The Future is Chaos

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At this point in US history every single Christian ministry and church is an experiment. Some, by virtue of having existed for centuries, appear successful - but it is notable that none have yet been seriously tested by our emerging social environment. And some of these experiments are already failing. We have seen how the mighty fall. 

The experimental nature of ministry fundamentally changes the institution of pastoral ministry. For centuries pastors have been at the center of stable institutions that were a stabilizing influence in society. And many pastors today, and their churches, imagine that they are a kind of safe harbor for those who sail on a storm-tossed sea. But it is pretty obvious that the bulwarks of the church are not strong enough or high enough to keep the tempest out, and in any case maintaining them is an arduous and ultimately futile task. It is worthwhile visiting Caesarea Maritima in Israel to see what happens to even the greatest of human-built harbors. 

It isn't the church that is a harbor for lost souls, it is the Christ.

So right now the pastor of the today and the foreseeable future must necessarily be an innovator, an experimenter, and a person capable of dealing with failure and starting over. The same is true of church leaders in general. 

Unfortunately these are not pastors and leaders that we have; which may explain why recent surveys by Barna suggest that 58% of pastors have considered leaving the ministry this year. (2021) 

Pastors of my generation and decades after never expected rapidly changing neighborhoods, farm communities overrun with suburbs or slowly dying, local politics dominated by contentiousness and violence, intra-denominational warfare, gross economic disparity eating at the foundations of civil society and destroying family life, and accelerating disaffiliation.  These are not conditions that suit the temperament of those called into ministry by the church in the last half century. 

The church sought, and attracted, encouragers for the struggling, thought leaders for the confused, chaplains for the hurting, and motivators for the unfocused and weary. Sometimes community leaders and activists as well. Those who filled these rolls good pastors, good maintainers of the church as institution, but not risk takers and innovators. 

And one might add that nothing in the standard theological education curriculum anticipated the current needs either. Intellectual formation around scripture, theology, and history came first and foremost because the pastor was the point person in the constant task of apologetics: making church and gospel relevant in the modern world. Interpersonal skills, congregational dynamics, and preaching came next. Social analysis was third. Innovation? Entrepreneurship? Change management? Technology? Not likely. And even less learning a relevant second language like Spanish or engaging seriously in developing cross-cultural competence. 

Covid simply cemented a half century of ecclesial failure to recognize just how far the culture of the church was slipping behind the demands of an increasingly chaotic social situation. And chaos is the word to remember. All the binary ideological descriptions of our social situation and their dystopian or idealistic visions of the future cannot capture the reality of accelerating chaotic change that was noted by Toffler half a century ago but largely ignored by ecclesial hierarchies and theological schools. 

This doesn't make the old models irrelevant, although the location of older forms of pastoral ministry are changing. More and more of my students are seeking chaplain's positions. Or they are finding a lifelong career in a multi-staff church where another pastor (or lay leader) provides the kind of entrepreneurial leadership necessary to navigate the current chaos. Some will find a home in rural congregations yet untouched by rampant social change, or in suburban enclaves untouched for now. But the rest must accept that their lot will be to "step out and face the next storm." (Frank Turner, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IZbCl6iR4) 

What can we do? First is to give up on our illusions. Ministry used to be carried out in a steady upward spiral of larger and more responsible pastorates. But too many rungs are now missing from that ladder as congregations become stagnant or decline. If getting ahead is a pastor's goal then they will have to build their own next steps. There is faithful service caring for the faithful without striving for "First Church," but grasping this reality will take a change in both American Christian culture and pastoral self-understanding. 

Secondly the church will need to accept the reality of bi-vocational pastors. Nothing in scripture suggests that "full time ministry" is normative for the successors of the apostles or that it must last for a lifetime. We United Methodists made normative a pattern of ministry devised for young single men who were expected to kill themselves in the saddle, or marry and "locate" to raise a family. Very romantic, but no longer relevant. More and more churches, good churches, simply cannot afford a full time pastor and don't need one. They deserve pastors happy to give time in service, support the ministry of the laity, and also hold down a secular job that can support a family. 

And we need pastors who can afford to innovate and plant new churches without having to succeed in creating financially independent institutions in a short time span, if ever. 

Finally, seminaries like mine will need to equip pastors with the skills they need for living as evangelists and missionaries in what is now a post-Christian, indeed post-religious society. The theological task that still dominates formal academic training for pastors, making the gospel relevant to already-Christians living in modernity, has lost its currency. Modernity is over and there aren’t that many Christians left. There won't be many churches if we don't rediscover our evangelistic task. The statistics are clear on that point.

Locating the interpretation of scripture in scientific exegesis no longer gives it authority, particularly for those people who are two or more generations from the church. For them the Bible is a cultural relic. It won't have authority no matter how it is interpreted unless it somehow speaks directly and powerfully to their own sense of self and situation. They don't care if the preacher mastered Greek grammar and vocabulary, or knows every twist and turn in the development of ancient cultural contexts. The scribes and the pharisees possessed arcane expertise. And yet they did not teach with authority.

Expertise works only to authorize the interpretation of a text that has already been given authority and often not then. When it is just another old book its authority will have to be established by the changes it inspires in those who hear it. This requires a different approach to studying, preaching and teaching Bible texts than has been current in theological education this last century. We need pastors whose authority doesn't come from a degree or an ordination certificate, much less their mastery of exegesis, but from their ability to make scripture come alive when they speak. 

Similarly locating the modern church within a genealogy of bureaucratic changes, theological developments, and modes of worship is meaningless unless these stories somehow capture the imagination of the hearer. Who cares whether a church is "presbyterian" or "episcopal" in polity? Who cares whether it is liturgical or not, or which liturgy it uses? Who cares where it branched off from a branch of a branch of a hypothetical trunk? It either witnesses to the gospel in a way that draws people into the love of God in Christ or it doesn't. And its story only matters if it connects with contemporary human stories. 

Mastering the internal language of ecclesiologists is far less important for pastoral ministry than mastering the lively languages of the world outside the church. Only when church history is the history of people trying to walk in God's way does it give life. We need pastors who can tell a compelling human story and not just a story of ideas. 

And yet theology matters. 

We are like sheep without a shepherd

We don't know how to be alone

So we wander 'round this desert

Wind up following the wrong gods home. (The Eagles, Learn to be Still)

In an earlier blog I wrote that doctrine can't carry the weight of unifying the church, because that unity is found in the experience of God's love through Christ. But the product of theology isn't correct doctrine: it is discernment; recognizing the spirits by their fruits. 

One of those fruits is belief, the intellectual articulation of experience that allows us to talk to ourselves and others about our experience. But the key question in the formulation of our Christian beliefs is only partly whether we articulate them with the same words used by others. It is primarily the question of whether they cohere with our shared faith in the God whose love we have experienced together in Christ. The pastor for chaotic times must be a leader in helping us find that coherence between our faith in God and our beliefs about God so that the mind nurtures both, as well as the other fruits of the Spirit. Theology isn't a task for the study - its a task for spiritual direction and dialogue. We need theologians who can talk with people more than at people. 

And as they engage in theological dialogue they must be aware that in a complex cultural environment the very act of communicating is fraught with possibilities for missed connections and understandings. Most theological schools give attention, through courses in pastoral care and counseling, to the psychological factors that create misunderstanding in communication. Less, if any is given to the current influence of culture and social location on everything from the way ideas and emotions are communicated to primary values and the structures that embody them. Such teaching has been confined to schools of mission and intercultural studies. In reality all pastoral training in the contemporary context must be cross cultural and missionary. 

And of course most importantly pastors need to be trained with opportunities to experiment, innovate, fail graciously, develop resilience, and become organizational agents and shepherds of change. This requires an intentional collaboration between spiritual formation and instruction, recognizing that pastoral ministry involves both skills and an emerging frame of mind and heart. Perhaps as importantly it means recognizing the pastors need expert instruction of the type never found among PhD's in theology and religious studies, although possibly among pastors who have learned on their own. The contemporary pastor needs the kind of instruction only available in business schools - making collaboration across or with a university an absolute necessity for contemporary theological education. 

As we re-read scripture in a time of chaos it might be useful to read the gospels and book of Acts in a different way; as accounts of rapid innovation. In virtually every chapter we find Jesus and his followers doing something new. One reason we can't nail down early church polity is because we don't find a single structure; we find a variety of experiments unfolding under the motivation of the gospel to form communities embodying the Spirit of Christ. What makes the churches of the New Testament exemplary and their apostolic founders mo

The Rev. Dr. Robert A. Hunt serves as Director of Global Theological Education and Director, Center for Evangelism at United Methodist-related Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. This post is republished from his blog, The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture.