A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society,by Rodney Clapp (InterVarsity, 25 pp.; $14.99, paper);
Death of the Church: The Church at the End of the 21st Century,by
Mike Regele (Zondervan, 352 pp.; $22.99, hardcover). Reviewed by John Ortberg,
teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington, Illinois,
and author of The Life You've Always Wanted: Spiritual Transformation
for Ordinary People (forthcoming from Zondervan).
At a conference for United Methodist clergy, Bishop William Grove told of
a recent visit to a church in Germany. The pastor was talking to a group
of 20-or-so year-olds and took longer to get to Grove than is customary when
greeting a bishop. By way of apologizing, he explained that he had just met
these young people earlier in the week: they were gathered outside on the
steps of the church one day when he arrived, and they asked him: "What is
this place?" "It's a church," he told them. "What's a church?" they asked.
He fumbled for words: "It's a place where we meet; more than that it's the
group of all of us who have devoted ourselves to following Jesus." "Who is
Jesus?" More fumbling: "He was a person we believe was sent from God—was
God Himself—whom God raised from the dead."
The primary moral Grove drew is that we have experienced the passing of
Christendom. For better or for worse, the notion of Western religious consensus
and the concepts of parish and clerical roles that went with it are gone
and are not likely to return.
This is precisely the situation that has occasioned both A Peculiar
People, by Rodney Clapp, and Death of the Church, by Mike Regele.
While they are very different kinds of books, and lead to different implications,
they are both avowedly postmodernist calls to acknowledge, respond to, and
(to some extent at least) celebrate the end of an era inaugurated by Constantine.
A Peculiar People is the more theologically reflective and academically
informed of the two books. Clapp writes as "a plebian, post-modern Christian"—he
is not formally an academician, but is widely read in theology and political
science as well as his own field of journalism. He has written a book rich
with insight on how the church might become in our day an alternative way
of life in a world of crushing secularism.
For Clapp, the Constantinian near-identification of church and state that
looked like the salvation of the church from persecution has instead very
nearly been its destruction. It has led the Western church to so identify
with the existing power structures that it has often offered little more
than "the religious sponsorship of the status quo" (what C. S. Lewis called
"Christianity and … "). If anything, the Reformers worsened this tendency,
for their dependence on the state to sustain them in the battle against Rome
wed them to worldly power much more tightly (the notable exception for Clapp
being the Anabaptist movements).
So the current crisis—the church often feeling irrelevant or useless—is
actually a wake-up call. It is a severe mercy to feel useless when you are
doing the wrong things. Clapp hopes that we might recover from this paralysis
by gaining a sense of ourselves as "a peculiar people"—that is, that the
church might rediscover its calling to be a culture, its own way of life.
This will require a number of corrections:
—We must learn to stop thinking of the "true" church as some invisible,
ahistorical, acultural reality. The church can be experienced only in and
through (and as) culture.
—We must stop thinking of faith as an essentially private, internal,
compartmentalized, individual affair between God and oneself alone. (Clapp
fits such tendencies, a bit loosely, under the heading of gnostic approaches
to faith.)
—We must come to see the church as offering to the world another
way of life. (In this sense, the church as "alternative culture" keeps coming
to mind when reading Clapp. Worship is "holy madness," baptism becomes again—as
it was for the Anapbaptists—subversive: an act of civil disobedience.)
I wish Clapp had devoted more reflection to the proper role of the category
of the individual. Admittedly, our worship of the individual is little short
of idolatry, but in seeking a corrective Clapp places an excessively heavy
burden on the formative powers of such communal practices as liturgy and
what he calls "the performance of Scripture."
In contrast, he says nothing about solitude, for instance, which was generally
understood by the desert abbas and ammas to be the single most
formative of all practices. (He also says the Eucharist has served to form
us as a "radically egalitarian" community, without commenting on the irony
that in many traditions half of all Christians are ineligible by gender to
preside at it.) Attention to Bonhoeffer's advice in Life Together
("Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. … Let him who is not
in community beware of being alone") or Kierkegaard's writing to "that solitary
individual" might have led Clapp to richer insights than simply criticizing
individualism per se, which is too easy a target.
Article continues below
I also think the book sometimes glosses over the difficulty of communicating
with those outside the church. Granted, for instance, that speaking of sin
simply as the lack of a good self-concept is a parody of New Testament writers,
one is still left with the difficulty of talking about righteousness without
being self-righteous (a challenge to which Jesus himself devoted much attention).
But this is a wonderful, thoughtful, well-written call for the church to
be the church. To read it is to be both challenged and encouraged.
Mike Regele would agree with Clapp that the church has lost its traditional
place within Western society, and that although this may feel like bad news,
it offers unique opportunities. And like A Peculiar People, Regele's
Death of the Church reflects a wide range of input, here mostly from
applied social sciences.
But Regele's book is not primarily devoted to reflection; it is designed
for practitioners. (In general, the book is not nearly so nuanced as A
Peculiar People when considering, for example, the relationship between
church, state, and culture: "We believe," Regele writes, "that the invisible
church of Jesus Christ exists outside of and independent from culture.")
A large section of Death of the Church analyzes the current church
situation using the generational theory of Strauss and Howe (one generation
tends toward crisis and leads to an inner focus; the next swings toward
"awakening" and leads to outer focus). The helpfulness of this section will
depend on the reader's evaluation of a somewhat disputed approach to thinking
about societal movements.
Death of the Church is at its most compelling a call for the church
to be willing to change its strategies in order to achieve its mission in
a radically changing context. The church's choice, Regele argues, is between
dying "as a result of its resistance to change" or dying "in order to live."
In Regele's vision for the church, the primary unit of mission becomes the
local congregation, the primary agents of mission become the members of the
congregation, and the orientation of the mission shifts from institution
to community.
The demographic trends that threaten the survival of major denominations—as
well as those that face the United States as a whole—are laid out here in
clear fashion. They present a strong case for the need for change within
the church (the average age of a member of the average Presbyterian church,
for instance, is 65).
Article continues below
Regele also helps the reader think systematically about those inside and
outside the church. He does this by profiling six categories from high to
low in religious commitment: Loyalists, Switchers, Newcomers, Floaters,
Indifferent, and Disillusioned. Interview material makes the concerns and
perceptions of the people in these categories concrete to those of us who
need to hear them.
How to communicate the gospel effectively in a post-Christian world
will remain a live question for the foreseeable future, with no single answer.
But that the church must change—without forsaking its core
commitments—can hardly be doubted. These two books are valuable contributions
to an ongoing conversation about what it means to be called the people of
God.
Short Notices Clergy Killers: Guidance for Pastors and Congregations Under Attack,by G. Lloyd Rediger (Logos Productions, 200 pp.; $14.99, paper). Reviewed
by Everett L. Wilson, pastor of First Covenant Church of Marinette, Wisconsin,
and president of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill of Marinette and
Menominee.
The title of Lloyd Rediger's book is shocking, but not as much as the behavior
described inside its covers. Clergy killers are people who seek to destroy
the credibility, reputation, and career of pastors. Certainly, many unhappy
separations of pastor and people occur without clergy killers being involved.
But Rediger's clinical experience as a pastoral psychotherapist confirms
what I have seen happen again and again to friends and acquaintances in the
pastorate, especially in the last 20 years.
Rediger doesn't dress clergy in white hats—there are congregation killers,
too—nor does he defend lazy or incompetent pastors. He recognizes as normal
the tensions that mark parish life, which may be dealt with through traditional
"conflict management."
"A congregation," Rediger writes, "should not be sacrificed to an evil agenda."
His knife sometimes cuts close to the bone. If we submit to his surgery now,
however, we will be better prepared to recognize and deal with the problem
of genuinely malicious attacks against pastors.