Christianity After Religion: The Beginning

I want to spend the next few weeks reading the just-released book by Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and The Beginning of A New Spiritual Awakening. It’s a proposal for viewing the decline of traditional religiosity in America, and nobody, to my mind, is more qualified to make such a proposal, for Butler-Bass has spent the last decade in the trenches with the leaders and members of mainline Protestant churches and institutions, carefully studying what’s going on.

The value of a project like this is indisputable, for hardly a presbytery meeting or Layman issue goes by without some well-meaning defender of the faith confidently asserting the decline and death of traditional Christianity in America as the result of a liberalizing, Bible-shooing, God-softening project on the part of mainline denominations. To these prognosticators, the indicator of church success par excellence is growth in worship attendance and membership, both of which, it is asserted, are the result of strong Bible-based pastoral leadership and the cultivation of an active piety among the flock.

That has long been a gross oversimplification of 1) what indicates “success” in a church, 2) what accounts for the success or decline in churches, and 3) what is actually happening nationwide. Christianity After Religion tries to set the record straight–ish. By drawing on lots of different research done by lots of different people and institutions, and by reflecting on her own experience and observation, Butler-Bass is proposing a different way of understanding what can no longer be understood as anything other than a culture-wide decline of all forms of Christian religiosity.

In “The Beginning”–the book’s introduction–Butler-Bass situates her interest in this subject within her own experience, in particular her experience as a teenage “Born Again” Christian in the year I was born, 1976. She describes this time the same way that many religious sociologists have: as a period of immense transformation wherein participation in traditional Christian communities began to erode in favor of new evangelical, suburban, megachurch-driven faith options.

These are the options I was born into. Both my parents were raised in those traditional Protestant structures, one a Baptist and the other a Lutheran, and both of them were powerfully grasped as parents of two young boys by a charismatic church that met in an office building. The staid church routine of their youths gladly gave way to loud singing, spontaneous prayer (often in “tongues”), and inexplicable healings achieved on the sanctuary floor. This, for me as a kid, was normal Christianity.

Obviously, there was nothing normal about it from the standpoint of the Presbyterians and Catholics down the street. Yet, to us, those mainliners were completely normal; that was their problem. They were practicing a religion, while we were growing in a relationship with Jesus. We were part of a swelling mass of American Christians who were taking the reigns of faith without any regard for the institutional concerns of the mainline churches. We were “saved,” “born again,” “believers.” Everyone else–Atheists and Episcopalians alike–were none of those things.

Here’s what Butler-Bass ultimately wonders about that era:

“What if the 1970’s [and my 1980’s] were not simply an evangelical revival like those of old, but the first stirrings of a new spiritual awakening, a vast interreligious movement toward individual, social, and cultural transformation?”

It’s the question that will set the terms for the rest of the book. Having been reared in that revival, lost interest in it as a teenager, rediscovered a more moderate form of it at an evangelical Christian college, embraced an “emergent” Christianity as a young adult, and then educated and ordained by a mainline protestant denomination, it’s a question I think is urgent, both culturally and personally.

You with me?

Prototypes and Process Modalities: NEXT 2012, part 2

My previous post lifted up the idea of a prototype advocated in Dallas by Jud Hendrix, an idea that has quickly set up camp at the forefront of my brain and is coloring everything I’m thinking about (see Jud’s presentation here)

The other major contribution that NEXT 2012 made for me was an exploration of process modalities, led by the likes of Theresa Cho and Yehiel Curry.

Theresa described an Urban Ministry Convocation that she and some of her colleagues orchestrated with 22 urban churches in a seven mile by seven mile stretch of downtown San Francisco. The gathering required getting commitments from leaders in all of the churches to come to something that wasn’t required to do they weren’t quite sure what with people they didn’t know and organized by an entity they didn’t trust. 19 of the 22 churches sent leaders. The process of recruiting participants was itself nuanced and creative.

Since it was a new thing they were doing, Theresa and her colleagues decided early in the planning that they would need a new kind of process, a process that they would have to create themselves. What they ended up with was something that invited participants to listen to one another and share their own story, something that allowed them to sit quietly as well as move around and interact, something that gave voice to the past while also sharing the struggle of the present and prayerfully prodding people toward God’s future.

That process isn’t, I’m sure, in any book. Parts of it are, but surely not the same book. The people behind the Urban Ministry Convocation in San Francisco had to decide what they thought the gathering needed to accomplish, then they got creative about crafting a process–their own process, not somebody else’s–to make that happen. Read more of Theresa’s thoughts on it here.

The 600-or-so NEXT participants didn’t just hear people talk about process modalities, though. We were were led through one that most of us had never experienced before: Open Space. I won’t labor to explain it here, but kudos to NEXT’s organizers for allowing the time and potential confusion of such an experiment.

Finally, Yehiel Curry described an alternative process for ordination developed by the ELCA called Theological Education for Emerging Ministries (TEEM). Curry is the pastor of Shekinah Chapel in Riverdale, IL., but he didn’t start at that church as its pastor. Rather, he became involved as a church member and ministry volunteer and was invited by the ELCA to pursue ordination and become the church’s pastor. He was ordained as a result of the TEEM process and installed as the pastor in 2009, and he’s currently finishing his seminary degree (view Curry’s presentation about TEEM here).

What struck me about this was how much more responsive to a congregation’s needs it seems to be. Rather than forcing a congregation to select someone from completely outside of their system to lead them, the TEEM process allows the church to select from within the non-ordained leadership of the church candidates who may be equipped, ordained, and installed as pastor. It’s a contextual solution to a contextual problem.

For almost two years now I’ve been using Moving Beyond Icebreakers as a tool for structuring interactive gatherings. I’m using it with youth groups, presbytery teams, and retreats. Only after being in Dallas this week do I now realize what I’ve been doing with it: experimenting with process modalities.

I feel smarter already.

Prototypes and Process Modalities: NEXT 2012, part 1

Mihee asked for it, so here it is: my quick-and-dirty blog post about the NEXT Church conference in Dallas. Part the first.

Terrific, outstanding, inspiring, exhausting: so much goes into a gathering for 600 people that nobody notices, and each one of those participants puts more into their time than they realize. I’ll be discovering the impact of it for weeks to come.

An event review, though, is less interesting to read than a reflection on the event’s ideas. And the architects of NEXT don’t want, I’m sure, people talking about the plumbing of these gatherings as much as they do the people and the conversations inside of them. Some people can’t get past the plumbing: what was the racial-ethnic composition?; was the music gender-neutral?; what was the age breakdown?; was there an organ?

Plumbing is critical. But the only time you talk about plumbing is when it’s faulty. Some find fault with NEXT’s plumbing, likely for good reason, and yet I don’t wish to repeat the mistake of conference blogs past by jumping into the fray of that fault-finding, either to defend or confirm.

Instead, I want to share the two most prominent ideas that I came away with. These ideas weren’t the subjects of workshops or sermons, but I heard them popping up in almost every conversation, and now I can’t shake them: prototypes and process modalities. The rest of this post will focus on prototypes; process modalities will get its own post later.

Jud Hendrix described the work of the Ecclesia Project in mid-Kentucky as a search for prototypes of Christian community. “A prototype,” he suggested, “isn’t a program (I’m paraphrasing here). It’s a runway on which the future can land.” Further, a prototype is an instrument of learning.

So his project supports six prototypical expressions of Christian community in mid-Kentucky, not a one of which would be recognizable as a traditional church. And the question they’re asking of each those communities’ leaders is not “are you growing?” but “what are you learning?”

Another prototype I heard about is an intentional Christian community of young adults supported by Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. The community is made up of local Americorps volunteers, and the seminary’s role is simply to provide some spiritual and pastoral guidance to their life together, which is enabled through the use of seminary housing. It’s new and different, and the seminary is learning valuable things about ways in which different parts of the church can connect to the best yearnings of young adults.

What are some other prototypes of ministry out there? What are they learning? How can Presbyterians be emboldened to create new ones and share what they’re learning with the wider church?

Stay tuned for part 2 of my NEXT review (teaser: it’s heavy on Yehiel Curry and Theresa Cho).