(Editor’s Note: The following article was written on 1 November 2044 by Eutychus Bailey, author and former North American pastor.  Because of amazingly quick internet access and the exponential growth of micro-processing speeds, we are now able to publish this column forty years before it was actually written.  This gives us the chance to get an unknowingly futurist perspective on where things are heading from this pragmatist writer observing his own times.)

 

1 November 2044 Eutychus Report:

 

Ministry Babies and Modernity Bathwater

 

As I look back over the past 40 or 50 years of ministry since the beginning of the 21^st century I’ve seen a lot of changes in The Church, Church Life and Ministry in general.  It has adapted and grown and moved with the leading of the Spirit.  Many things have drawn us back to what we think the church should have always been.  Some things have challenged us to be what the church has never been but God was leading us to be.  Almost all of these changes have, in the end, served the Body of Christ and given glory to God. 

 

I think there are a few things, however, which we lost and are now looking for.  These are the things that, had we known, we would have rescued from the burning towers of modernity in some form.  They were like children left to the flames that we would have been wise to save—and raise up as our own.  But unfortunately they are the Orphans of the Postmodern Shift.  They may have been poorly tended by the prior age—which made us loathe to take them under our wing.  But they were worth saving, and something in us left them to their fate in history.

 

Today we find ourselves hoping to rediscover some of these things, and I wish we hadn’t throw out these ministry babies with the modernity bathwater:

 

LEADERSHIP

 

We don’t value leadership in general in the mid-century church.  The emerging church had many “leaders” in its early stages.  But many things made us very suspect of leadership in general.  We felt like leaders in modernity were the problem, not the solution.  Leaders were manipulators – not saviors.  Leaders were not to be trusted.  Therefore—when churches and movements were in need of leaders we preferred not to be called that.  We tried other words to mean “leader” but few of them caught on.  Eventually, we were leaderless.  This was fine with most of us.  We thought it was all about community anyway—not leadership.  So without leaders we were able to function completely organically… with Christ as the Head, and the rest of us just following him.  The problem is that in our search for a community of leadership we actually created committee of laziness.  We’re in dire need of leaders today—but we don’t value leadership enough to call people to it, or aspire to it ourselves.  We tossed out the leadership baby with the modernity bathwater.

 

CALLING

 

Yes – we were skeptical about leadership.  But we were just as skeptical about “The Call to Ministry.”  Historically—there has been a huge tradition behind the idea of the call.  However, we were very skeptical about people’s stories of God calling them.  If they were somewhat mystical, we would wonder if it was exaggerated.  If they were somewhat mundane, we would wonder if they just did it because they wanted to.  We explained away the call.  We also raised the bar on “everyone a minister.”  This in and of itself was a wonderful thing – a continuation of Great Reformation philosophy.  However, many of us simply downgraded what a “Minister” does to what other people doing “ministry” do.  In this case, it looked like we were elevating “ministry” when in fact we were downgrading “The Ministry” to make it look comparable to everyone else.  But we were opposed to anyone thinking of themselves as “higher” in the order of the Church—so we tossed out the idea of Calling.  We loved to quote G. B. Shaw: “Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.”  But in a church that prided itself on “getting back to 1^st century values” and “following the biblical way of life” we tossed out something that the early church was founded upon and thrived with, and the Bible is perhaps a long record of: God calling men and women for specific roles of ministry and authority.  We tossed out the calling baby with the modernity bathwater.

 

EFFECTIVENESS

 

If we were skeptical about leadership and calling—we were diametrically opposed to people that wore their success on their sleeves.  The firstfruits of this trend lie in my generation.  Growing up under the long shadow of the boomers in the last century—their self-centered narcissism and our self-conscious phobias clashed during the birth of Postmodernity.  We began to cast a pall over anything that appeared “successful” but that we presumed was empty.  We claimed that just because something was large, well-attended, or well-known didn’t make it effective.  So we changed the playing field.  We tossed out things like numbers (how many came, how many received Christ, baptisms, confirmations, whatever) and headed out to embrace a new way of evaluating our effectiveness.  We imagined a church that would value what the early church valued.  We thought we might just discover a more ethical and humble way to see if we were really doing what God wanted us to do.  The problem is that we never found that new way of evaluating our effectiveness.  We’re still on the journey today.  We’ve embraced nothing—because every way to evaluate was seen as a way to dominate.  Our false humility left us in a lurch of our own making.  We couldn’t determine if what we were doing was “working” or not.  We’d tell stories, or explain models, or write down ideas.  And some of the trendy things passed for a while on making us feel effective: our web-sites were gnarly, our pastors became pseudo-consultants or speakers, our churches were hip adaptations of other buildings, our services were odd, fun and relational.  We stood out.  But all those things were just more window-dressing that were no more biblical and first-century than the previous counterparts we rebelled against.  Unfortunately, when we demanded new ways to measure but came up with no consensus, we tossed out the effectiveness baby with the modernity bathwater.

 

RESOURCING

 

In a related problem, we found ourselves unwilling to resource the larger church or the movements we were a part of.  There was a general distaste for churches that dominated the early-century scene, like Saddleback and Willow Creek.  And part of why there was a distaste for them is that they resourced us to death.  You could buy, buy, buy at every conference and all over the web-site.  Those churches seemed like local church versions of Maxwell’s Merchandizing Machine to us.  So we swung the pendulum to the other end.  If we were to help another church out with resources, we wouldn’t charge for them.  It would be a complete sharing type of thing.  And it would be more authentic – less flashy.  Of course, this didn’t work for long.  Eventually we realized we were spending too much time resourcing other churches with unpaid work that didn’t feed our children.  We turned back to our own situations, and just did our own thing, which we justified as being more local church minded.  We also stopped buying from the big time resource companies.  But this was a crucial change.  We became isolated.  Each church would be doing such radically different things that when people moved from place to place (as they have increasingly so every decade this century) there was no unifying style or direction to the church.  They just faded away because of that.  And we also became ingrown—we were using our “own” stuff so much that we weren’t influenced by experienced outside ministries.  Today we are resource-deficient.  And it’s because we tossed out the resourcing baby with the modernity bathwater.

 

VISION

 

Predictably, we also didn’t like “vision-casting.”  We saw vision casting as “manipulative communication.”  We thought we had seen behind the curtain enough to know that vision casting nearly always had to do with hidden agendas.  We thought it was always conveniently focused on the “3 B’s” – more buildings, budgets or butts in the seats.  So we tossed out vision-casting.  It was too icky for us to do.  The problem is we forgot that “without vision the people perish.”  And so many are perishing around us because we haven’t offered a compelling vision of where we’re going as churches.  All too often we remain small fringe entities that are not going anywhere and aren’t actually depopulating hell in the end.  We might have relanguaged vision into something we could do and not destroy our Pomo Ethos.  Instead, we just tossed out the vision baby with the modernity bathwater.

 

RESPONSIBILITY

 

We valued authenticity like no church before us.  We loved to hear how people really felt.  How they were really doing.  What they weren’t doing that they should.  We thrived on the down and dirty truth.  We loved this in our leaders more than anything.  Often times, our pastors portrayed themselves as being the biggest slackers in the whole church.  This was all innocent enough at first—but it had an unpredicted side-effect.  With our authentic sharing we also lost our sense of responsibility for anything.  In our lifestyle, our work, and our ministry, we began to think: “it’s all right, I’ll just tell people I was a dork and didn’t do it.”  Or we’d sin and think, “well, I’ll just confess and say I messed up—it’ll be good for people to know their pastor’s are not perfect.  It’ll even be a good story to tell.”  Overall, we started to lose our sense of being responsible for what we did and didn’t do.  This is a real problem today in the mid-century church, because no one is taking responsibility for what the church is, and what it is becoming.  We tossed out the responsibility baby with the modernity bathwater.

 

TRANSFORMATION

 

We’ve always been suspect of the “lines in the sand” that were used in the past.  Coming down to the altar.  Raising a hand.  Confirmation.  Infant baptism.  Signing up for Jesus on a card.  These all seemed like manipulations to us.  Faked outward signs that we vested too much value in.  And we were sick of people “making the commitment” or “praying the prayer” and not living it.  Hypocrisy!  It offended our sensibilities.  So we tried it a different way.  Instead of “praying the prayer” people would “start the spiritual journey.”  Instead of “coming down to the altar” people were asked to join in the Eucharist or hammer a nail into a cross.  Instead of signing up for Jesus on a card we would ask them to discuss their spiritual lives in groups.  But in changing the entire process into just a process (with no turning points, only curves) it became very hard to know if anyone was really changing.  We again removed the measurements of Christianity.  It’s one thing to stop boasting about our attendance… but now our believers could not even boast in Christ.  Our extreme spiritualized humility made us toss assurance, conversion and a point of salvation out the window.  And while we no longer could really tell if someone was changed—we could, however, still tell whether they showed up.  And in a twisted logic it all became about attendance again.  We might not be bragging about it.  But whether someone is “with” us is all that counts anymore.  We tossed out the transformation baby with the modernity bathwater.

 

MULTIPLICATION

 

We leaders of the postmodern church are like bonsai tree keepers.  Each of us has meticulously planted and trimmed and shaped our perfect little churches and ministries.  We know every bend and curve of our little trees.  Even their imperfections look to us like beauty.  We know them intimately.  And others appreciate and admire them.  They look at them and wonder if they might keep a bonsai church themselves in some city they love or dream about loving.  But what we missed was the idea of reproducing these bonsai trees.  They’re nice in and of themselves in many ways – but when we tossed out our sense of leadership the movement wasn’t led.  When we tossed out the idea of calling we couldn’t call people to be missionaries – and were satisfied to have them stay local.  When we tossed out effectiveness we could no longer judge whether other cities and countries were being reached for Christ – so we lost our motivation to reproduce.   When we tossed out resourcing no one else knew how to do what we had done.  When we tossed out vision we restricted what God wanted to do by reproducing our churches for a greater harvest.  When we tossed out responsibility we forgot about the cities and countries next door and only focused on our own.  When we tossed out transformation we stopped sending people out – since they were still “on the journey” with us.  So unfortunately we have a lot of expert postmodern bonsai tree keepers who love their little trees completely—but aren’t doing much to reach the fields, which are still as white unto harvest as ever.  We tossed out the multiplication baby with the modernity bathwater.

 

Here in the year 2044 as I look back at the start of Postmodern Church life, we tossed out way too many great young babies with the modernity bathwater.  That bathwater was so dirty and inauthentic and greedy that we needed to toss it.  But in our haste and carelessness we lost some of the things that count most in the Church Christ intends as his Bride.

 

 

 

Past Eutychus Reports:

 

Conference in the Empty Super-Church

The Present War and the Bush Doctrine

I Used to Be Pro-Life

Voting on a “Traditional” Pastor

 

Born in 1974, Dr. Eutychus D. Bailey served as a pastor in the early decades of the 21^st century.  He “now” writes a column on the state of the mid-century church & culture which is being retrieved by us from the future because of recent technological advances enabling us to retrieve his articles 40 years before they are published.  Depending on your time-travel ISP speed, you may be able to reach the old codger by e-mailing him at [email protected].