Structured for Mission

Renewing the Culture of the Church

Alan J. Roxburgh

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780830844241
• eBook ISBN:
  9780830898589
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

The church is living in a time of massive, unprecedented change. Traditional institutions and structures are unraveling in response to rapid social, demographic and economic developments. The existing ways of being the church are no longer meaningful to many. How should the church respond?Many seek to address this situation by tweaking the established institutions, finding new structures, reorganizing congregations or renewing long-established practices. Some even argue that we need to abandon structures and institutions altogether. We regularly hear proposals for missional churches, organic churches, simple churches, fresh expressions churches and so on.Alan Roxburgh argues that we need to look deeper. Structures embody the core narratives that shape how people see the world. We cannot simply replace old institutions with new ones. We need to examine the underlying stories, metaphors and cultures that give organizations their meaningfulness. Thecrisis of the church today is a crisis not of institution but of imagination.In Structured for Mission, Roxburgh challenges the church to become a place where people are empowered to reimagine their religious life and experiment with new ways of being the church in a local context. We are living in a brave new world. Will the church be ready?

Part One

1

The Place of Structures in the Midst of Massive Change

Introduction: Three Structures, Three Stories

Structures are a common part of our everyday lives. You are likely reading this book sitting at home, in an office or at a coffee shop. Each is a building structured to address a certain set of habits and practices that shape our lives. These buildings house our different roles. We usually take them for granted. They’ve always been there for us. Structures are, however, rich containers and shapers of meaning for us. Take, for example, figures 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3. The cathedral (fig. 1.1), high-rise (fig. 1.2) and suburb (fig. 1.3) each express a different story about how communities of people in different times structured their lives. The cathedral takes us back to the Middle Ages, the high-rise represents the heyday of modernism in urban architecture, and the suburb reflects the dominant way in which most of us live today.

Each of these three structures tells its own story about what the people in each of these periods believed was important for their thriving together. The cathedral lay at the center of a society. Its structure told the story of the Christian narrative and the human journey. In its shadow people were formed inside a story about how life was best lived. The high-rise came to dominate urban landscapes at the beginning of the twentieth century. It represented a totally different story about how we thrive as communities. It was the rationalized, planned living space designed for efficiency through the separation of work, commerce and private lives. Finally, the suburb embodies yet another vastly different story about how we thrive.

Figure 1.1. The cathedral

Its structuring is about the individual as the center of all meaning; it connotes independence, self-development and autonomy.

Three structures. Each created inside very different stories about how human beings thrive. Structures are the embodiment of meaning. They are the ways we take wood, stone, glass, steel, concrete, plastic or an organizational chart and form them to express our deepest convictions about what is important in life and how we believe life is made to work. There is nothing neutral or taken for granted about structures.

Figure 1.2. The high-rise

We are in a time when many long-established forms of church life are unraveling. Figure 1.4, for example, is of a church in a West Coast neighborhood where more people describe their religious affiliation as “none” than attend churches. Back in the middle of the twentieth century when someone passed this structure, he or she would have been completely at home identifying what it meant and its place in his or her life. Today that happens far less! Now it symbolizes a quaint structure people pass on their way to somewhere else; it’s mostly a structure from the past few remember.

Figure 1.3. The suburb

The temptation is to think that the primary cause for this unraveling is existing structures. With this assumption in place it seems reasonable to believe that by creating new structures or restructuring existing forms the problem will be solved. This is why, over the past half-century, we have seen multiple proposals for remaking the church. But what if there is something else going on? Perhaps we need to understand why and how we create and become committed to certain structures in order to discern how to address the unraveling? If we take the time to ask about the reasons for the structures we have created, as well as the alternative ones we propose to take the place of existing structures, perhaps we can discern the ways the Spirit is gestating new life in the midst of current institutions and structures.

Our changing situation: Unraveling. North American society is in the midst of massive change. Change is always with us and, as such, is nothing new. The character of the change we face is its speed, unpredictability and multiplicity—it’s not just one or two elements that are changing, but it seems like practically everything is up for grabs. There is an attendant recognition that many of the churches are struggling to get handles on the implications of these changes for their own identity, mission and ministry. The situation is particularly challenging for those Protestant churches that are the inheritors of the European reformations of the sixteenth century and European migrations that followed. These Eurotribal churches, until recently the dominant forms of church in North America, still represent a major form of Christian life. However, a way of being, leading and organizing the church is unraveling. The unraveling metaphor proposes that existing ways of being church are less and less able to provide meaningful ways of shaping people’s religious life.

Figure 1.4. West Vancouver United Church

The drive to address this situation is understandable. A pressing question is how to respond effectively to this situation. What are the most helpful approaches? How do the Eurotribal churches understand and engage their massive unraveling? In seeking to get bearings and find effective ways of responding, it may not be helpful to assume that the primary need is to change institutions, reframe structures or even renew long-established practices. This book explains why and proposes a different way of addressing the unraveling. To get some perspective on the challenges facing the churches, it is helpful to summarize some of the sources of the massive changes affecting our society at so many levels. What follows is not an exhaustive characterization but a selection of several areas undergoing massive transformation (there are many others, and therein is the crisis we face—the multilevel and multidimensional nature of the change) as illustrative of the challenges facing the churches and undermining so much of their current forms and practices.

Economics. Few of us would doubt that over the past several years economic foundations have been badly shaken. The result, for many, is a massive uncertainty and anxiety about their own and children’s economic future. The taken-for-granted dream that anyone who works and tries hard enough in this society can “make it” has evaporated. Even before the economic implosion of 2008 there was a restive sense that the rules of how we earn a living and secure our future were rapidly changing. Words like globalization and postindustrial had already presaged a very different and scary period for many in terms of their economic future. The ever-widening earning gap between the rich and the rest said that something was deeply out of sync with the way the economic world had worked in the recent past. The French economist Thomas Piketty’s hefty new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century undoes the myth of the trickle-down theory that enervated neo-conservative economic theory, and shows that we have entered a new era wherein wage earners will continually fall behind as the economic assumptions that shaped most of the twentieth century no longer function.

In his book The End of Growth, Jeff Rubin describes a series of powerful global forces now rearranging our assumptions about growth and therefore work. He points out that while the 2008 global recession was tough, it was more like a concussion than the real issue. These are not comforting words for most of us as we watch what was once called the middle class get ever smaller. The shape of our economic lives, and that of our children and grandchildren, is very much up for grabs. Rubin argues something is happening that’s fundamentally changing the economic realities we have lived in. He sees national governments in the West continuing to cling to the notion that we are recovering from a blip and that good times are just about ready to return. But there is a growing sense among us that something deep and fundamental has shifted. He views the basic reality we’re facing in terms of the end of growth. This is a massive disruption, since growth has been the economic assumption we have operated from. Oil is the engine driving the economies of the West. Even as the price of oil plummeted in late 2014 and will likely stay this way for a year or two, the underlying reality that oil is a limited commodity that is ever more expensive to extract will not change in the mid- to long term. These new sources of oil (deep well drilling, shale extraction, tar sands) are only viable at current cost levels. They are viable because of the current high cost of oil production and therefore are themselves contributors to the end of growth.

This scenario of the end of growth may not be the complete picture, but at this point in time it is becoming a viable explanation for the slow, imperceptible “recovery” characterizing the economies of the West. The result is the slowing of real job growth along with stagnation in real wages (adjusted to inflation). The reality for many coming out of college is the difficulty of finding work. So many entry-level jobs pay so little that they can’t begin to address educational debt and drive young adults back into their parents’ homes.

What do these economic shifts mean for being the church? This is not meant to be an economic treatise but an illustration of the massive changes contributing to the unraveling of the churches as we have known them. For multiple generations Protestant churches were successful because their members had steady, secure jobs with things like pension plans, vacations and sick days. Most of these churches were populated by the now-shrinking middle classes, most of whom had 9-to-4 jobs and weekends off. These economic realities meant that the churches were shaped by a huge reservoir of volunteerism that runs programs, as well as people with sufficient and predictable incomes to give. This world has disappeared. Emerging generations no longer have the weekends or the paid vacations or the health plans. Most young adults will have had three to five jobs by the time they reach their late thirties.1 Most of those jobs will require them to learn new skills and change their patterns of life. The world these adults now live in is no longer neatly divided between work, home life and pleasure. The competition for jobs linked with the ubiquitousness of technology means work is now a 24/7 fact of life with little time left over for anything else except one’s small coterie of friends. In the new economy there is little time left over for church and all the ways it has been programmed. Volunteerism is a luxury for the few, hardly something most can afford to give. These are massive changes across society that challenge some of the most basic ways in which the Protestant churches have operated over the past fifty or more years.

Family. When All in the Family and Archie Bunker represented the modern family in the 1970s, it pushed the edges of the “traditional” family, but all the parameters of that imagination were still firmly in place. When Cameron and Mitchell appear on the current Modern Family one knows that any pretense to some idea of a traditional family has gone. We are in new territory. Families just aren’t what they used to be. More and more young adults remain at home longer and longer because of the economic transformations noted earlier. But even more significant, there are increasing numbers of people who are living alone. One of the largest emerging demographics are people living on their own. Today, “family” has an amorphous, shifting identity in which the classic (nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and North American ideal of the nuclear family—a father, mother and 2.5 children) understanding is more like an endangered species than the norm. Fewer adults make marriage vows, greater numbers choose to live as one-parent families, blended families are normal, and children learn to live in different homes shared between parents in agreed upon legal arrangements where they have multiple sets of brothers and sisters.

The terminology of marriage and family is difficult to navigate. What does a church mean when it advertises a “Family Camp” or hires a new staff person to run a “Family Ministry” program? Church used to be one of those primary places where people met their future partners; now a significant percentage meet online through dating services, Christian or otherwise. Contemporary marriage is based more and more on voluntary commitment (rather than covenant) with fewer and fewer children. An unintended consequence is that these small units with tenuous connections to extended families and others forms of support are under huge stress from the massive economic and social changes overrunning their capacities to cope.

For a hundred or more years Protestant congregations have been built around what has come to be known as the nuclear family. The ethos, language, programs and often unexpressed assumptions of congregations are still built around this understanding of family. It is incredibly difficult for leaders to know how to navigate these treacherous waters when people are divided about what is right and what is wrong in terms of being family. Not so long ago there were straightforward formulas for running generationally segmented, family-based programs. This was the basis of a successful ministry. Today, fewer and fewer congregations can make this work when the families in their neighborhoods bear little resemblance to this imagination.

Again, the description of family is intended to be illustrative of yet another element in the massive changes moving across society. As with the economic challenge, so it is with the family challenge. The middle-class economic model of the last half of the twentieth century, upon which a whole way of being the church was designed, has all but gone. In a parallel manner, the whole edifice of being family which these churches were built around is rapidly coming apart. These Eurotribal churches are being confronted not simply with a single tough, intractable challenge, they’re confronting multiple intractable challenges all at once that question some of the most basic convictions about how a society ought to function. One further illustration will be sufficient to show how this is now the normative situation for the Eurotribal churches.

Diversity. At the beginning of the new millennium Diana Eck published a book, A New Religious America, in which she proposed that while American Protestants where engaged in their culture wars, a sea change had been underway in the diversity of religious life. She wrote,

There are more Muslim Americans than Episcopalians, more Muslims than members of the Presbyterian Church USA. . . . We are astonished to learn that Los Angeles is the most complex Buddhist city in the world. . . .

[M]ake no mistake: in the last thirty years, as Christianity has become more publicly vocal, something else of enormous importance has happened. The United States has become the most religiously diverse nation on earth.2

Several years ago Joel Kotkin wrote a book about an America that has grown from 300 million at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century to 400 million by the midpoint of the century. The origins of the peoples making up that next 100 million will not be like the majority Eurotribal people who have comprised America to this point. They will be people from Asia, the Middle East and a host of other non-European locations. America will be once more in a process of reinventing itself for this radically new geography of diversity. Some kind of hybridization of American culture will emerge that will likely look, feel and act very differently from the current tribal enclaves that have tended to shape urban growth over the past sixty or more years. Even at this point in North American history, the younger generations are increasingly multiracial in relationships. They are less and less aware of or shaped by differences of race, ethnicity, sexuality or religious preference. Already there is a pronounced shift to multirace and even multifaith marriages, a sharp turn from a more recent time when race and religion were deciding factors in the choice of a partner.

Up until the present moment Protestant congregations across North America have been predominantly monocultural groups whose programs, worship forms and ethos have been designed around the dominance of Eurotribal traditions. All of this is being challenged by the changes cataloged by Eck and Kotkin. This is not an accusation directed toward these churches, but recognition of yet one more massive, disruptive socio­cultural transformation that has to be faced. Forms of leadership, structures and institutions that have supported these churches so well for so long are now faced with yet another shaking of their foundations. Denominational structures that have shaped Protestant churches along with multiple other forms of Eurotribal church life have continually illustrated a certain kind of religious diversity among themselves. But this has largely been a diversity based on Eurotribal differences and the capacity of the various Eurotribal churches to continually find creative ways of adapting to changing contexts. The diversity described in this section is of a fundamentally different kind. It takes these churches into a new, off-the-map world. A new immigrant Christianity is emerging that will bring with it practices, values and theologies that won’t fit neatly into the notions of Christian life familiarly shaped by the European reformations in terms of their polities, theologies and forms of communal life. The Protestant churches find themselves needing to travel in yet another altered religious landscape. It represents a great opportunity. These churches have a long tradition of being remarkably adaptable. But it means navigating yet another set of changes.

In summary, existing ways of being church are less and less able to provide meaningful ways of shaping people’s religious life in these tumultuous shifts. While the drive to address this situation is understandable, the pressing questions are: How do we respond effectively? How do we underst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part One: The Loss of Place
• Part Two: Reframing Our Imagination
• Notes
• Index
• The Missional Network
• Praise for Structured for Mission
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright