here is the last of the introduction! I'm grateful for a good week, and excited to move on to the "sphere-focused" chapters starting monday. It picks up from the last post, but begins here. you'll have to wait for the book to read it all together in order!
"Dominant Cultural Traditions Live Through Us
The second problem is that powerful American cultural traditions have become our primary way to talk about our lives and frame the choices before us. Whether called “personalism” or “individualism” of one sort or another, when such cultural traditions become our primary language, and faith a secondary language, we fall out of practice in thinking and talking about our lives in ways that are explicitly shaped by faith. When this is so, pastors struggle to grasp faith as a whole and to have it ‘at hand’ as a coherent vision of a way of life they can model themselves, not to mention shaping communities that live such faith as a way of life in and for the world. In part, blame lies in the fragmented nature of theological education that gives prospective pastors the humpty-dumpty fragments of bible, theology, church history, and ministry arts and asks them to piece them into some workable whole largely on their own. This is, thankfully, beginning to change as Charles Foster and his co-authors recently documented in Educating Clergy, their landmark study of seminary education in America.
While theological education plays a contributing role, the core problem lies with the durable “common culture” of the United States and the strength of its primary cultural languages that shape our ways of living in the world. Too often, however, sociologists portray this in simplistic terms such as found in Alan Wolfe’s book The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith. His overall message in the book is this: “In every aspect of the religious life, American faith has met American culture—and American culture has triumphed.” By this, he means that although religion tends to paint “a picture of religious believers as a people set apart—their eyes focused not on the mundane world around them but on the judgment that awaits them,” such a set-apart and God-fearing people are not to be found in American now—if they ever were. After reviewing twenty years of ethnographic research on American religious life and doing some poking around on his own, he comes to this conclusion: “Americans revere a God who is anything but distant, inscrutable, or angry. They are more likely to honor a God to whom they can pray in their own, self-chosen way.” “The faithful in the United States,” he finds, “are remarkably like everyone else.”
While Wolfe’s perspective undoubtedly has some truth to it, the combination of his self-professed lack of faith and his global critique of believers who sell-out their heritage for a pottage of cultural values rubs pastoral leaders the wrong way. They work hard, often seven days a week, in order to be faithful to God and to the congregations they lead. They might feel the pinch of such a critique were it offered in more nuanced form. And indeed, such an argument has been made by others that we can draw from to make more sense of the power of cultural languages—and here Wolfe is on track by pointing to the power of individualism.
The classic sociological argument here is from Robert Bellah and his colleagues in their landmark study Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. In that book they describe a common moral vocabulary Americans—despite all their conflicts and differences—share as a “primary language.” They name our primary language “individualism,” which is presumably what Alan Wolfe means when he says Americans are most likely to “honor a God to whom they can pray in their own, self-chosen way.” Whereas utilitarian individualism, they argue, sees human life as an effort by individuals to maximize their self-interest, expressive individualism reacts against the such a calculating image, instead preferring to see human life as the task of expressing each person’s unique feelings and inner being.
These two modes of individualism have resonant figures—the manager and the therapist—that loom large over American life at present. The manager, according to Bellah et. al., is “to organize the human and non-human resources available to the organization that employs him so as to improve its position in the marketplace.” The therapist, in contrast, “is a specialist in mobilizing resources for effective action, only here the resources are largely internal to the individual and the measure of effectiveness is the elusive criterion of personal satisfaction.” Even more worrisome, Bellah writes, is how the culture of the manager and therapist “urges a strenuous effort to make our particular segment of life a small world of its own.” One might invoke this as one place the cultural traditions have affinity with the social separation of spheres noted above, combining in their pressure on churches to over-emphasize their life gathered in their own little circle of shared style and taste while under-valuing their life scattered to participate and impact the world for good.
Pastoral leaders find the emotion-driven therapeutic mode and the results-driven managerial mode especially powerful. Caring deeply about how people feel or pressing for effective results with people are often highly rewarded skills in congregational life. Yet when they dominate, faith becomes a weak sibling, doing little work as leaders guide a community in deliberating and enacting its faith in daily life. The trouble is that one sees faith at best as a means to use in achieving effective resolution to organizational problems framed by values other than faith. The other sees faith as a potential enhancement of the self, a possible means to feeling _______ (fill in the blank: peace, wholeness, healing, loved, needed). What has dropped out are the faith convictions that claim us and orient our living towards a good beyond ourselves—our ability to improve our circumstances or at least feel better about them.
The primary cultural language of individualism is, to be sure, very familiar both to pastoral leaders and to the communities they lead. When pressed, they already know that slipping into this primary language of individualism—perhaps especially when talking about faith—is often easier than the hard work of consciously speaking in a secondary language of the biblical and theological tradition of Christian faith. They understand what is lost: the pastor as theologian, seeking God’s will rather than our own. They long to grow in their ability to model and mediate a strong and substantive vision of Christian faith and feel that little matters more than this in their ministry. And indeed, while Bellah argues that individualism is our “primary language” we do have resources in our “secondary languages” including what he calls the biblical tradition that can aid us in moderating the impact of self-focused and morally vacuous individualism. In the biblical tradition, the aim is not to self-maximize or self-realize but to respond to God’s call to a community in which a genuinely ethical and spiritual life could be lived.
These two worries combine to form a scenario where pastoral leaders focus on the church as gathering, offering effective management and empathetic presence within that gathered community shorn from a lively sense of its purpose in gathering: the empowering and equipping to be scattered out into the world as seeds, as salt, light and yeast, transforming the world just as we have begun to be transformed by the Spirit of Christ that lives in us.
Working the Creative Tension: Practicing Pastoral Excellence
As an antidote to the loss of lively tension between the vision and reality, this book examines how to hold pastoral leaders can work the tension in successive spheres of life such as family, work, politics, and the arts. For each sphere we describe the problems and prospects of congregational leadership for living out a faith that matters. As we move through these spheres, which we often experience as fragmented pieces of our lives, we practice thinking theologically. This is, we believe, crucial to a full understanding of pastoral excellence. By encouraging the practical skill of thinking theologically about everyday matters, we intend to aid pastors (and those to whom they minister) in finding a way faithfully in the world.
Each chapter, as we move forward, will follow a similar pattern. They will each deal with one of the distinct spheres of our society (and of our lives). Opening each, I will sketch a vignette or two of pastors and the communities they serve as a way to ground reflections in that chapter. Some of these they’ve written themselves—where they have, the text will indicate that fact. Then the chapters will circle through the reflective process we found so helpful in pursuing the question of how to encourage and sustain pastoral excellence at the core task of shaping communities for faith as a way of life. First, we will evoke how the social-structural and cultural realities outline in this introduction come to bear within that sphere. Second, we will propose some practical resources that evoke a vision of faith’s impact in relationship to the realities facing us. Finally, we’ll rehearse some practical pastoral exercises that might foster the kind of rubber band leadership that holds the vision in tension with the realities such that lives and communities are drawn more deeply into the shape of God’s gathering and scattering of Christ’s body for the sake of the world. The final chapter will pull these threads together by evoking an image of the congregation as a lively intersection, a space in bodily imagery that inhales and exhales in a life-giving rhythm.
We turn now to the first sphere, in more than one respect: the sphere of intimate relations, of family and friends, or of kinship as Max Weber called it. It is, of course, about marriage and children, but much more as well. It is also about larger circles of family and friends, the circles of trust and affection that extend over years. Yet too often our pleasures and taste become the guiding principle for our most intimate circle of association, and therein begins our challenge in living faith as a way of life! Onwards!
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