The High Modernist Church

I just finished reading James C. Scott's book Seeing Like a State. In the book, Scott, an anthropologist from Yale, dissects the high modernist view of the world. Essentially high modernism is roughly the time period of the early nineteenth century to mid twentieth century. Your run of the mill high modernist is someone who believes in endless progress of scientific reasoning. It is not so much a belief in science, as in biology, chemistry, physics, etc. It is a belief in the science of reasoning. There is no value of what has come before. In fact it is a hindrance. Scott uses the example of two cities that were highly influenced in their design by high modernist thinking. One is Paris, France. Paris is an old city, and it was difficult to retrofit it to a modernist grid system. The older part of the city was built up with no rhyme or reason, in the view of an outsider. The other city is Brasilia, Brazil. It was totally planned from the ground up by designers with a high modernist view.

Scott details how Brasilia did not turn out the way it was expected. He details many such things: Prussian forestry science, Soviet agricultural collectivization, and others.

He does not mention the church, but I think we can apply some of these lessons to the church. Somewhere in the nineteenth or twentieth century, this sort of thinking permeated through the church world. Everything became cookie-cutter. (I have numerous book in my library that prove this.) Everything was reasoned. Everyone had to have the same salvation/sanctification experience. Every church had to be run the same way. Every church plant had to done to exacting specifications. Every church building had to look the same way. (Not everyone does, of course, but you can almost date the decade in which a church was built by looking at the architecture.)

Centralized church bureaucrats (like centralized bureaucrats in the Soviet Union, or anywhere else) drew up plans for everyone to follow. The problem is that these cookie-cutter plans seldom worked. A church plant in midtown Manhattan, New York City is going look vastly different from a church plant in rural Iowa. The ministries that exist in a mountain community in Washington state are going to look much different from a multi-ethnic church Miami.

I think a good number of people in the church world have come to realize this. What works here will not work there. Just because Pastor Big Shot in Dallas baptizes people at the local water slide does not mean it is going to be effective in anywhere else.

As ministers, we have to know our community better than anyone else. This is one thing I struggled with as we were running our church into the ground. I went back and forth with the district big-wigs (250 miles away, in another universe). I kept trying to tell them what our community was like, but they would not listen. They insisted we do things by their methods. We tried to change, but the money they were supporting us with was taken away.

Every church must be local and meet the needs of its community. I am not a fan of this word, but it must be organic.