The Congregation in a Secular Age (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #3)

Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life

Andrew Root

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780801098482
• eBook ISBN: 9781493429721
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

A New Paradigm for Understanding the Congregation in Contemporary Ministry

Churches often realize they need to change. But if they're not careful, the way they change can hurt more than help.

Leading practical theologian Andrew Root offers a new paradigm for understanding the congregation in contemporary ministry. He articulates why congregations feel pressured by the speed of change in modern life and encourages an approach that doesn't fall into the negative traps of our secular age.

The Congregation in a Secular Age calls congregations to reimagine what change is and how to live into this future, helping them move from relevance to resonance.

Part 1: Depressed Congregations

1
The Church and the Depressing Speed of Change

In a restaurant in North Dakota, I found myself sitting across from a pastor I had met just hours earlier.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said to me. “It’s something more than apathy. It’s not that they don’t care. It’s just that my church, maybe the whole denomination, seems depressed. I know that sounds weird, but that’s how it feels. I’ve battled depression myself for years. I know it from the inside. This feels like church-wide depression. Like we’re stuck in mud or trapped under water, and we just don’t have the energy to face it.”

“Face what?” I asked.

“Anything at all,” he returned quickly. Sighing deeply, he said, “Maybe even the energy to be the church at all.”

This was too big of a statement for me to process. I tried to step back. “What’s the depression over?”

“That’s the thing,” he continued. “It’s like depression usually does: it doesn’t have a clear cause. You don’t know why, but you just can’t find the get-up. The world feels silent and bland. And you don’t know why. There may be something that triggers it, but it’s just a current pulling you to the bottom, making you too tired to fight to get to the surface.”

I’m in his North Dakota town to speak to a large gathering of young Methodist people. I arrived one day early to meet with some local pastors. His church hosted the conversation. He met me at the door, taking me on a tour of his church building. By any measure, it’s beautiful, wearing every mark of vibrancy.

We started in the brand-new wing, opened just months earlier. After peeking into the shiny youth room, we moved across the hall to a warm fireside room with leather couches and a decked-out kitchenette. Then we moved to the gym, lit by the late-October sunshine spilling in from a dozen large windows.

The gym echoed with the laughter of about two dozen four-year-olds. They were slowly placing a large parachute on the ground, finishing their game. As the parachute gently hit the floor, they all rushed past us, beelining for the wall behind us, searching for water bottles covered in cartoon characters to quench their little thirsts. Running past us, as though we were invisible, a little girl said, as much to the universe as to anyone, “Now that was great!” We laughed with delight. We stood there a few seconds in silence just absorbing the joy and energy of all the little ones before moving on with our tour.

We passed more classrooms filled with more three and four-year-olds. I was told that the congregation ran the largest preschool in town. The walls of the spacious narthex were filled with posters and information sheets of trips, programs, and outings. We looked through the window into the enormous sanctuary. The pastor told me that their worship attendance was about five hundred a week. At the end of the tour, moving toward the pastor’s office, we passed through a narrow hallway filled with office doors. I read the name plaques on the doors: Associate Pastor, Director of Children’s Ministry, Youth Director, Minister of Music, and even another Associate Pastor.

Hours later, sitting across from this pastor over lunch, I’m shocked that he would describe this seemingly vibrant church as depressed. There was no deferred maintenance, no budget shortage, no lack of young families or staff. And yet he used the word “depressed.”

Here at Cowboy Cal’s Steakhouse in North Dakota, there was no mistaking it for Manhattan or any coastal city. The bright orange vests on half the customers and the talk of pheasant hunts signaled quickly that this was flyover country, far from the coasts, in a place red enough to burn, where guns and civic religion are both loved.

Yet this North Dakota congregation, insulated from the supposed liberal ethos that undercuts the civic importance of religion, was as depressed as any declining city church in Philadelphia, according to its pastor.

“But you worship with five hundred people a week?” I said, a little incredulous.

“True, but three years ago, when we started the capital campaign for that new addition, it was over six hundred. We’re still raising the last 10 percent of that project.”

We paused as our sandwiches arrived.

“But that’s not really the issue,” he continued. “For the most part, people still show up on Sunday morning. But to get them to care or invest in anything else is impossible. We’ve tried everything.”

“Prozac?” I responded, reminding myself to keep my sarcastic sense of humor in check. Luckily he laughed.

“Wow, that would be perfect: congregational Prozac!” he said. “I wonder if they could drip it into our coffeemakers.”

I was now sure we could be good friends.

“I only laugh to keep from crying,” he continued. “Personally, Prozac probably saved my life. But I’ve tried the equivalent of congregational Prozac. I’ve tested all sorts of meds on this church. We’ve done the small group discipleship thing, the family thing, the church movement thing—we started a new church across town that we can no longer fund—and even the missional thing. As the political climate changed I even did the prophetic justice thing. I felt like I had to, my conscience called for it. That wasn’t easy in this community. But I couldn’t keep up. I’m not even sure what I was trying to keep up with, but I couldn’t. People in my church feel it too. We talk about falling behind, about needing change—it’s all we discuss at our regional meetings—but no one seems to know what that change needs to be. And worse, I’m convinced no one has the energy. To be honest, I’m not sure if the lack of knowing what to do creates the depression or if the depression creates the inability to do anything.”

He was on a roll now.

“I mean, these should be exciting times. Everyone knows we need change. But instead of creating energy, it creates depression.”

The silence that now fell between the two of us felt much different than it did in the church gym among the joy of the children. That silence in the gym was full and open. This one was dull and confusing.

“All of those approaches were helpful. But in the end we’d just slide back into this depressive state, this inability to be any more than a church that shows up on Sunday morning. This congregation is essentially a country club, and I can’t break that mentality. I don’t think it’s because these are bad or selfish people. They’re lovely. As a church, we’re just depressed.”

Depression’s Backstory

Parisian sociologist Alain Ehrenberg made a provocative argument in his late 1990s book La fatigue d’être soi: Dépression et société, which was mostly unknown in the English-speaking world until it was translated and published in 2016 under the title The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age. In this book, the sociologist argues that depression is an ailment of speed, the feeling of not being able to keep up.

Like Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, Ehrenberg’s project is a genealogy. As we’ve seen in the first two volumes of this Ministry in a Secular Age series, Taylor’s genealogy traces modernity’s movement into unbelief. Exploring our cultural history, Taylor shows how it was possible for us to produce a world in which God is assumed to be absent, unbelief is easy, and the transcendent song of existence is deafeningly quiet. Taylor shows us the genes that produce this kind of world.

Ehrenberg is also interested in tracing our cultural history. Particularly, he’s interested in how modernity’s unfolding has produced distinct forms of mental illness. Ehrenberg wants to show us how these distinct forms tell us something important about modernity itself. Mental illness isn’t an oddity in the project of modernity, something completely disconnected and periphery to its pursuits. Mental ailments and the way we diagnose and treat them unveil something central about the pursuits of modernity itself. Mental ailments are the canary in the mineshaft of modernity.

The story Ehrenberg traces is how each of the three stages of modernity—early (broadly the eighteenth century), high (nineteenth century into the first half of the twentieth), and late (the second half of the twentieth century)—has produced its own ailments. We’ve shifted from madness to hysteria to despondency. In early modernity, our pursuits for reason led to a radical redefinition of the odd. The socially esoteric, those shouting warnings and living under bridges, were no longer demoniacs or secret sages, or even angels or Jesus himself, whom we owe alms. In the medieval era (premodern, pre-1500s), such people had a place in the economy of salvation and the pursuit of virtue. But not in modernity. Rather, the blessed poor were now mad, overtaken by madness, unable to keep pace with reason.

In high modernity this shifted. The mad could still be spotted, but now the hysterical revealed something important about modernity. The need for the duties of politeness, manners, and all things proper was heavy. Even the death of a child, for the elite class, shouldn’t upend your proper appearances. The proper was now tied to a speed engine, a modern economy. The need to order a happy private life so one could compete in a public arena of commerce was essential. Trying to hold everything together amid the pain of loss cracked many, leading to episodes of hysteria, frantic crying, screaming, or trancelike muttering. The hysterical person needed direct treatment because that person’s breakdown spilled from the private space into the public. The treatment for such bouts was hospitalization—being placed in a private, enclosed institution away from the rush of public life. The hysterical needed to go away, even away from the private home, to get well. Whether madness or hysteria, it was now assumed to be a sickness. The hope was that you could treat hysteria like you could a broken leg.1

Psychology as we know it—particularly its Freudian or post-Freudian veins—has its origin in the diagnoses and treatments of mainly “hysterical” women. The nineteenth century, with its sexist disposition, seemed to do something to the human psyche, causing especially women to go into fits of hysteria. In hospitals in Paris, mostly women were admitted for being hysterical. Young Freud, in Paris training to be a doctor, was assigned these patients as part of his rounds. He discovered, to state it simply, that it was often the hidden obsessions that afflicted the hysterical. These obsessions weighed them down, producing a psychosis that kept them from reaching the speed of normal modern life, being able to marry and work, being a proper wife and keeper of the private space. Psychoanalysis had both its birth and its heyday in dealing with how the conditions of high modernity created hysteria. Psychiatry, on the other hand, would have its golden era in our late-modern times.

The Fatigue to Be Me

The pressure that produced hysteria gave way to something else in late modernity. Ehrenberg shows convincingly that while there were antecedents, such as melancholy (something Luther battled), it wasn’t until the 1970s that hysteria was replaced by the late-modern mental ailment of depression. In high modernity the anxiety produced by the modern world could crack you, leading to bouts of hysterical crying and screaming. Sometimes it looked like madness. But in late modernity the issue became despondency, a feeling that you just couldn’t find the energy to keep pace.

The title of Ehrenberg’s book, La fatigue d’être soi, translates as “the fatigue of being yourself.” Depression in late modernity is a fatigue with no direct outward cause. It is the feeling, born within yourself, that you just don’t have the energy to be yourself. If it gets too heavy, you can become too fatigued to be at all. Suicide is no longer an act solely done under the shadow of lost societal esteem. For example, a person’s bold action loses people’s hard-earned fortunes in a crashing stock market. The failure of this bold action leads to another bold act, convincing that person to leap from a bridge in the shame of failure. Bold action causes a bold act. In late modernity, what pushes someone into suicidal ideation has largely shifted. Most often it’s not the feeling of a failed bold action but rather a s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1: Depressed Congregations
• Part 2: Examining Congregational Despondency; Our Issue Is Time
• Part 3: Moving from Relevance to Resonance
• Index
• Back Cover