Simplicity

Unshackling the American Church: Fraternitas

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When I was small, I found comfort in something beautiful: the sound of laughter in my house. Mom and Dad liked to entertain, and I remember cold winter nights when the chill outside was dissipated by the sounds of adults talking and laughing into the wee hours of the morning. I’d fall asleep to those sounds knowing all was right with the world.

I fear my son won’t know that same pleasure, not because we don’t want to entertain like my parents once did, but by the sheer fact that it’s increasingly rare in our society that others come over for anything. According to Robert Putnam’s seminal work, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, nearly every social group that existed in American culture in the 1960s has seen precipitous drops in members or involvement.

Putnam warns that our stock of social capital – the very fabric of our connections with each other, has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and communities. Putnam draws on evidence including nearly 500,000 interviews over the last quarter century to show that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We’re even bowling alone. More Americans are bowling than ever before, but they are not bowling in leagues. Putnam shows how changes in work, family structure, age, suburban life, television, computers, women’s roles and other factors have contributed to this decline.

—From the webpage description of the book.

The title stems from the loss of bowling league membership in small towns, and in a frightening bit of correlation, I once spent an afternoon bowling alone in Silicon Valley for no other reason than no one else wanted to come. Worse yet, for the hour I was there, I was the only bowler in the alley.

Indeed, like its currency-based counterpart, social capital has value critical to the social economy of this country. Conserving social capital should be the hallmark of any belief system that calls itself conservative, but in an odd bit of data, Putnam’s own studies showed one of the most social capital impoverished portions of the country is the conservative South.

Alarmed by the data from Putnam’s book, a committee of top sociologists, intellectuals, historians and politicos convened at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss the findings and possible recourse. Their conclusion:

Incivility and coarseness are a continuation of behaviors that have always been with us. However, these behaviors are greatly amplified by the new economic dynamics of mass markets, by the new technologies of mass communication and by laissez-faire governmental policies.

The tender web of society depends on people, but we’ve instead chosen compartmentalizing technologies and cheapness.

Hands unitedI grew up in what was a brand new subdivision in 1972. We were one of the first residents of that new neighborhood, watching houses go up and people move in. A mostly Catholic neighborhood developed with us Lutherans and the AoG pastor at the end of the street.

I loved that neighborhood. Most of the people were seasoned marrieds with kids in elementary and junior high school. Plenty of other kids to play with. I was ten, the perfect age for navigating both the slightly older kids and slightly younger.

One of the things that neighborhood did that impressed me is that very early on they started having block parties once a year. Amazingly fun, these were the single most anticipated events of the neighborhood year. We ate, drank, played, danced, celebrated and enjoyed an entire day of fun.

Time passed and the neighborhood got a little older. A few couples divorced. Those two or three “life-of-the-party” couples moved away. The kids got older and a second generation of people moved in. That life-affirming decade of block parties came to a crashing halt.

When I returned to that old neighborhood after my first stint in college, a few houses had some new toys: Beta and VHS videotape players, plus video game players. More houses now had personal computers, too, the 128k Macs, PC XTs, and PC Juniors of lore.

I stuck around that neighborhood for a few years, but didn’t notice the change initially. One fine spring day I glanced outside to find a curious sight: an empty street lined with empty yards.

As a kid, we’d played in the dead-end street every day. The yards were big enough to host a football game if you played across three of them, or a softball variant we played constantly called Zoneball.

Yet despite knowing that a few dozen children still lived here, I saw none Even the ones who were toddlers when I moved in and would have been outside weren’t.

A couple months later, a strange thing happened. Gorgeous June day, blue skies and sun, and the power went out at 6:45 PM. From a lawn chair on my parents’ porch I witnessed a curious exodus, as the neighborhood residents gradually stumbled out into the bright sunshine and started talking to each other.

By 7:00, the streets and yards were filled with kids playing an impromptu game of kick-the-can, just like I had done for so many summers. The old neighbors reminisced, then pulled the new neighbors into the conversation. The energy level? Block-party-sized. You could feel the life.

But around 7:30, the unmistakable hum of air conditioners starting up broke the electrical silence. By 7:45, emptiness reigned once again.

Till the day I die, I will never forget watching people break up and head for their front doors.

The TV, VCR, Computer, Video Game—pick a device—called like sirens and we obeyed.  I took a stroll up the street, watching people through windows, each one parked in front of this tech gadget and that. The tech gods are indeed unappeasable.

Flash-forward twenty years and we loyal consumers opened a vein and told Sony, Panasonic, Apple, Microsoft and others to jack us in. Best Buy is the new worship center, its blue-shirted acolytes preaching to our itching ears that a 40″ TV is passé—60″ is the new hotness.

In his book Why We Don’t Talk to Each Other Anymore: The De-Voicing of Society, John Locke discusses studies that show that our dependence on technology for communication is damaging our ability to read instinctive social cues. Young people accustomed to interacting through computers and cellphones find that they can’t gauge other people’s feelings when confronted with face-to-face interactions. The result is an increasing disconnection between what one person communicates and another understands.

When a society can no longer interpret agreed-upon social cues, it won’t take Visigoths storming the gates for societal collapse to occur.

But what of the ultimate social capital bank, the Church of Jesus Christ?

A couple months ago, I petitioned readers to answer a few questions about their financial and living situations. One of those questions asked, “Do you live within thirty miles of extended family?” To my utter shock, out of the dozens of responses I got via comments and private e-mails, only about 10% answered positively.

Christians answered those questions, not unbelievers. But if we Christians–who so nearly make an idol of family with our rhetoric about it–aren’t near our extended families, then what of all our talk?

Joseph Myers wrote in his popular book, The Search to Belong: Rethinking Intimacy, Community, and Small Groups, that  we Christians can no longer expect people to come to our homes since many are fearful of stepping across the threshold into another’s residence. If this is true, then we might as well pack up and turn out the lights.

Is it any wonder then that consumerism bedevils American Christians? If what God gave us to conserve is gone, why not find fulfillment in the latest tech gadget?

We used to be producers. Pre-Industrial-Revolution America saw capitalism flourish in home-based economies. Both parents worked at home. Both parents taught the kids. Both parents and children produced out of their home.

But after the Industrial Revolution, as our economy was wrongfully forced into big business models and city-living, the home’s essence as the base of family operations withered. The Church abetted that little death by failing to question this so-called march of progress. Instead, American Christians marshalled the parade of efficiency and championed late-19th and early-20th century triumphalism .

Consumerism rushed in to fill the void. Consumption replaced community. Advertising pitted the Joneses against the rest of humanity, handing us a new national pastime. Social Darwinism stirred that pot and told us that it was us or our neighbor, but it couldn’t be both. Someone had to win. Might as well be us.

If we wish to know why the “Church of Me” predominates today, why churches are filled with folks who want to know what’s in it for them, then we need only ask what happened to the home. We need to ask if modernism, postmodernism, industrialization, and globalization are bad for families, churches, and communities.

Destroy the home and you ultimately destroy community. Oddly, I hear no Christian leaders today arguing for a return to  home-based economies that fuel local communities. A few might be trumpeting the single-wage-earner households that homeschool, but that’s a band-aid on a bigger problem. Until we can find a way to resurrect real home-based economies, well never see an end  to the relentless onslaught of consumers trickling out of polished McMansions demanding that churches tickle their ears till the thrill departs and so do they.

No matter how much we talk about community, we simply don’t have real community in our churches. The Church in Acts broke bread in each others’ houses every day! And that was possible because of how they worked and lived out of home-based economies.

I think one of the reasons that revival has been so elusive in America since Azusa Street a hundred years ago centers around the fact that home-based economies afforded people the chance to linger at church to see revival. Can you imagine anyone today calling his boss and saying, “I can’t come into the office because revival broke out at our church?” That guy’d be pinkslipped the next day.

I think we can resurrect true community, the kind where you watch my back and I watch yours, but it’s going to take paradigm-shattering effort to do so.

A few ways to begin:

1. Stop with the materialism! Start getting rid of what we own. Stop letting what we buy rule us.

2. Start asking our pastors why they’re preaching that it’s okay for mom to stay at home, but not mom AND dad? Start asking how we can restore home-based economies that support the family, which supports the local community, and ultimately enhances the church community.

3. Start talking with other people we know about their always-going, non-stop-consuming lives. Create some dissonance in the standard thinking that we have to be robots who serve the State by perpetually buying things.

4. On the Web sites of prominent American Church leaders and their churches, bring up these questions and ask how real community can be restored.

5. Put people first, not things. Contact friends we haven’t spoken with in years. The alarming statistic for married men over forty shows that those guys have only one other man (or two) they consider to be a close friend. Time to better those numbers.

6. In church meetings, start brainstorming ways to keep people entrenched in the local body. Start questioning the need to chase work all over the country, too (one of the main reasons so few of us live near extended family). Americans are moving every seven years—and that number is getting smaller. We can’t experience real community in our churches if we’re turning ourselves over like that.

7. Make your home an open home. Find ways to make your home a nexus of community. Let your kids know that your home is for others; encourage them to bring friends over. Practice hospitality at all times. Start a block party.

8. Pray through your church directory. Then start inviting two or three families at a time to your house.

9. Develop relationships with local merchants. Consider the extra money you might spend at their place of business (versus a Category Killer or Big Box store) a tithe to the development of godly community.

10. Reject pat answers. We’re too busy, too tired, too disconnected, and too socially bankrupt. Time to divorce the status quo.

Despite the fact that our churches preach a form of Gospel today that is completely individual-centered, Jesus founded a Church, not disconnected individuals. It’s time we start thinking about Christ in Community and not always Christ in the Individual. But to get there, we have to be bold and question everything our society and our churches hold up wrongly as sacred, questioning assumptions in our churches that are based on non-Christian ideals and not on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

We can have true community folks, but it’s going to cost us to get it back.

What are you prepared to give up to make it happen?

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Other posts in the “Unshackling the American Church” series:

Unshackling the American Church: The Sacramental

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My son and I took the thirty mile drive out east to the Amish area of Adams County. Our kitchen table is giving up the ghost and our original set of chairs is now down to two, with two replacements that themselves need replacing. I wanted to see a man about a table. Not some cheap piece of Chinese fiberboard held together by staples and glue, but one built by a man who cared about the wood he selected and the way the lathed spindles felt in his hands. A man whose shop sign read “Wood Craftsman.”

The store itself was not fancy—is anything Amish fancy?—nor was the design of the furniture. But in running my own hands along the same lines that craftsman’s took, I heard the wood singing.

We don’t have the money now to buy that careful, beautiful table. Can’t afford at this moment the chairs that will someday hold our friends and neighbors as we sit around eating the meal I prepare for them. But I liked the man who made that furniture and he’ll get my future business because he understands the nature of what he offers another man.

Down the road was the organic farm. Not too many organic farms in our area, even among the Amish. The young man who ran the place was happy to talk with someone who grasped what he attempted. You could hear the worry in his voice, though. How many other people understood? Who else would come and buy? This was food the way God intended it to be. Food whose cost in dirty hands and sweat made it all the more sweet to eat. One plant mattered because there were so few, so the care taken to preserve what little was in the ground showed in every future bite. This was food that demanded as much care in creating a meal of it as the nurture this young man gave to it.

Walking back to our truck, a flash of red from overhead proved to be a summer tanager alighting on a phone line. My son and I talked for several minutes about that little crimson singer highlighted against the cloudless cerulean sky. Scarlet TanagerThe sun at just the proper angle, the tanager’s feathers glowed in the rays as it warbled. I made sure to ask my son if God was pleased by that little bird He’d made. He gave me a “yes” and together we watched the summer tanager until it darted into the gently swaying oaks.

Later that evening back near our pond, I spotted the summer’s cousin, the scarlet tanager, with its black wings and vibrant red hue, a red that puts the summer’s palette to shame. With the tops of the trees yellow in the setting sun, I glanced back to catch the iridescence of an indigo bunting flitting through the walnut trees, and I thanked God for the birds He created that bless us with their beauty and song.

The Enemy’s work is to oppose God. How does he best accomplish that task? By destroying meaning.

You can’t read God’s prescription for the construction of the Tabernacle and the making of the priestly garments in Exodus without noting a few choice descriptions:

You shall make a mercy seat of pure gold. Two cubits and a half shall be its length, and a cubit and a half its breadth.
—Exodus 25:17 ESV

You shall make a lampstand of pure gold. The lampstand shall be made of hammered work: its base, its stem, its cups, its calyxes, and its flowers shall be of one piece with it.
—Exodus 25:31 ESV

You shall make for the breastpiece twisted chains like cords, of pure gold.
—Exodus 28:22 ESV

Moreover, you shall make the tabernacle with ten curtains of fine twined linen and blue and purple and scarlet yarns; you shall make them with cherubim skillfully worked into them.
—Exodus 26:1 ESV

And you shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty. You shall speak to all the skillful, whom I have filled with a spirit of skill, that they make Aaron’s garments to consecrate him for my priesthood. These are the garments that they shall make: a breastpiece, an ephod, a robe, a coat of checker work, a turban, and a sash. They shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother and his sons to serve me as priests. They shall receive gold, blue and purple and scarlet yarns, and fine twined linen. “And they shall make the ephod of gold, of blue and purple and scarlet yarns, and of fine twined linen, skillfully worked.”
—Exodus 28:2-6 ESV

The gold used to make the tabernacle wasn’t just gold. It was pure gold.

The lampstand’s construction wasn’t from this bit and that. It was in one piece.

The garments made for Aaron weren’t just clothes. They were glorious, beautiful, and holy.

And the linen that compromised them wasn’t just linen. It was fine linen.

Most of all, the creators of those items weren’t just workers. They were skilled workers.

While it may be true that to the pure all things are pure, I wonder how many of us in the Church today still understand that the sacred has an enduring quality. That which is cheap and meaningless will not endure, but those things that are consecrated and sacred before God are not forgotten in this life or the life to come. The sacred is costly. To make the Tabernacle cost the Hebrews. They surrendered up their gold, jewels and yarns. But more than that, their artisans surrendered up their time and skills to craft something precious. Gold is easy to refine. Pure gold is not.

Yes, the craftsman’s work honors God. If the Reformation taught us nothing more, we should should remember that all the Reformers understood that craft is blessed by God; therefore our work is sacred when it harbors meaning within it.

But this is not a call to buy that Bang & Olafsen audio system instead of the Emerson. If life is nothing more than consuming and buying, then we have fallen for the greatest of the Enemy’s lies; we have cheapened what it means to be alive.

The American Church’s wholesale abandonment of that which is sacred and infused with meaning for that which is cheap has taken a terrible toll. Our attempts to prove culturally relevant have shown that we value what is cheap over what has meaning, rather than going the opposite way of the world.

  • The pastor downloads his sermon off the Internet. Cost to him? Nothing.
  • The worship leader thinks about the morning’s music the night before. Cost to him? Nothing.
  • Communion that Sunday consists of some mass-produced wafers out of a plastic bag and a gallon of grape juice from Dollar General. The cost…?

Does it matter? Yes, it does—it matters more than we can know this side of Eternity.

So much of what we do as a Church in this country is devoid of meaning. We’ve allowed the Enemy to strip out so many simple and sacred aspects of life that we didn’t notice they’d gone missing one by one until it was too late. Our wholesale chasing after the culture rather than being the counterculture that holds onto meaning and sacrament left the unsaved scratching their heads as to what we really offered. If it were possible, some might contend that we who are the representatives of Christ have treated our the Lord as if he’s just some cool guy who lavishes meaning by giving us what we want. We’ve taken our own lazy lust for the cheap and cheapened our birthright as Sons of the Living God. No wonder the world looks elsewhere for meaning! If we as the Church can’t be trusted to lift up the name of Jesus, what then is truly sacred?

No thankfulness exists for the cheap. The sacred though, commands our thanks. When we receive a costly gift and understand its cost, how can we not be grateful? The heart of the Christian should incline toward thanks because only the Christian understands the depth of the cost Christ paid for our sin. Yet our wholesale abandonment of meaning in other aspects of life makes it all too easy for us to do the same with Christ’s atoning work. Our thankfulness shifts to become the pitiful cry of “So Jesus, what have you done for me lately?” And all meaning in life suffers in that wake.

The sparrow falls to the ground and God knows it because He created it. We, on the other hand, pass by without caring. What is another bird to us? Or another tree? Or for that sake, another person? We Christians may stand against abortion, but why is it that all other aspects of life hold so little value to us that we can overlook them so easily? Our picking and choosing looks more like picking and choosing than a consistent worldview that understands meaning in light of the whole Gospel.

As believers in Jesus Christ, we are a priesthood. As a priesthood, we are charged with conserving that which is sacred. But our focus has been so narrow in that regard that we’ve let the bulwarks fall without thinking and let the enemy saunter up to our gates to assault the very heart of the fortress. Tree, bird, horse, man, Christ? Who cares, right? The latest iPod’s come out!

But redemption offers us true change:

  • Opening our homes to our neighbors has meaning.
  • Slowing down to catch the sunrise has meaning.
  • Listening to our elders tell the stories of our families has meaning.
  • Caring for a dying parent when it is so easy to let someone else do it for us has meaning.
  • Taking the time to listen has meaning.
  • Making something with our hands when it can be bought at WalMart for less has meaning.
  • Wondering at the splendor of a scarlet tanager has meaning.
  • Passing onto another generation the God-soaked sacredness of so many aspects of life has meaning.
  • Making a homecooked meal from the plants we harvested and the animals we raised has meaning.
  • Creating objects of beauty has meaning.

But most of all, being thankful as we experience God and worship Him in every fragment of our day has meaning. How did we in America let the Enemy so easily rob us of the sacramental?

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Other posts in the “Unshackling the American Church” series:

“Unshackling the American Church” Series Announcement

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Rarely do I read a book that leaves me saying “Amen” after every sentence. More amazing is the fact that this book, while it does deal with Christian thought and living, resides in the Politics section of your average secular bookstore. So dead-on accurate is the content, though, that I’m considering starting a new category of Essential Reading in my sidebar just to house it.

Long-time readers know that I take great care to avoid bringing politics into this blog. But this book is not so much a tome on politics as it is on living a sacramental lifestyle that goes beyond the glitz and gloss of modern-day Evangelicalism in America to a new vision of life that is truly ancient.Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons

The book? Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher.

Dreher’s released one for the ages. In fact, this book is so good that I’m hacked off at him for writing it because what he’s penned is the next book I had planned to write (although mine was aimed more squarely at the Church).

The gist of this book explores a little-known tribe living in the United States: Political conservatives, usually Evangelical Christians, who are dropping out of the rat race by going back to traditional ways of life that existed in pre-Industrial-Revolution America. Anyone who’s caught my epic The Christian & the Business World series is well-acquainted with my views on the dire need for Christians to rise up and question our lifestyles, the non-stop, community-destroying, materialistic live-for-today zeitgeist we’ve adopted indiscriminantly.

As the subtitle proclaims, the book gathers under its wings the disenfranchised out there who firmly believe that conserving the family unit, better stewarding creation, restoring genuine community, and overseeing local market economies by restoring America’s agrarian heritage, will recapture the essence of what it means to live a full life that honors God, family, neighbor, and country.

Weeping is not my normal reaction to reading anything, but this book has so far uncorked a torrent in me. And while too many Christians in America brush all this off as utopian nonsense—even as they adjust the volume on their latest in a string of iPods and munch on genetically-modified tasteless veggies—I’m imploring readers of this book to check it out, if only for the first few chapters.

Despite the finale of the subtitle, I’m personally not interested in saving the Republican Party, but I am for saving conservative values—even if truly conservative values look more like some of the elements of the Left than the Right. The kind of conservativism championed by Edmund Burke in no way bears any resemblance to the “free-markets-at-any-cost” stupidity we see enshrined by today’s GOP, but that’s okay. If enough of us drop out of the prevailing societal madness, someone will notice and want to court our vote.

Though Dreher’s beaten me to the punch, I know that you know I’ve been talking these points for a while, so in concert with my reading of Crunchy Cons, I’ll be starting a series called “Unshackling the American Church” that will further examine many of the issues I’ve touched on at Cerulean Sanctum, ideas that dovetail with Dreher’s book.

Stay tuned. I promise a mind—and possibly soul—altering ride.

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Other posts in the “Unshackling the American Church” series: