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.

Take that Dr. Gunter

In April, I went on a three-day rant about the fear that exists in the Church of the Nazarene about the Emerging Church. Here are the links:

Ugh! (4/17/07)
People of the Night (4/18/07)
Revising and Extending My Comments (4/19/07)

Today, I received in the mail my copy of Preacher's Magazine. The article on page 34 roused by interest. In was written by Dr. Henry H. Knight, III of St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City. His article is entitled "John Wesley and the Emerging Church." I do not believe Dr. Knight is Nazarene, but the article is published in an official publication of the Church of the Nazarene. I would like to quote a few lines from the second paragraph. Perhaps Dr. Nina Gunter will read this so as to alleviate her inordinate fear of all things emerging.

"I believe Wesleyans should welcome the emerging church... Wesleyans should support this new movement because the purposes and values emerging churches seek to embody--their vision of discipleship, church, and mission--is highly congruent with those of the Wesleyan tradition."

Wow. I never thought I would read anything so "heretical" in an official publication of a church stuck in 1953.

Revising and Extending My Comments

I listened to the complete message of Nina Gunter at the M7 Conference. She did say some good things about not beating our heads against the same walls. She talked about the need to know the context in which we minister. She said some good things about being forward thinking, especially in asking the question What kind of church are we leaving to our children? She also said that we should work together. She talked about being innovative and trying new strategies. She said that we should not get hung up on the method. All of these things, I can agree with.

The clip that is a couple blog posts below is kind of strange in that it seems to be a disconnected interjection. She does not expand on how these three challenges are really affecting the church.

It seems to be an unfortunate thing. I have done that in sermons. I have a thought that sounds good, but when it comes out of my mouth it really has nothing to do with what I was talking about. That seems to be the case here.

How is Calvinism and Reformed Theology a new challenge? Calvinism is only about 500 years old. Also, Calvinism is pretty much the same thing as Reformed Theology. When you search on "Reformed Theology" on Wikipedia, it redirects you to "Calvinism." How is the emergent church negatively impacting the church? I wish she would have expanding on this.

If you read, Dr. Mark Quanstrom's A Century of Holiness Theology, you will see that Calvinistic thought has been an issue in the Church of the Nazarene since the late 1910s and early 1920s. It certainly is not a "new" challenge.

The comments were not out of context, but it was a minor part of the message. I still don't see a Calvinist as a challenge. We are on the same team. The Baptist or Presbyterian is not my adversary. They are my teammate.

Ugh!

What on earth is she talking about? I hope this 46 second clip was taken out of context.