Post-Christendom & Economic Recession

When I was a young fresh faced graduate from Bible College I was appointed to pastor a small Salvation Army Church in the East Midands of England. Opposite our church building, in fact dwarfing our church building, was a huge old factory that housed innumerable little businesses and textile sweatshops. It used to be the Imperial Typewriter Company. At one time Imperial was the acknowledged leader in a market that seemed to have a guaranteed future. After all, no matter what happened in the world economy, businesses were always going to employ secretaries, and secretaries would always use typewriters – wouldn’t they? It was said in that city that if you landed a job with Imperial then you had a job for life.

Today typewriters are curiosities and museum pieces. The PC killed the Imperial Typewriter Company, and consigned thousands of employees to the ranks of the jobless. Now, the question I am asking is, “Was the PC worth the loss of all those jobs?” Immediately I am reminded of the last document I produced on a typewriter. It was a dissertation at University, and every typo or spelling mistake meant I had to get a little pot of white paste and delicately paint over my mistake, then wait for it to dry, then scroll back up and try typing it again. I think any of us who have ever struggled to write letters or documents on a typewriter will agree that the pain in the Imperial Typewriter Company’s factory was worth the gain of the new technology.

Major changes of any kind produce great pain and great opportunity. If we fix our eyes on the opportunity then usually we can get over the pain. This is not to minimize the anguish of those who are the most affected by change. Those employees of the Imperial Typewriter Company found themselves jobless during an economic downturn that was far grimmer and more characterized by poverty than anything we have yet seen in this current recession. Yet how many of those workers, or their children, would really like to go back to the days before PCs, laptops, and desktop printers? Imagine if the development of the PC had been stifled by an understandable compassion and sympathy for those employed in the typewriter industry? Focusing on the gain can overcome the pain. But focusing on the pain will hinder you from ever achieving the gain!

The Church in North America is undergoing a process of change – because America itself is changing. Since 9/11, after five weeks of initially high national church attendance, people have been leaving America’s churches at a faster rate than in any period of history. Space does not permit me to go into the details or reasons for this (that is probably better done in a book than in a blog post) but the statistics are undeniable. What we are witnessing is the end of Christendom and the beginnings of a post-Christendom society in North America.

Now don’t get me wrong or go misquoting me. This is not the end of Christianity. In fact, the coming years may well see more born-again believers than ever before, and a more authentic kind of Christianity to boot. But Christendom is something quite different. Christendom is when the Church exercises a dominant influence on society. Christendom is where the Church calls the shots as to what laws get passed and even as to who gets elected. Christianity is the early Church in the Book of Acts when believers were persecuted by the State. Christendom is where the Church allied itself with the Roman Empire and the believers began persecuting everybody else.

We’ve already seen this in Europe. We’re already living and ministering in a post-Christendom society. Our version of Christendom stumbled into oblivion a couple of generations ago. Yet some of us have found post-Christendom Europe to be a very fruitful place indeed in which to live and minister. However, those churches that have learned to survive and thrive in a post-Christendom society have had to get rid of old mindsets and habits and to ministry in a new way (which actually turns out to be a very much older way).

For historical reasons America’s Christendom took a different shape than that of Europe, and lasted longer, but, make no mistake, it is now headed in the same direction as its European cousin. European Christendom developed as a hierarchical Church because it aped the surrounding political climate and structures. This should not surprise us. Any version of Christendom begins at the tipping point when the Church is no longer content to be merely in the world, but determines to be also of the world. European Christendom was a deliberate imitation of the royal households and nobility that controlled Europe. Therefore there developed ‘princes of the Church’ and a rigid delineation between the clergy and the laity. Decision making, and ministry, were concentrated in the hands of the few.

From the moment that the United States won its independence from Great Britain, it was obvious that the European model of Christendom could not succeed. The clergy/laity dichotomy was so profoundly undemocratic as to prove incompatible with a society where a frontier boy like Andrew Jackson could rise to become President. But that did not stop the churches from aping the surrounding culture. Commerce and capitalism proved to be a much more powerful influence than that of nobility or high birth. And so churches multiplied in the manner of businesses and corporations, a survival of the fittest where charismatic communicators mirrored captains of industry, church boards acted as boards of directors, and the ordinary church members paid their tithes in order to become stockholders who enjoyed the dividends of entertaining services and belonging to a community. So, in American Christendom, pastors became either entrepreneurs, leading from the front like ecclesiastical Henry Fords, or managers, doing the bidding of the church board. Some churches operated as parts of a national operation (denomination), others as franchises, while still others were independently owned and operated. Either way, ordinary church members were frequently relegated to the role of consumers – prone to jump ship when another church came along and offered a better product.

It was Dean Inge of St Paul’s cathedral in London who famously said that the church that gets married to the spirit of the age will become a widow in the next age. European Christendom lasted an amazingly long time, over 1500 years, because the societal norms it was wedded to were equally long-lived. But when the monarchies and nobility of Europe collapsed, or degenerated into powerless relics and tourist attractions, European Christendom quickly followed them into irrelevance and insignificance.

This is, I believe, why 9/11 has proved to be so pivotal to church attendance in the United States. It was more than just an issue of terrorism or homeland security. It was the puncturing of an illusion. Being bombed by foreigners in one’s own country was something that happened to other people in other places. America was different. America was an island of peace and prosperity in the midst of a world that was broken. American commerce, and the American way of life, was powerful and inviolate. 9/11 was more than just a despicable atrocity or a tragic loss of life. The crumbling of the twin towers on live television was a demolition of the prestige and omnipotence that the corporation had enjoyed for 250 years.

For five weeks after 9/11 churches were packed. People were searching for something deeper, something that not only promised protection and meaning, but something that could not be snatched away by the evil and hatred of men. Of course the churches were the natural place to look for such meaning! After all, the very existence of Christianity is living proof of the power of truth to triumph over the persecutions and attacks of men and nations of violence – isn’t it? So, for five weeks, churches were packed. Christians held their breath and hoped. Was this the revival that so many had prayed for and prophesied of? Then, in week six, church attendance slipped back to pre 9/11 levels – and, for every Sunday since, the levels of attendance have dropped off the charts as churchgoing has suffered an unprecedented decline. Many of us, as Christians, are tempted to dismiss this as evidence of how fickle human nature can be. I would suggest, however, that there is another, more troubling, explanation. Those seekers who temporarily packed our churches were looking for something deeper and more meaningful than anything offered by corporations or multinationals – but instead they found many of the churches were themselves modeled on the same corporation model that had been so graphically demonstrated as having feet of clay.

9/11 was one of those headline events that happen very few times in each of our lifetimes. Such events, like the collapse of the Berlin Wall or the assassination of Kennedy, do not appear out of nowhere. They sum up what has been happening on a lesser scale in a thousand different ways and usher in more events that reinforce their message. For a number of years increased secularism and the development of postmodernism had been undermining the prestige of the corporate model. The process was accelerated by scandals such as Enron. Even in the political sphere it seemed like a virtually unknown senator from Illinois could harness the power of the internet to mobilize manpower and finance that eclipsed the influence of the most powerful political and corporate machines on the planet. Then, as if to stick the boot into the ailing prestige of the corporation, came the greatest financial crisis in living memory – where the biggest names in the corporate world became derided as incompetent chumps.

Of course capitalism will continue and survive the current economic recession, and corporations will continue to provide employment for millions of us for many years to come, but the mystique and prestige of corporate power has been damaged irreparably. And that spells disaster for individual churches and denominations that are structured on the corporate model.

Let me stress again, I believe the future of Christianity in America is incredibly bright and exciting, but that will mean learning to adapt to post-Christendom. It will involve finding a model for Church life that is more authentic, and more biblical, than that of the corporation. Again, I would love to say so much more about this, but limitations on time and space would make a book, rather than a blog post, a more suitable setting for such a discussion. Suffice for now to say that the church needs to develop a model for life and ministry that is based on servanthood and where the entire church body become ministers.

So, this brings us back to the Imperial Typewriter Company. That can serve as an illustration to us in one of two ways. It can demonstrate that societal change is beneficial, and ultimately is worth even the pain of job losses and pink slips. But it can serve as a darker illustration – reminding us that bodies which fail to adapt to change face extinction.

For many years those of us involved in church planting in Europe looked to the United States for inspiration. We would visit American churches and marvel at their buildings and facilities. We dreamed of the day when we too would be able to pay full time youth pastors, children’s pastors and music pastors. American churches were a continual reminder that if we only worked hard enough, prayed fervently enough, dreamed big enough, then we too could build churches that resembled a successful corporation. Now some of us are realizing that we were deluded. We were comparing our ministries in a post-Christendom culture with those who were enjoying the trappings of Christendom. Now some of us are beginning to understand that we had it all back to front. European churches don’t need to strive to be like American churches – but maybe American churches can learn from those of us who already successfully planting and building congregations in the post-Christendom world.

One of the bits of Christendom that churches have most enjoyed is the widespread acceptance of tithing. Now don’t get me wrong, I believe in tithing. I am a tither, and I believe tithing to be biblical. But that is a belief that is based on my love for Christ and my commitment to His Church. That is a very different thing from the attitude within Christendom where tithing is accepted as a matter of course, even by many who show little or no commitment to the cause of Christ.

In the old model of European Christendom tithing was actually mandated and enforced by law. Workers were forced to pay both taxes to the King and tithes to the Church – even if deep down in their hearts they were atheists. Obviously the American separation of Church and State made such coercion unthinkable in the New World’s version of Christendom, but tithing remained strong. In talking with American pastors I hear of a phenomenon unique to the Unites States. I hear of church members who are unsupportive of the pastor personally, who demonstrate little or no evidences of practical godliness, who show no enthusiasm for the church’s vision, who do nothing to serve their fellow Christians in any meaningful capacity – yet they still pay their tithes. I still remember a pastor saying to me, “Isn’t it annoying how the biggest tithers in a church are always those who resist you the most and who cause you the most problems?” I looked at him in bafflement and incomprehension, because in a post-Christian society those are the people who never tithe! The tithers in our European churches are those who have grasped the vision and share our commitment.

So, in a post-Christendom society the church will find that it has a much narrower base of financial support. A few highly successful megachurches will still build impressive cathedrals and boast large staff – but they will be the exception rather than the rule. Many pastors, even of larger churches, will be bi-vocational. Many churches will meet in rented premises. Regional Overseers or Bishops will not be supported full time, but will double up as pastors of local churches. Youth pastors and worship pastors will minister purely for the love of it and without a sense of entitlement to a salary. Church planters will start congregations fired only by faith and without feeling that their denomination is somehow duty bound to financially support them.

To give you an example: I pastor a European church with over 800 members and with Sunday worship attendance to match our membership. Yet I am the only paid member of staff. All other workers and ministers, including a team of six other pastors, are entirely unpaid volunteers. Yet our people are enthusiastic, relatively prosperous and, by European post-Christendom standards, they are good givers. Welcome to the post-Christendom world!

So, if all the analysts and demographers are correct, and if America is rapidly becoming a post-Christendom society, what does that mean? First and foremost it means that those who try to do things the way they have always done will share the fate of the Imperial Typewriter Company! We all need to learn to do more ministry on less money. That means not just cutting the fat, but cutting flesh and bone as well. And, in what will be a personal tragedy for many of those involved, it will involve pink slips and job cuts. That will apply not just to denominational structures, but also to local churches.

I feel like a bit of a Jeremiah at this point. Nobody loves a prophet who brings bad news – and no doubt some will want to shoot the messenger! I am a big softie rather than a corporate tough guy, and I would probably lose weeks of sleep if I was ever in the position of having to cut someone from their job, but we cannot ignore the writing on the wall. Local churches (my own included) and denominations (again, my own included) are already reeling from decreasing tithes and offerings due to economic recession. Yet, paradoxically, this recession may yet be used by God to save many of our churches from going the way of the Imperial Typewriter Company.

Christians are, at times, notoriously resistant to change. It took a terrible persecution in Acts Chapter Eight to push the early church out of its Jerusalem comfort zone to fulfill is divine mandate to be witnesses to the ends of the earth. Might the current recession be the divine stimulus necessary to bring needed structural change to the Body of Christ in North America? One thing is for certain – tough times lie ahead. My own denomination that I love deeply, along with other churches and movements, has some difficult decisions to make. Good people will lose their jobs and feel pain, bewilderment and even a sense of betrayal. Some will redeploy to other areas of ministry. Some will find themselves forced to minister in a bi-vocational capacity. But I am hopeful that the end result will be a denomination, and local churches, that are transformed in order to communicate authentic Christianity to a post-Christendom society. I am hopeful that we will see new churches, and new kinds of churches, that are based on models of servanthood and shared ministry. I am hopeful that, with my own eyes, I shall see the Church as a bride prepared for her heavenly Bridegroom – without spot, wrinkle, or blemish.