Turning Ourselves Inside Out

Thriving Christian Communities

Russell Daye, Robert C. Fennell

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506470023
• eBook ISBN: 9781506470030
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Turning Ourselves Inside Out emerges from the Thriving Christian Communities Project started by the authors in 2015, as well as from a Facebook conversation where someone asked, "We always hear about the problems in our churches. When are we going to talk about the good news stories?" This got the authors thinking: How do we learn about what is exciting and what the Holy Spirit is doing? How do we broaden the conversation beyond how sad, afraid, and grumpy we often are as church people?

These kinds of questions filled the authors' imaginations as they scouted out the long walking route of Camino Nova Scotia, the pilgrimage program offered by Atlantic School of Theology. The long hours walking together gave them space and peace to think more broadly about what they wanted to learn, and how to share it with the wider church.

In interviews with thirty-five faith communities, the authors discovered that amid great upheaval, Christ is giving us a new church, and this book offers readers a firsthand glimpse of it. Turning Ourselves Inside Out isn't an "off the shelf" program or model. It invites readers to listen to others' experiences and then dig deep into their own and get down to the business of dreaming God's dream and making it real, right where they are. Leaders of congregations, and all who care about what God is up to in the world, need to hear these stories. They are a source of hope and courage, as God renews and revives God's people.

1

When the Storms and Fires Come to the Forest

To appreciate the power of thriving Christian communities in the mainline context, we have to be honest about the backdrop against which they stand out. We need to see the dominant experience of the mainline church clearly. Such clear seeing can help us shake the negative energy from our souls and toss away the collected baggage. It can free us to be inspired and moved to action by the counternarrative and by churches that shine in the midst of so much shadow.

Some years ago, a department of the United Church of Canada organized a consultation on the future directions of the church. A senior executive from a large bank was at this consultation and asked about the collective value of all United Church of Canada property, including the thousands of local church buildings around the country. When she received the answer and learned that the figure added up to billions of dollars, she responded, “Well, I know your problem: You don’t believe in your mission.” Her implication was that if United Church of Canada people really believed in their mission, they would liberate much of that money to support renewal and innovation. She’s right. How can it be that the mainline has become stuck in this way? The financial assets frozen in so many emptying buildings are like a quantifiable manifestation of our frozenness of spirit. What is going on?

The Forest and Its Fires

The forest and forest fires are metaphors that inform this book, for they have given us as authors a way of understanding what is going on. Some time ago, looking for a quiet space to do some writing for this book, Russ rented a cabin at a retreat center in Nova Scotia called Windhorse Farm. One day, Jim Drescher, cofounder of Windhorse, dropped by for a coffee and a chat. He shared the following true story:

My family has been going camping on the same land in Northwestern Colorado for generations. It is near the north and west forks of the Elk River. In 1997, a windstorm tore through the land, flattening all the trees in a swath of destruction hundreds of yards wide. It was very strange: the boundaries of the destruction were very clearly demarked, and the trees beyond were untouched. That was the first calamity. Most of the wood up there was pine. All the dead pine in this ribbon of devastation became a haven for pine beetles, which exploded in number and then spread into the surrounding forests, killing pine all around. That was calamity number two. Of course, all this dead wood made these hills particularly vulnerable to forest fire, and in 2007, there was a great fire that burned over the whole area. Calamity number three.

This area may never come back the way it was, or it may take hundreds of years to repopulate with pine as it was before. And some species may take thousands of years. But the forest is coming back. The first species that is starting to thrive is not pine, but aspen, because aspen lives mostly underground. Aspen reproduces from its roots. One can gaze upon whole hills of aspen, covering square miles, and all one sees can be essentially one tree, with the same DNA, because all the trees have sprung from the same root system. While it looked like all the aspens were killed, they were very much alive underground.

What also survived underground and out of sight was the mycelia. This is the vast system of fungus that lives under a forest, carrying both the intelligence and the nutrients for that forest. As I said, the forest may not look the same for hundreds of years, if ever, but it will live! The underground ecology of fungus and roots has already spawned remarkable growth. It will continue with its new assortment of species and find its new balance.

Jim then described how he is letting this “forest teaching” shape how he sees the current crisis within the spiritual community of which he has been a part for a half century: the Shambhala Buddhist community. Shambhala had exploded with controversy as multiple accusations of sexual harassment and assault were leveled against its global leader. He doesn’t know if Shambhala will ever look the same and isn’t sure it should ever look the same. This crisis may give the Shambhala “ecosystem” a chance to renew itself without patriarchy. What Jim does know, however, is that Shambhala will reform and live on in some other way. He has this confidence because of his half century in the mycelium and roots systems of Shambhala, in the deep teachings and practice that carry intelligence and nutrients. He knows that the mycelium is even now sending up shoots of new life.

Acute crises like the Shambhala scandal and chronic crises like the collapses we have seen in mainline-liberal Christianity each have their own kinds of pain and hope, their advantages and disadvantages. In acute crises, the pain is so sharp and the fear so great that the levels of suffering are extreme. But these very same factors provide a powerful motivation to be honest about the problems, seek responses, and deploy all of a community’s resources to bring about reformation. Chronic crises involve lower levels of suffering, but the suffering extends over a longer period of time. The pain slowly creeps in, causing the suffering community to contract and constrict the flow of energy. Much of this happens below the level of awareness because of the slow speed and the small increments of change. By the time most people are prepared to admit that there is a crisis, the community’s capacity to respond to it has been diminished. But there is also an advantage here. In a long-term chronic crisis, there are usually early perceivers and innovators, prophetic individuals who have been naming the emergency and experimenting with creative responses long before most people were prepared to listen to them. We met some of these early perceivers and innovators as we researched this book.

Today, the crisis in the mainline church is doubly difficult and doubly full of opportunity because it is both chronic and acute. The liberal church has passed through its early windstorms, through the spreading of pine beetles and rot throughout its ecosystem, and has been burned over by what feels like a great cultural forest fire. After a half century of chronic decline, the levels of pain and fear have now become acute. Here is some good news: a significant number of prophetic individuals and faith communities have been functioning like mycelia. They have descended into the deep teachings and practices of our tradition and are carrying nutrients and intelligence for the church. There has been an underground movement of truth telling and experimentation. Faith communities well suited to the realities of the current ecology of religion in our culture have been springing up like aspen. And they are thriving, adapting, springing up from the roots. They are like the pine cones that require a forest fire before they can open up and disperse their seeds.1

When we are burned down to our roots, a new opportunity emerges. Under the dead branches and various bits and pieces that have become inert—now all burned away—we get to revisit deeply rooted things. There is so much wisdom, power, insight, and hope buried in the Christian mycelia. There is the courage of the early churches that faced authorities violently hostile to them. There is the genius of the early evangelists, like Paul, who learned how to articulate the gospel in the language of the cultures through which they passed. There is the diversity of our first centuries as churches grew organically in places like Palestine, Syria, Greece, Asia Minor, Rome, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Libya, taking myriad forms. Ancient spiritual practices were honed in these churches and the monasteries that they birthed. There is the otherworldly insight of mystics like Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart, the empathy and honesty of Francis of Assisi. There is the brilliance of our theologians, each finding a way to use the intellectual models of their time, who have carried on an uninterrupted conversation from Augustine to Aquinas to Luther to Schleiermacher to Barth to Bonhoeffer to Tillich to Day to Moltmann to Gutiérrez to Cone to Ruether to McFague to Sugirtharajah to Kwok. There is the inseparable entanglement of prayer and protest that empowered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders. And there are the gospel encounters of non-Christians like Gandhi, who was so inspired by the Sermon on the Mount.

All the nourishment and genius of this heritage awaits churches that will dig down through the deadwood and ashes of institutional religion. Indeed, the existential ground of Christ’s presence, the Community of Heaven, which is both formless and capable of taking infinite forms, awaits them.2 In the following chapters, we will sojourn with faith communities and leaders who have revisited Christianity’s deep things. With the nutrients and the intelligence they have found there, these communities have fostered real vitality in the church, and they are spreading their roots, transforming our underground ecology so that new life may spring up in the contemporary ecosystem of religion and spirituality. They are surprising us by living and finding new ways to live. Death and decline are not their inevitable identity.

But let’s stay for a moment with the windstorms, infestations, and fires that have burned over most of the mainline church. An honest look at the scorched earth is needed to understand the challenges innovative churches face in this time and is required for us to know the context in which the genius of the Christian mycelia will have to be applied.

The Drive toward Death

Sigmund Freud, in his influential work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, identified a “death instinct” or “death drive” in the human psyche.3 Earlier in his career, Freud had identified a powerful “life drive,” which he called Eros. He saw this fundamental life force working in human creativity, reproduction, and vocation. Later, working with patients who had suffered traumatic experiences, he witnessed them returning over and over again to those experiences, causing themselves great pain. Freud’s followers came to name the death drive Thanatos. Thanatos also can be a force in patients who have repressed painful experiences. This repression fosters what Freud called a “pressure towards death.”

We believe that the mainline church today has its own form of Thanatos. It is a death drive that makes the church toxic and unappealing to the wider society of the United States and Canada. It hastens decline. We see Thanatos played out in church decision-making bodies that exhaust themselves fighting about issues of secondary importance. We see it in congregations that use their last resources clinging to old ways for tiny remnants instead of risking new ways of living the faith. We see it in the resentment directed toward the counterexample churches that actually do find a way to thrive in these hard times. It’s true: when a congregation is doing well and finding new ways to thrive, sometimes other congregations get snippy and envious, bad-mouthing their siblings in Christ who are just trying to be as faithful as they can. Why is it so hard for us to celebrate and give thanks for the fresh energy they bring? Thanatos is an energy that underlies the negativity.

Even those churches that have things to celebrate and can offer a narrative of affirmation find it hard to do so because they float in the sea of the larger, toxic, Thanatos-consumed church. They fear the day when the poison waters will lap at their shores.

This is a painful time for the mainline church. There is so much grief. There are so many empty pews. When you visit almost any congregation today, you are more likely to hear a story of loss or complaint than one of faith or mission. How many times have you heard (or said) sentences that begin like this?

• “I remember a time when . . .”
• “Young people just don’t . . .”
• “I don’t know how much longer . . .”
• “We’ve already tried that, and it didn’t work . . .”

The decline of the Christian church is well documented.4 It has been hashed out in church councils and colleges ad nauseam—sometimes even literally to the point of nausea. This decline has advanced to a stage at which it has become an active, self-strengthening force. Freud’s diagnosis of the “death drive” is paradoxically alive and well. There is an expression: “Energy follows attention.” We become that upon which we focus. When we become obsessed with what’s wrong, we become part of what’s wrong. We have trouble seeing anything else.

The Challenge of Scientific Materialism

There are many reasons for the growth of this death drive. Rejection by a materialist culture that seems to embody so many values antithetical to the gospel makes liberal Christians wonder if their spiritual expressions really are irremediably flawed. The society around us seems to value rationalized leadership and to suspect charismatic leadership—leadership that is itself led by the gifts of the Holy Spirit. We seem to have too few successes in our social gospel campaigns and our efforts toward social transformation. The empirical spirit of the age wants “results” and statistics, but the soul work of faithful Christians doesn’t lend itself easily to such a paradigm. And there is more we could say on this. But we have come to see two great causes for the growth of Thanatos standing out above the others. We believe that renewal stands a much better chance if we look these two causes squarely in the eye and confront them. They are, first, a surrender to the scientific materialist worldview of Western society and, second, a guilt-laden denial concerning our role in colonialism. Let’s take a brief look at each of these—not to wallow in them but to see our sickness clearly so that we can find strong medicine in the stories of hope that fill the remaining pages of this book. The future of what we once called mainline churches may depend on finding this medicine and healing ourselves, and welcoming the Spirit’s healing, from what looks more and more like two serious errors, or even apostasies.

The book Beyond Physicalism opens with these words:

The rise of modern science has brought with it increasing acceptance among intellectual elites of a picture of reality that conflicts sharply both with everyday human experience and with beliefs widely shared among the world’s great cultural traditions. A particularly stark but influential early statement of the emerging picture came from philosopher Bertrand Russell: “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of Man’s achievements must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. . . .” There can be no doubt that this bleak vision continues to dominate mainstream scientific thinking and has contributed to the “disenchantment” of the modern world with all its multifarious attendant ills.5

This worldview, which is sometimes called physicalism, scientific realism, or scientific materialism, has come to dominate the educational and cultural institutions of Europe and North America and is rising in its impact on other parts of the world. It also has come to dominate the mainline church, even if we pretend otherwise. A good exercise for anyone who wants to gain insight into the extent to which the mainline church has absorbed the worldview of scientific materialism and allowed “disenchantment” to creep in is to spend some time with a charismatic or Pentecostal church. Recently Russ was doing that, as an independently networked charismatic church6 has moved into the building owned by the congregation he served, sharing the space. This charismatic church is made up mostly of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. Joining them for worship, one is struck by the amount of prayer and the intensity of prayer, as well as both the content and tenor of the preaching and of the singing. Leaders and worshippers demonstrate a passionate belief that God is an active agent in their lives! God is not some theoretical entity that may in some subtle way be watching and imperceptibly influencing events in the world, which seems to be the most common depiction of divine agency one will hear in most mainline churches today. Members of this charismatic church show up with a palpable hunger for encounter with the Spirit and are open to having their lives melted down and remolded by that encounter. They earnestly believe that their hurts can be healed and that healing often actually occurs. They believe that they will be given energy to live the often-challenging lives of immigrants, and they are energized. They believe that money will flow into their church (and its overseas mission projects), and it does. They believe that they will grow, and they do. This congregation has grown tenfold in the last decade. The pastor of this church has a PhD in engineering, and many members have postsecondary education. They have spent time in educational institutions that propagate the worldview of scientific materialism, but they have not internalized that worldview. They don’t allow it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Get Going!
• 1. When the Storms and Fires Come to the Forest
• 2. Starting with “Yes!”: The Virtue of Hope
• 3. Learning and Spiritual Growth: The Virtue of Humility
• 4. Openhearted Leadership: The Virtue of Love
• 5. Willingness to Risk: The Virtue of Courage
• 6. A Sense of Identity: The Virtue of Integrity
• 7. Willingness to Be Turned Inside Out: The Virtue of Kenosis
• Afterword: Supernova or Black Hole?
• Appendix 1: Questions Asked at Interviews with Thriving Christian Communities
• Appendix 2: A Four-Week Study and Discussion Process: Exploring Descent, Renewal, and Reemergence
• Notes
• Bibliography