What on earth am I doing?
17 Jul 2009
I had my latest PhD supervision just over two weeks ago, at just under the 2.5 year point into my 6 year part time programme, with my first literature review chapter written. My supervisions have progressed from events that left me reeling with no idea of what I was trying to focus on, to times of major revisions to my focus, to what is now more a tightening and trimming of an outline, method, topic and thesis.
So much so that the next 3.5 years are scarily mapped out with reading and chapter writing goals, one per term for the next 7 terms/semesters. So trying to stand back and look at the bigger picture, what am I trying to do? This post is for my benefit and those of you who need some coma inducing reading.
And of course my outline below betrays the lack of focus and desire to do everything, that only a full time minister/pastor, pragmatic church pragmatic planter, and part time student could have in spades, and of course where my reach far exceeds my grasp.
Ecclesia Res Publica: At it’s heart I am exploring how consumerism and secularism organise relationships, beliefs and practices, and what kind of people this makes us into and the implications of this for how we do church. Within this I’m diagnosing how my evangelical tradition has lost (if it had any in the first place), an idea of the public nature of church between the market and the home.
Church has been reduced to an optional club or society, unnecessary for Christian identity and formation, and if the modern evangelical church was captive to the market and consumerism, many of its new emerging forms of church, might continue to have more in common with consumer and secular identities than Christian ones.
And ultimately without this understanding, we’ll continue to see fewer and fewer people convert to Christianity as a way of life with others. So I want to be honest to my church context and ask how has my evangelical tradition been complicit in a relationship with consumerism and the market, and does it have within itself the resources to respond to those problems. Rather than become post-church, post-evangelical, does my tradition have within itself the ability to renew itself?
Method:I’m locating my work within political theology, which takes the concrete nature of the church as it’s focus, but then draws on ethical and theological reflection to understand that action. I’m particularly concerned that much of what passes for critiques of church is the application of social theory, and less to do with a traditioned, biblical and theological understanding of the church in history. I’m also trying to avoid over theologising of church, thinking about it in the abstract, producing great theories that have little or no connection to the real world.
So political theology attends to these problems, has within it the traditioned resources of the church in history, provides descriptions of the social and economic of life, and around issues that my problem area is about, the public nature of the church and christian life.
Chapter Outline – How I hope to do this: So lastly an outline of what I hope to do chapter by chapter to fulfill this.
Chapter One – What is the relationship of the evangelical church to consumerism and the market?:
In this chapter I am going to explore the question of whether evangelicalism is a creature of modernity, and response to industrialism. I’ll be trying to provide an historical account of how much the evangelical church is a carrier and distributor of the market.
I’ll be trying to do that with a general historical account of the last couple of hundred years then some examples of specific cases studies of evangelical groups, such as methodism and the salvation army. I’ll also explore how unlike these movements later renewal movements don’t take determinate social forms.
In other words whereas previous forms of evangelicalism led to forms of church that ordered the rest of life, later renewal movements had no corresponding exploration of polity, or ceded that to the nature of the market and secularism. Or at least I’ll be trying to see if that was the case. Ultimately I’ll be asking if the emerging church ecclesiology lacks any determinative social forms, and if this is a continuing detriment to christian identity and formation.
This account, I expect will be a mixed bag, of how the church resisted the logic of the market and how it succumbed to it. Evangelicalism has an under-told story of it’s relationship to the market, that I want to uncover.
Chapter Two – Understanding the relationship between the Market and Evangelicalism:
Having provided an account of the relationship between the church and the market, I then need to find a way to understand that relationship.
In this chapter, I’ll use the theological and philosophical resources of political theology. I’ll be making my descriptions from social, philosophical and political theories to map the terrain in which the evangelical Protestant church now finds itself, and its historical and theological relationship to that environment. Writers I anticipate drawing on here for these descriptions are Karly Polanyi and Bourdieu, Max Weber, Vincent Miller, and Charles Taylor.
Chapter Three – A Traditioned Response?:
Having given an historical account of the church and it’s relationship to the market, and explored that nature of that relationship theologically, philosophically, politically and socially, this chapter will be one in which I formulate how I might begin to respond to the problems of the church surfaced in my research, and accounts I have made.
I’ll be taking my lead from Alasdair MacIntyre, that we must start from the internal resources of our tradition to describe my problem and attend to it, a ‘physician heal thyself’. Does my evangelical tradition and the larger traditions of the church have the resources to describe the problems we are in and also to respond to them?
I will seek to establish that there are three key and relevant discourses of 1) Augustinian/Reformed, 2) Anabaptist and 3) Anglican (Radical Orthodoxy) traditions that provide suitable descriptions of my problem areas and that offer implicit and explicit ecclesiological resources in response.
I will further establish for my method a theological trope for reading those resources, where using my work in chapters one and two, I will try to show how, within consumerism and secularism, 1) the anthropological locations (The Human Condition) lead to 2) an understanding of soteriology (what intervention and rescue must take place around that human condition), and 3) then how the ordering of human relationships takes place around that (that is, ecclesiology).
In other words, how do these three traditioned discourses provide a description of the human condition? What are their resultant soteriologies in response to that condition, and what are their explicit and implicit implications for the ordering of human relationships within ecclesiology?
Can these traditions read in this way reveal how consumerism and secularism function analogously to religious systems, how they co-opt and undermine Christian formation, and the implications for Christian conversion and identity, in the context of the political, the market and secularity? How is Christian identity therefore understood in light of the traditioned resources, and what kind of ecclesiology might better lead to Christian conversion and formation around these against the background of the market and secularism?
Chapters Four, Five, & Six – Traditioned Accounts:
These chapters will contain the traditioned resources outlined in Chapter Three read against the identified trope of anthropology–soteriology–ecclesiology.
Chapter Seven – An Assessment of Current Ecclesiological Debates:
In this chapter, I will ask what my findings from these traditioned resources have to say regarding current debates on ecclesiology, particularly dialogue on the emerging church, within which my Protestant evangelical tradition is located, being the initial area from which my research questions were surfaced.
I will offer an analysis of this current debate and key emerging-church figures in light of my research findings. In particular, I will take my preceding descriptions and diagnosis and ‘field test’ them against an emerging and ‘state of the art’ ecclesiology that typifies one such current ecclesial discussion.
In short I hope to explore how emerging church is perpetuating the problems of the relationship of the evangelical church to the market, and how it might be countering it, and what is taking place with regards to Christian identity, and formation, and ecclesiology. What is the ecclesiology of the emerging church and how is it helping or hindering its hopes and aspirations.
Chapter Eight – Implications:
In my concluding chapter, I will provide a recap and summary of all my preceding chapters, outlining my implications for ecclesiology as it relates to my initial problem areas, and avenues for further exploration. In light of my findings, I will determine the implications for concrete mission and ecclesiology. What does all this mean for the public nature of church between the market and the home? What kinds of church self understanding, practices, and structures might help see more conversion and christian formation?
Tagged: Consumerism, ecclesiology, Evangelicalism, Secularism
21 comments
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Comment by Andy Rowell
3.18 pm on 17 Jul 2009
Jason,
Sounds excellent. Well done. I look forward to watching it progress and cheering you on.
andy
Note to other readers (Jason already knows this):
Below I write a long comment because I am doing very similar work in the Doctor of Theology (Th.D.) program at Duke Divinity School (Durham, North Carolina, USA.
Jason, none of this is criticism. I’m just adding a few comments of things I think I am thinking!
Comparing notes:
1) On political theology. I have mixed feelings about “political theology.” I love the discussion of concrete ecclesiology but I worry that the conversation becomes a bit too circumscribed and narrow among the “political theology” club. McAleer worries about lack of engagement with political science in the The Blackwell companion to political theology.
The review:
The Blackwell companion to political theology By: McAleer, Graham.
Source: Pro Ecclesia, 15 no 4 Fall 2006, p 489-491. [S.l.]: Columbia
records, [196-] .
Fall 2006
Volume XV, Number 4
Book reviewed:
Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, eds.
The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology
McAleer’s review is particularly striking because because Cavanaugh is the editor of the volume and the editor of Pro Ecclesia. Still, in general I love that the political theologians (and I am probably one of them!) want to see the church functioning at its best. “Let the church be the church.”
2) On consumerism, I too have read carefully Vincent Miller but as a Roman Catholic, he speaks to an ecclesial situation that is quite different from that of evangelicals. One of his main two points (in my view) is to call for greater “agency.” Small Christian communities (small groups) should be encouraged (219). Catholic newspapers should be places where lay people speak out and engage in dialogue (221-222). Miller wants the Roman Catholic church to become more Protestant! Ha! Second, he wants to encourage the recognition of “complex building blocks.” He wants less slogans and shallow popular religion and more meaty stuff. Less Purpose Driven Life and more Augustine. That is great, of course, but is it possible to appropriate traditions without doing so selectively (83)? Miller admits that “nostalgia haunts this work” (12-13). As an evangelical, I think the best “complex building blocks” I want people to learn have to do with Scripture and the history of reading Scripture while Miller wants more appreciation of Catholic church tradition which I am lukewarm about.
I especially look forward to seeing how you will negotiate the issue of consumerism and marketing with your concern for the few conversions that are currently happening. One of these days I will read Leadership Journal (the most important pastor’s magazine in the USA) editor Skye Jethani’s book The Divine Commodity which looks at this from an evangelical perspective. But see his colleague John Wilson’s review in Christianity Today. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/may/37.62.html
It seems to me the first issue that someone dealing with consumerism/marketing has to deal with is evangelism / mission in the New Testament. If there is a concerted effort to invite people to choose the “good news”–to buy it–(and I think there is), then the consumerism/marketing critic needs to make clear how they envision apostolic proclamation taking place without some semblance of consumerism/marketing. David Bosch, Lesslie Newbigin, Lamin Sanneh, Andrew Walls, John Howard Yoder, Christopher Wright, and Richard Bauckham get this and thus don’t make sweeping criticism of consumerism/marketing. I love the idea of exploring 1) Augustinian/Reformed, 2) Anabaptist and 3) Anglican (Radical Orthodoxy) traditions.
3) On evangelicalism in the USA and UK. Finally, I was thoroughly helped by this article:
David Bebbington, “British and American Evangelicalism Since 1940,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700-1990 (ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington and George A. Rawlyk; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 370ff.
After reading his article, I concluded in a paper:
All of these factors in the United States have contributed to a very different evangelical church culture in the United States than in the UK: (1) lack of uniform institutional forms, (2) a driving culture, (3) use of wealth for evangelism, (4) use of Christian media, (5) an educated laity relative to the clergy, and (6) many church attenders.
All the best, readers and Jason.
andy
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Comment by Jason
4.14 pm on 17 Jul 2009
Hi Andy, thanks for the thoughtful and detailed comment, I’ll get back to you early next with, once I have digested it
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Comment by Jason
7.44 am on 25 Jul 2009
I’m still digesting your comment Andy, and will reply asap.
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Comment by Andy Rowell
3.36 pm on 17 Jul 2009
One other thing. This post reminded me of Notre Dame’s Davey Henreckson’s post this week:
Eric Gregory and Hauerwas II
http://www.theopolitical.com/?p=1214
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Comment by Johnny Laird
3.39 pm on 17 Jul 2009
Should be interesting, Jason.
Obviously, I’ll be particularly interested to hear about my tribe, The Sally Army…
J
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Comment by Jason
4.15 pm on 17 Jul 2009
gulp…no pressure then
!
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Comment by steven hamilton
4.35 pm on 17 Jul 2009
thanks so very much for sharing your journey with us jason…
i admit yet again, that i ove your topic and want to journey all the way through with you. my concerns and conversations on this side of the pond in the last few years – with the likes of friends like kevin rains, dave nixon and ken wilson, et al – have been towards the assumptions inherent in modern ecclesiology embedded in our culture rife with consumerism and market-driven-ness.
the fact that in the US – possibly as well in the UK? – a church is a private non-profit business enterprise, a 501 (c) (3) corporation (especially if you want your parishioners to be able to claim their tithing and giving as a tax write-off)…thus, it seems that without thinking, since at its inception, and possibly in it essence, the state has subborned the church so as to make it one corporation among many others offering goods and services and bringing our wares to the “marketplace of ideas” (a popular catch-phrase in the US). this happens without thought or conscious choice most of the time.
i’m alos intrigued, because this is so, that church has really become private space (of a corporation) whether everyone is invited or not, it is perceived largely as private space, thus the question arises in my conversations: what does it even look like for church to engage in public space…perhaps more easily imagined in terms of political advocacy for justice and mercy (like our church did in lobbying government concerning human trafficking laws), or advocating within church-circles for environmental stewardship priorities, but what about other stuff…like public worship? public prayer(we have to get a permit to have a “prayer vigil” in certain areas. it seems to have been reduced or limited to the “marketplace” and thus the rise of “christian radio, christian TV, christian music labels” and the christian ghetto…
anyway, i better stop ranting and go off and forage for some lunch…
thanks again for sharing jason!
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Comment by Jason
7.43 am on 25 Jul 2009
Thanks Steve, for your encouragement.
Indeed whilst we might see the modern evangelical church as having been reduced to a dispenser of goods and services within the market place, many emerging ecclesiologies, seem just as captive to the logic of the market, and secularism.
Church is optional, a voluntary choice, not a moral one, and something to practice on our own, by consuming christians goods and services.
The nature of Church as a genuine public, that interrupts the logic of the public life of consumerism and secularism, is something I’m reaching for.
Otherwise we repeat the turn to social justice that has a christological hear failure, without a worshipping community to give it political form and christian identity in public. Or we turn to worship aesthetics, as places of play and self creation, with no real mission. Or we tend for the environment towards it’s own ends, without knowing that tending is in relation to the purposes of God for creation.
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Comment by Laura
4.53 pm on 17 Jul 2009
“Church has been reduced to an optional club or society, unnecessary for Christian identity and formation…”
Jason, You’ve hit on such an important area–one in need of deep, theological, and practical thinking. While my own studies no longer revolve around ecclesiology as they did in the ThM (I’m just starting a PhD in Educational Studies), this is still my heart and I’ll be following your discussion for sure.
PS: tips on PhD survival and thriving much appreciated.
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Comment by Jason
5.00 pm on 20 Jul 2009
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Comment by Laura
6.04 pm on 20 Jul 2009
Thanks. I’ve barely stuck my toe in the pool and already feel some water splashing about my nose. I am both excited and terrified to begin this adventure and will certainly share my story as it moves along. You’ve modeled that well; thanks for sharing your continuing saga
.
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Comment by Jason
6.18 pm on 20 Jul 2009
Tnx
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Comment by Paul
7.11 am on 19 Jul 2009
Looks just as great and as needed, as challenging and as rewarding as it did at 36,000ft. Just run this race a mile at a time… and think of all that beer at the finish line lol
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Comment by Jason
7.28 am on 19 Jul 2009
Tnx mate
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Comment by Katharine Moody
1.06 pm on 20 Jul 2009
Hi Jason,
Have you read any of Philip Goodchild’s stuff on the theology of money? Could be useful for you. And he’s a really nice guy too (at Nottingham with Milbank).
Have a productive summer!!! Katharine xxx
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Comment by Jason
4.59 pm on 20 Jul 2009
I read one book on CST that he edited and contributed to. Hope you have a great summer too
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Comment by Steve Burnhope
8.24 am on 21 Jul 2009
Sounds great, Jason – I hope to be able to read it when it’s finished (and, that you’ll provide some updates along the way).
Just one quick thought, which is implied in your outline but not (unless I have missed it) appearing explicitly. That is, the role of individualism. To you, this thought will be very basic stuff, I’m sure, but I thought it was worth a brief post nonetheless.
In the evangelical church’s efforts to emphasise the gospel must be personal (due to the perceived need, which I am sure was once the case, to battle against “if you’re British and a churchgoer then de facto you are a Christian”), it has commingled the notion of ‘personal’ with Modernity’s enthronement of the individual. That, I think, is one of the main reasons why, as you rightly say, “Church has been reduced to an optional club or society, unnecessary for Christian identity and formation.”
An understandable fear of a de-personalised gospel, the roots of which lie in the sorry state of pre-Reformation Catholicism, continues to haunt evangelicalism. But evangelicalism appears not to have noticed how the vital and necessary element of the personal has been subsumed into an individualised gospel.
We see it both in its core message (the problem of sin centres on the individual’s personal acts, Christ’s solution addresses this problem at the level of the individual, and his solution is to be received and appropriated by each of us as individuals) and, in its outworking. Church is there as a resource, to help us be better individual Christians. Church is a service-provider, to which we individually contract (while we are getting what we need out of it, and when that changes we move to another service provider).
Because the evangelical gospel is addressed to – and expressed almost exclusively in terms of – the individual, people think about ‘going to church’ (and variants on that theme) virtually the same way people conceive, say, membership of the local golf club: whilst in golf you are really always playing against yourself, it’s helpful to one’s game (an makes it more fun) to practice it with others, plus, there’s an extra benefit in the social side. So, we do the golf club on Tuesday nights and Saturdays and the Church club on Wednesday nights and Sundays … it helps us be a better individual golfer and better individual Christian.
This kind of ‘association for common convenience’, or ‘resource to help me grow my individual faith’, seems very far removed from the biblical understanding, which seems to have simply masses to say at the communal level. Partly, it must be said, because society thought that way in the Ancient World, but also, I suggest, because human relationships have a far bigger part in God’s purposes than the stripped-down evangelical ‘get individuals saved and send them out to get other individuals saved’ understanding recognises.
The ‘good news’ seems to me to have a lot to do with living out an alternative way of being human society, modelling God’s ways to the wider society (to which it offers a generous and welcoming inclusion); a new way of being community, under God, with the living Christ at the centre; a real and sacrificial outworking of the metaphor of ‘God’s family’; a 1 Corinthians 12 understanding of being the body of Christ together; and, the radical transformation of our relationships to each other (not just of our individual relationship with God through Christ, even though our Christ-relationship is the primary source of all transformation).
Evidence of a worldview ‘lens’ in which Christian faith is centred almost exclusively on the individual can be seen in our songs, prayers and preaching: the frequency of “I”, and the presumption that “you” in scripture (e.g. in Pauline texts) is invariably singular.
Just a thought.
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Comment by Jason
7.38 am on 25 Jul 2009
Hi Steve, a great comment thank you. It reminds me that I think at it’s heart my research is trying to trace the theological anthropology of how we have become individuals, and how we have formed relationships, ecclesiologies within consumerism and secularism, around identities that are less than christian.
Also how the modern evangelical church extended those identities and is still doing so within emerging ecclesiologies, and what kind of ecclesiology might lead to christians conversion, identity and formation?
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Comment by mike_docherty
8.40 am on 21 Jul 2009
Hi Jason
I’ve been meaning to a post a comment for a month or so, as you’ve had some quite thought provoking blogs. I find your PhD topic particularly interesting, although my background is sociology not theology. A book you may find helpful for chapter 2 – although you’ve probably got it on the list – is Bob Goudzwaard’s “Capitalism & Progress” (there’s a web-site of his I came across just recently too with a lot of his articles etc. available online free). I’m making my way through C&P just now – although I originally bought it some years ago – and the discussion on the rise of capitalism out of the medieval is one I think you’d find interesting. That whole period (fall of Byzantium, the Renaissance, the Reformation, rise of capitalism) is a fascinating one.
Best of luck with the next 3.5 years – I look forward to hearing more.
Mike
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Comment by Jason
4.48 pm on 21 Jul 2009
Thanks Mike, I’ll check those out, and thanks for your encouragement. Jase.
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Pingback by Ecclesia as Res Publica: Responding to ‘Churchless Faith’ at Deep Church
11.27 am on 9 Oct 2009
[...] Back in July I made a post about my PhD research, that tried to summarise the problem I am exploring and the resources and methods I am using to respond to it. [...]
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