As Goes the Church

What do you believe is the most influential institution in the world? If given the formulation, “As goes the ____, so goes the world,” what would you put in the blank? Would you pick the Academy, the Market, the Media, or the State? Or would you pick the Church?

If you are a Christian, I hope you believe the Church is the most influential institution in the world. I hope you would say, “As goes the Church, so goes the world.” After all, it’s only the Church that is the people of God, that has the Word of God, and has the Spirit of God. It’s only the church that Jesus promised to build, and it’s the only institution He promised would prevail (Matthew 16:18). 

But if you are a Christian and are inclined to think the Academy, the Market, the Media, or the State is more influential than the Church, I would encourage you to ask yourself why. Is that way of thinking influenced more by the promises of God in Scripture, or by your perception of current events? Are your priorities driven more by faith or by fear? And I’m going to hazard to guess that this viewpoint may reflect your own sense of vocation, affect your concerns for what other individual Christians should be doing, and shape your vision of what the Church should look like.

If you think the Academy is the most influential, you are probably highly educated and see yourself as a scholar. You may think many more Christians should have advanced degrees, and that many more should be working in either secular or Christian primary and secondary schools. But not only do you want the Academy to be more Christian; it’s possible that you also, however subtly, desire for the Church to look more like the Academy. In the local church, you may gravitate toward fellow intellectuals and away from the people you see as simple or ignorant. You may expect pastors to have seminary degrees, large libraries, and sophisticated sermons.

If you think the Market is the most influential, you are probably smart with money and see yourself as a businessman. You may think many more Christians should be starting businesses, investing, or climbing the corporate ladder. But not only do you want the Market to be more Christian; it’s possible that you also, however subtly, desire for the Church to look more like the Market. In the local church, you may gravitate toward the wealthy or the financially striving and away from the people you see as poor or financially complacent. You may expect pastors to have an entrepreneurial spirit and be administratively gifted.

If you think the Media is the most influential, you are probably gifted in some art-form or medium and see yourself as a creative or a communicator. You may think many more Christians should be going into the film, music, and publishing industries and into journalism. But not only do you want the Media to be more Christian; it’s possible that you also, however subtly, desire for the Church to look more like the Media. In the local church, you may gravitate toward fellow creatives and away from the people you see as mere consumers. You may expect pastors to be artists, entertainers, or so-called “content-creators.”

If you think the State is the most influential, you are probably involved in politics (or just read the news a lot and have a lot of strong opinions) and see yourself as a civil servant or political reformer. You may think many more Christians should go into politics, get more involved at the grassroots level, or at least pay more attention to the news. But not only do you want the State to be more Christian; it’s possible that you also, however subtly, desire for the Church to look more like the State. In the local church, you may gravitate toward those who seem to have power and status in the world and away from those who seem powerless. You may expect pastors to be charismatic executives with an ambitious agenda for what the church can be doing outside its own four walls.

To be sure, right now it doesn’t seem like the Church is influential, at least not positively. It looks as if lately the Church has been better at scaring people away than drawing them in. And I’ll grant that it is a frail and weak thing, beset with sins and failings. But we ought to remember that God likes to use what seems foolish to shame the wise (1 Corinthians 1:27). We should look back to how Christians transformed the Western world two millennia ago: not by starting academies like Plato’s, or by raising capital, or by writing better epics than Homer or plays than Sophocles, or by getting into Caesar’s inner circle, but by forming churches where people heard the gospel preached and sought to live in the light of it together. And we ought to remember that when Jesus walked among us, while He would happily interact with scholars like Nicodemus and businessmen like Zacchaeus, He spent more time with the illiterate and the poor. Likewise, when Paul went on his missionary journeys, he could quote literature to philosophers and get an audience with governors, but getting them on his side was never his priority. 

Yes, go into the Academy or the Market or the Media or the State, if you have the gifting and opportunity for it, and if your motives are predominantly in the right place. But be careful that the perceived importance of your mission does not expand beyond proportion to become the mission, and that your way of contributing to the kingdom does not became the way to advance it. Jesus has His own means and methods—so much better and higher than ours—for accomplishing His purposes in the world, so let’s commit ourselves to them. However unlikely and unimpressive they appear, they will change the course of history. 

Bonhoeffer on the Dangers of Idealism

A quick addendum to two previous posts, one at The Jedi Archives and one in this Notebook, on what can go wrong when ideals eclipse principles and relationships. There are Count Dookus and Mr. Hollingsworths in the church and other Christian institutions, too. Here’s Bonhoeffer in Life Together:

“Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

“God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. … He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.

[…]

“Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate” (pp. 27-28 and 30 in the HarperOne edition).

Big Idea: A Cautionary Tale

In Fall 2013, when I was a undergrad at Biola University, Phil Vischer—the founder of Big Idea, creator of VeggieTales, and voice of Bob the Tomato and a host of other characters—gave a talk to a packed gymnasium of people who had grown up watching his videos. I was one of them, and what Vischer had to say that night played a significant part in the long story of how and why I decided to quit filmmaking. That is a long story for another time, but I share that autobiographical detail here to suggest how much Big Idea has been to me a paradigmatic example—a cautionary tale, really—of the challenges facing Christian individuals and institutions engaged in culture-making and cultural engagement. This summer, I finally read Vischer’s memoir, Me, Myself & Bob (Nelson, 2006). Here are some takeaways from the passages dealing with how Vischer lost control of the company in the early 2000’s. 

One: An organization needs to be led by both a Head and a Heart. 

Among the problems that led to Big Idea’s bankruptcy was that Vischer was a dreamer surrounded by yes-men and took increasingly expensive risks. Yet if at the other extreme the company had been led by someone concerned only with the financial bottom-line, that would have stifled creative experimentation. So Vischer concludes that “The balance between creative inspiration and good stewardship of resources is vital to any successful enterprise” (211). He cites the example of Walt Disney’s life-long collaboration with his older brother Roy: “The key to the partnership of Walt and Roy was mutual submission, based in genuine love for each other. … In hindsight, perhaps the simplest explanation for the failure of Big Idea Productions is this: I never found my Roy” (213). The administratively-gifted Head and the visionary Heart need to work together to accomplish anything worthwhile long-term.

Two: Enough with the obsession with growth. 

Big Idea grew at an unsustainable rate, and it would have been able to do more good over the long-haul if it had stayed smaller. Vischer argues that “Real impact today comes from building great relationships, not huge organizations. More overhead equals less flexibility to pursue unexpected opportunities” (219). As the saying goes, “More money, more problems”—but also, more people, more problems; more projects, more problems. Big Idea’s meltdown is a warning for churches, Christian schools, and other parachurch organizations that think that numerical growth means they must be doing something right.

Three: Be explicit and consistent about the organization’s theological commitments, and make sure all employees at least know what those are and can respect them.

This is closely related to the second takeaway. For Big Idea to scale up to the size Vischer over-ambitiously envisioned for it, it was almost inevitably going to have to attract more non-Christian talent (not to mention non-Christian investors). Vischer confesses that, “the more we hired, the less Christian Big Idea became” (125). He goes on to say that “I shared my passion for Christian ministry through creative media with everyone but my own staff, because, frankly, I wasn’t sure many of the folks at Big Idea would buy into it” (126–27). This is an almost-guaranteed recipe for mission drift and internal divisions: “My vagueness about Big Idea’s true mission and values led to a profoundly confused, dysfunctional workplace. By the time I had figured out the problem, it was too late to do much about it” (223).

Vischer advises leaders to “Build a team that rows in the same direction” (222). However, he adds the qualification that, “This doesn’t mean everyone needs to think the same, look the same, or talk the same—that sort of conformity leads to groupthink and failure. Diversity is a wonderful thing, as long as the diversity isn’t around the purpose and values of the group itself. … I hired some Christians who didn’t fit and some non-Christians who did. The key was that each employee—from the receptionist to the president—was excited about Big Idea’s mission and the Christian values we promoted” (222). I’m not sure about that last part. There are some “Christian values” that only a Christian could be “excited about,” and while maybe the “receptionist” doesn’t have to a Christian, the “president” and everyone making the defining creative and financial decisions should be. But I do take Vischer’s point that not everyone has to be theologically aligned on every single issue for a non-church, non-denominational Christian organization to be able to accomplish its goals.