Church in America absolutely fumbled the Gospel here is that we automatically equated his different way of thinking with error. Not only that, but we painted (ugh!) the artist and all his friends as the very thing that is wrong with the world today. Strangely enough, he was thinking the same thing about us.

Now, as we enter 2006, we have an impasse. We decided we liked our churches stripped of anything that resembles art, good or otherwise. (I don't mean to pick on the Baptists here, but could there be anything more soul-anesthetizing than the architecture and interior decoration of your typical Baptist church of the last thirty years? Honestly, why can't our congregations inspire artists in their midst to create beautiful church art to offer up to God the artistic gifts He bestowed on those folks? It seems every kind of service is appreciated in our churches except the artistic.) The message to the artist was clear: your paintbrush is the devil's instrument.

Think what our churches would be like if we thought that everyone involved in the computer industry was creating the Beast's pathway. What if the engineers were building the antichrist's throneroom? And the accountants were only presiding over the one world money system and that infamous mark? Do you think that any of those left-brainers would hang around our congregations? Yet, in many cases, this is what happened to the right-brainers.

But guess what, left-brained Christians? Artists are the new power class in the Conceptual Age. You know, the bohemian with the soul patch. And guess what again? We drove his kind out of our churches with our total emphasis on left-brained thinking and our complete inability to appreciate what his right hemisphere (and his musical, empathic, theatrical, artist's bent) brought to our congregations.

But now that empathic artist is the one in charge. Left-brained Christians are gnashing their teeth over this. I see it every day. And the gnashing is only going to increase unless left-brained and right-brained Christians bury the hatchet—and not in each other. God created both left-brained and right-brained thinkers; it's about time the Church honored both.

In the next installment of this mini-series, we'll see how the Church needs to adapt to this cultural change and what it means for how we do ministry in 2006 and beyond.

Stay tuned!

For 2006: The Church’s Brave New Brain—Part 1

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This final post of 2005 begins a short series that examines what I believe to be a pressing issue that is flying under the radar of the American Church. If we do not address it humbly and prayerfully in the coming year, I believe we American Christians will preside over a Church (and societal) implosion of our own making.

The thought that I cannot escape is about just that: thought. Our brains consist of two hemispheres, each with a God-imparted function. The left hemisphere handles language and logic, the right, narrative and art. The left excels in processing the batting averages of the 1927 Yankees and understanding that pigs can't fly, while the right finds wisdom and beauty in a poem or painting.

If Christianity in 2005 can be examined in any light, I would offer that the battles we are now seeing for the heart, mind, and soul of our Faith are those of the right and left hemispheres.

Some reading this will view what I have to say as nothing more than the ongoing tussle between modernism and postmodernism, or the Enlightenment and the post-Enlightenment. On some levels, this would be true. However, I do not believe it is necessary outcome that one or the other of those labeled sides should win, but that God's mind about our minds holds the key to where His will for us as a Church dwells.

Talk to anyone who studies trends and you'll hear them proclaiming that we are moving from the Information Age into the Conceptual Age. Where the Information Age's hallmark is the processing of data, the sine qua non of the Conceptual Age is design. Now that even a six-old can jump on a computer and find out facts about dinosaurs that paleontologists of thirty years ago had to spend months unearthing, data is cheap. The Information Age's attempt to make it exclusive to drive profits failed. It is no longer enough to have data. The power center has moved away from data-crunching to creating what machines cannot: objects of beauty. The new ruling class has shifted from computer systems analysts to graphic designers.

What has been commodified in the process is the very heart of the last Age. There are dozens of MP3 players on the market, but despite the fact that each is a technological marvel undreamed of twenty years ago (and with a price point that is startling), only one of those players has captured the zeitgeist of the transition from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. Why is Apple's iPod outselling all the other MP3 players combined? Design. There are more-powerful MP3 players on the market, some selling for less than the iPod, but Apple's MP3 player dominates all others because Apple understood that design matters. As a result, the iPod is now iconic.

Design has triumphed as a result of the wealth of our day. A hundred years ago, a toaster was remarkable. Just having one of those expensive devices put you in the swanky minority. Yep, it's a toasterToday, though, it is no longer enough to build a toaster that toasts bread. We've seen toasters. Virtually every Western home has a toaster. Because a $7 toaster is possible, the companies that make toasters can't operate on the hope that people want their bread toasty. Something as humble as a toaster has to make a design statement or it will not sell. That's a profound paradigm shift. (Take a few minutes to marvel at what toasters look like today if you don't believe me. Note also the price paid for cutting-edge toaster design.)

The fallout of the design explosion that heralds the Conceptual Age is the ascendancy of the design-rich right hemisphere of the brain over the left. This, too, marks a sea change. Most of us did not grow up in a time that placed right-brain thinking over left. Our heroes are thinkers, not artists. Our educators drilled into us the truth that facts won out over concepts, our elders belaboring the reality that diagnosticians were the cream of society, able to follow a well-memorized flowchart to whatever answer was desired. There was the future! We had the data to prove it.

But they were wrong.

What is most frightening about the audacity of our elders to so drastically miss the future is what that failure has meant for the Church. So stay tuned for the second part of this post—next year—to find out how Christians must live in our brave new Conceptual Age world.

Tags: Artists, Designers, Design, Thinking, Feeling, Brain, Church, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, God

Jabez, Swaziland, and Christmas

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The Wall Street Journal earlier this week broke the story of Bruce Wilkinson's African folly. The Prayer of Jabez author prayed his patented prayer and yet still managed to bomb out in his attempt to transform Swaziland's orphans into productive citizens populating a Disney-esque dude ranch and tourist trap. The intentions were good: The Prayer of Jabez Coverthe money for this lofty idea—called Dream for Africa—would be plowed back into fighting AIDS and poverty in a country where the heads of AIDS-ravaged households are the eldest children left behind in the wake of death and sorrow. Dream for Africa was the quintessential utilitarian Christian response to devastation.

But unable to crack the vagaries of African culture, Mr. Wilkinson resigned from heading his visionary venture, pulling up his personal stakes in Swaziland and taking his figurative ball back home. This has left his supporters in the country in a lurch. The end result is bitterness. (Like they say, read the whole thing.)

Wilkinson has taken quite a bit of flak from some Christians who are hooting over his failure. Their point is that the Rick Warren model of Christian dominionism that Wilkinson epitomizes is anti-Christ. I contend that there is a greater reality here.

First, although I'm a firm opponent of the Evangelicalized version of the Pentecostal "Name It and Claim It" theology that The Prayer of Jabez espouses, I must ask this of Mr. Wilkinson's critics: What have you done for orphans in Swaziland? How simple it is to point fingers in the aftermath of Dream for Africa's failure and say, "I told you so." How hypocritical to judge someone else's failure when we ourselves have done little or nothing. Frankly, I find this piling on by supposed Christian people who want to get their licks in on Bruce Wilkinson to be despicable and anti-Christ. There—I said it.

However, Wilkinson is not without blame here. His is a cautionary tale that all Christians should heed:

Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.
—Psalms 127:1 ESV

It is one thing to believe we are doing the Lord's work, but quite another to be doing it as He alone leads. Dream for Africa's greatest mistake was to try to do things on Man's timetable with Man's strength using Man's cleverness. Wilkinson had a decent vision to help the poor, orphaned, and ill in Swaziland. But the hubris at work here is the way it was planned and executed. In short, the Lord was not allowed to build the house.

Part of the blame here goes to Western presumptions about whether God works in mysterious ways or easily explainable, manufactured ones. In far too many churches today there is a mentality that we go ahead with our plans and ask for God's blessing. When this is coupled with the raging anti-supernaturalism inherent in so much of Western Christianity, God becomes little more than a rubber stamp on what we desire for an outcome. As Bruce Wilkinson learned, we can pray the Prayer of Jabez till we're blue in the face, but unless the Lord makes all the pieces fall into place, we're building a house that will not stand.

Wait for the LORD and keep his way, and he will exalt you to inherit the land….
—Psalms 37:34a ESV

Waiting is, indeed, the hardest part. Somehow, today's expression of Evangelicalism has developed an inability to wait on God for anything. The history of world missions consists of laborers who went years and sometimes decades without seeing a single convert, but then the floodgates of heaven were opened and the harvest made plentiful. Wilkinson's African involvement was cut off after three years. So much for waiting.

Again, what we see in Wilkinson's Swaziland disaster is a greater problem with Evangelicalism in America in the 21st century. We want things done now and we want them done according to our plans. Sadly, this kind of brute force manipulation of God's will amounts to little more than wind. And while the most vociferous of Bruce Wilkinson's critics are hooting over his failure (and their hope that Rick Warren will fail miserably in Rwanda), they, too, often embody this problem—only in a blind way that is uniquely theirs.

Even though I don't approve of the manner in which Dream for Africa charged in and did things under Man's power, it saddens me even more that there are people gloating over its failure, while offering nothing else in return. Surely there are people out there who God has blessed with a heart for Africa that are willing to take the decades it may take to bring about the end of AIDS, orphans, and poverty in Africa by God's way alone and only under His timetable.

Two thousand years ago, the religious intelligentsia thought they knew it all, but God built a house His way. He brought His Son into the world in poverty, made His Son's Kingdom not of this world, and confounded every person who thought they knew just how the Messiah would come and what He would look like. Man's confusion as to God's way made it all the more easy to take that supposed Messiah and crucify Him. Those upholders of all that was right knew what they were doing, or so they thought.

One of these days, we'll see just how many of our enterprises failed because we second-guessed God. It's all too easy for any of us to do. Bruce Wilkinson and Dream for Africa failed. And yet, so many of our own whims have gone up in flames for the very same reason.

Phariseeism is not far from any of us.