What’s your vision for the next period of the church’s existence in our culture?
One hope is that there is a genuine innovation in models of churches that are started and popularized. The last time that there was a significant change to the traditional church in America, I would say, was in the 1980s. Then you had several factors. You had the rise of the megachurch movement, which re-sorted most Christians into larger churches. You had the small group movement that came in tandem with that. You had the seeker-sensitive movement that made churches more aware of how far many people were from God. And you had the charismatic renewal. It has transformed modern worship music and the worship experience in most churches.
I think all of those innovations were responding to the need of the hour, which was very different from the need of our hour now.
Rodney Stark argues that the peak of Christendom in America was not in early America or the First Great Awakening. He argues that the most secular and post-Christian America ever has been was at its founding, in 1776. The peak of Christendom was in the late 1950s or early ’60s. So by the early ’80s, when these innovations start to kick off, you have peak Christendom now 20 years in, and you have the problem that Christendom tends toward, which is apathy—all these people that mostly believe the right thing but have been emotionally dulled to it, and they are compromising, deeply, with the American way of life. That compromise, in many cases, went to the core of popular ministry.
I think you are already seeing a response to that in the house church movement. It is finally past its angsty teenager stage into more of a legitimate model of church for people. I think you are seeing it in some of the evangelical returns to more historic traditions, like Anglican, Eastern Orthodox or Catholic.
The need of the hour is to stir people up and rally them together toward something more real than they have been given. It’s a kind of revivalist moment. However, the problem we’re facing now is not primarily the apathy of the ’80s, but anxiety. Most people are utterly wrecked by anxiety, burnout, exhaustion, loneliness and digital distraction. We need smaller spaces, not larger ones; quieter spaces, not louder ones—a church that feels more like a Headspace app than a rock concert.
One of my hopes is that the increasing ineffectiveness of church as it’s been done pushes people over the pain threshold to where pastors begin to seriously consider new (or really ancient) models of church that are more focused on community, discipleship, quiet and on the long slow growth of the soul.
I have a lot of ideas here, and hope to go try some of them. But if all of a sudden, we discover ourselves trying to figure out how to keep church more focused on tables than on stages, then that opens up a whole new world of possibilities. And I believe that we will be doing something right. We will be moving closer to what it means for us to be apprenticed together to Jesus. To practice the Way.