Can reimagining "Reformation" help extricate Christ's Body from its cultural captivity?
Throughout the middle of the 1960s, the Catholic Church held a series of ecumenical meetings known as the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II). This Council resulted in broad reforms to relationships both within the Catholic Church, and Catholicism in relationship to the world around it.
This article addresses a simple question: If we are poised for a similar reformation movement within the church today, what should that movement look like?
Drawing on my personal experiences and challenges as a doctoral student, I propose that the reformation needed can be described as the transition from an autonomous to a self-directed learner.
I will begin the conversation by defining those terms, autonomous and self-directed, and setting some parameters for my realm of experience within the global church. I will then explore how the church exists within the broader cultural situation. Finally, I will consider how this proposed change in posture influences church relations both internally and towards the broader world.
Autonomous and Self-Directed Learning
Michael Ponton describes autonomous learning as the typical posture in higher education. A student is presented with an array of learning institutions and degree programs, each containing a series of courses. The student has the autonomy to select the institute, program, and some courses which are most desirable. However, while the student has the autonomy to select which rubric of success he will operate within, the content, expectations, skills, and activities required for success are predetermined. He endeavors to achieve within a standard created by others.[1]
At the doctoral level, a student is expected to move beyond autonomous learning and become a self-directed learner. “High performing doctoral students not only learn from imposed environments - that is, the courses and exams as designed - but also select and create opportunities to learn either independently or with the help of others.”[2] At some stage of the journey, doctoral students no longer operate under an external framework, but begin to determine for themselves what questions are important, what skills and knowledge are necessary, and what constitutes success. The direction is not external, but initiated by the learner herself.[3]
The autonomous learning posture has inherent weaknesses when embraced by the church, necessitating the transition to self-directed learning. However, before moving to that point of argument, it is necessary to identify to which portion of the global church I am qualified to speak.
Defining Parameters
The parameters of the overall question, to envision a reformation within the weltkirche (world church), are beyond my personal capacities. My experience has almost exclusively been within white urban and suburban evangelical congregations. While some elements of this group may view themselves as normative for all of Christianity, I recognize it as one context among many.[4] This context can be described as having roots in classical Protestant orthodoxy, further shaped by the developments of pietism and the Great Awakening.[5]
Alistair McGrath delineates six convictions which define this movement: (1) the supreme authority of scripture as a guide for life and the knowledge of God; (2) Jesus Christ as incarnate God and savior of sinful humanity; (3) the divinity and work of the Holy Spirit; (4) the need for personal conversion; (5) the priority of evangelism; (6) and the importance of Christian community.[6]
When I speak of “the church,” this is the context I reference.
The evangelical movement has also included a strong missionary effort, spreading this particular flavor of Christianity across the globe.
As a young boy, I experienced and participated in this effort as the child of missionaries on northern Nigeria. The corner of Christianity in which I work and worship is unique to my cultural context, but that context has been spread broadly. I do not claim to speak for the global church, but it is reasonable to believe that some elements of this Christian context have been spread far and wide.
The Current State of Culture and the Church
Current assessments of Western cultural are seldom optimistic. Ross Douthat argues we are in an age of decadent stagnation. The rapid growth and technological advancement of the 19th and 20th centuries has decelerated. Each successive step of advancement requires greater effort for smaller gains.[7] Rather than a precipitous decline, contemporary culture simply feels stuck. There is a great degree of concern, fervor, and restlessness, ultimately moving us nowhere.[8] Feelings of excitement and progress are largely illusions:
If you want to feel like Western society is convulsing, there’s an app for that, a convincing simulation waiting. But in the real world, it’s possible that Western society is really leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth, all riled up in its own imagination and yet, in reality, comfortably numb.[9]
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre relates that this illusion includes the use of language, with “spin” becoming more important than content. Generations raised in this environment become increasingly distrusting of messages they view as marketing endeavors.[10]
This situation of cultural restlessness and the presumption of disingenuous messaging has led to an erosion of public trust.[11] America is increasingly divided into partisan groups, with each preferring, trusting, and listening to its own members and narrative, viewing all others as suspect, even despicable.[12]
Likewise, the church is experiencing a time of stagnation and division. Pew Research reports a 12% decline in Americans identifying as Christian between 2009 and 2019. Those identifying as Protestant have become a minority of the population, at 43%.[13] Accordingly, each successive generation shows decreased connection with basic principles of orthodox theology.[14]
The church also shows increasing division internally. Sunday morning being the most racially segregated hour in American society has long been a trope of religious critics. It is now becoming politically segregated as well.
Kevin Vallier reports that partisan identities have become the most stable personal identifiers in society, often determining religious affiliation.[15] We expect our religion to comply with our politics. Veli-Matti Karkainnen warns this inability to transcend social barriers disarms the power of the church to wield unifying presence of Christ in culture.[16] While Christ has demolished the dividing wall of hostility, members of the church choose to live as if it still exists (Eph. 2:11-22).
This picture of the church, while disheartening, should not be surprising. If the church has embraced the stance of autonomous learner in society, accepting and pursuing societal rubrics for success, then it should expect to achieve similar results to those of the broader society.
Both societal institutions and the church are experiencing an erosion of public trust, and increasing division, because both are playing the same game … by the same rules.
This is not a unique observation. McEntyre sees the church discarding a love of biblical genre in favor of simplified marketing language, which trades away spiritual truth for perceived cultural efficacy.[17] Paul Sparks, Tim Soerens, and Dwight J. Friesen lament how the church has not challenged cultural divisions, but seen them as conveniently homogenous demographics, easily marketed to.[18] Kevin Vanhoozer summarizes the situation:
Our present-day Western churches struggle with status anxiety in the face of the new empire of popular culture. Like status-anxious individuals, we are tempted to employ the tools of empire—mass marketing, music videos and other tools from the merchants of cool—in order to achieve larger numbers of adherents, more money and more programs in order to be reckoned successful in the eyes of the world.[19]
The details of any local congregation can vary. This is autonomous learning—students free to choose from a variety of rubrics, so long as they don’t create their own. Available options might include audience, attendance, budget, building, celebrity, charisma, politics, or power.
The unique position of a given church within these culturally defined systems is irrelevant. The posture remains the same; the church attempts to succeed within rubrics designed by culture. The solution is for the church to transition from an autonomous learner to a self-directed learner. Some of the potential details of that transition are the topic of the following sections.
The Internal Reformation: Naming and Confessing Our Mammon
The first step in moving away from a culture-dependent posture of autonomous learner, to one of self-directed learner, which seeks to discover problems, define questions, and measure success on independent terms, must be confession.
In Matthew 6:19-24, Jesus warns not to store up treasures on earth, where they can be destroyed, but to store up treasures in heaven, where they cannot. He gives the warning, “No one can serve two masters …You cannot serve God and mammon.” Modern translations and commentaries interpret mammon as either money (NIV, ESV), or wealth (NASB).[20]
However, it is possible to view the definition more broadly. The Greek mamonas, “treasure,” derives its origin from the Hebrew maman.[21] This verb can carry the broader concept of trustworthiness, faithfulness, or reliability.[22]
Within the argument of Matthew 6, mammon can be whatever tangible realities result from efforts to achieve success in this world. The passage is a warning not to measure success in materialistic terms.
Acknowledging its posture as an autonomous learner in society, the church should pause in self-reflection, asking what mammon has been pursued, or accepted as definitive to the church’s mission.
From that conversation, the church can reconstruct an understanding of its identity and purpose apart from cultural entrapments. Confession and redefinition are initial steps towards becoming self-directed learners who still live in culture, but do not define success according to its terms.
The ecclesiological explorations of Vatican II can be seen as a move toward self-directed learning. Karkkainen argues the most important development of Vatican II was the change in self-perception from the church as an institutional, hierarchy-based “perfect society,” to that of a gathered “people of God” on a pilgrimage together.[23]
The nature of the communion of God’s people within the church is based not in a particular structure, but in the gathered people being drawn into the communal relationship which exists in the Trinity.[24] As such, the church, its mission, operations, and success, cannot be defined by the results typically produced in an institutional system. Rather, the church is a mysterious sacrament, serving as a sign and instrument of the trinitarian union.[25]
Jack O. Balswick, Pamela Ebstyne King, and Kevin S. Reimer apply trinitarian reflection to individual personhood. They provide a mathematical model as the image of both the Trinity and the human person. A “reciprocal” unit contains individual quantities which combine to create a whole, “We could say that to be human is to live as unique quantities whose product is unity.”[26]
Just as the Godhead does not erase the individual identities of its members, but rather fulfills and completes them, individual humans become most human when invited into the unified relationship of Jesus Christ, the Father, and the Holy Spirit.[27] This relationship is not a place where we are unified into some homogenized unit, but rather for relationships which simultaneously affirm the individual and create a whole.[28]
In light of these reflections, the mammon of the church, at least in my personal experience, has been the subjugation of human-divine relationships to benefit cultural standards of success.
We need to confess our practice of using people as means to an end. As self-directed learners we must create communities which view growing relationships between God and others as an end in itself.
The church does not only need an internal reformation. It also needs reformation in its engagement with the world around it. Karl Rahner warned that the Spirit blows everywhere, working in the world in advance of the church. Therefore, the work of the church is not to spread itself, not to be self-serving, but to work at growing the Kingdom wherever it is found.[29]
The External Reformation: Who Is My Neighbor?
Christopher Wright argues that the contemporary church struggles to embody a wholistic view of mission because it struggles to embody a wholistic view of scripture. Authority is only seen as connected to command. As such, imperative passages are given priority when exploring a biblical basis of mission.[30] He counters this by arguing a devout Israelite would not have answered the question, “How do you know that you are redeemed?” by pointing to an imperative command in the Torah. Rather, the response would be a recounting of the Torah’s narrative arc. The theological grounding of redemption is the story of God and his people.[31]
Leslie Newbigin continues by saying the lived experience of Israel is not just another philosophical text. It is the story of God revealing himself through actions in the world, a story which continues in the New Testament and the church.[32] Newbigin argues that such a narrative revelation cannot be disproved by rationalistic standards.[33]
Placed within the context of autonomous versus self-directed learning, the revelatory power of God at work among his people informs the goals and desires of that people in a way to which pragmatic cultural rubrics are unable to speak.
More practically, revelation always occurs within a certain people, at a certain time, in a certain place. The knowledge may be universal, but the act is always local.
An example is the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk. 10:25-37). The truths presented in this story are indeed universal. The details which express those truths are local. The function, role, and social standing of priests, Levites, and Samaritans were important, local issues.
The question which prompted the parable, “Who is my neighbor?” was an attempt by the lawyer to reduce God’s law to an abstraction. Jesus responded by applying it to the neighborhood.
If the church is the people of God, living in a particular place at a particular time, one of the essential movements in becoming self-directed learners is applying scripture to our local context. We must begin to look around our neighborhoods and define who our neighbors are and how we are to love them.[34]
There is no methodology or technique that can take the place of loving our neighbors.[35] There is also no one-size-fits-all program available at our favorite ministry website which will identify and love our neighbors for us. Indeed, each answer to the question must be as local and unique as each individual gathering of believers and the neighborhoods they inhabit.
Leonard Sweet and Michael Adam Beck argue that the church does not get to choose its context.[36] It is called to love the context it finds itself in and embrace that God has placed it there for a purpose. They call the discernment of purpose within a given community “contextual intelligence.” It is the skill of reading the surrounding community, determining its historical and social realities and problems, and then developing knowledge, relationships, and techniques to speak to those problems.[37] Sparks, Soerens, and Friesen argue that a key aspect of this journey is not the end goal of some “big answer,” but the quest to determine the questions and needs of the community.[38] In that regard, the process begins to sound very much like self-directed learning within the doctoral process.
An Example of the Distinction
Several years ago, while working in the young adult ministry at a local church, I lived half a block off the main street in a small town. Our neighborhood was economically and socially diverse. There were young, professional families, with small children, who went to church on Sunday and work on Monday, maybe enjoying a barbecue in between. There was also an “inn” up the street, which rented rooms by the month.
It was a good place to be a Christian. I was blessed with close family and supportive, nurturing friendships, but also challenged with how to express God’s love among those our culture prefers to ignore.
When a homeless young adult, struggling with mental health, landed a room in the inn up the street, I let him do his laundry at our house, invited him over for dinner, and repeatedly searched him out in the middle of the night, when he expressed thoughts of suicide.
Our church covered the cost of his room for one month, while he worked through these issues.
Eventually, several members of the young adult ministry and myself loaded this young man into a vehicle, and drove him to the hospital, where he checked in as a risk to himself.
A few days later, I met with the lead pastor of the church, who expressed disgust with the situation. In his view, this young man took advantage of me and wasted the churches resources.
Within the posture of autonomous learning, my pastor’s assessment was correct. Ministry to this young man did not increase any standard measurement of success within the realm of cultural rubrics. He did not become a regular church attender, giver, and volunteer. He did not profess faith in Jesus Christ, allowing the church to claim a convert. He did not give us a testimony which could be distilled into a video clip, growing our social media presence, or inspiring participation in our capital campaign. He was a drain on staff and financial resources which brought no tangible return.
Within the posture of self-directed learning, the gathered people of God came into contact with one of God’s lost children, and showed that child love, support, and accountability. Ultimately, leaving him in a place where he was able to get the help he needed, and continue his journey in knowing his Creator.
The autonomous church needs to confess the countless stories of neighbors like these, who we did not make the effort to know and love, and who were either used or discarded in pursuit of cultural success.
A Final Thought
A church which embraces the practices and definitions of success embedded in larger culture can only hope to achieve what that culture achieves.
The solution proposed here is that the church transition from a posture of autonomous learner, choosing preferred cultural rubrics from a variety of options, to that of a self-directed learner, probing into questions that move beyond “success” and into a deeper understanding of what it means to abandon mammon and find meaning in rootedness within the trinitarian relationship, from which it is empowered to embrace its position within a place and time, identifying our neighbors and loving them as Christ as loved us.
NOTES: [1] Michael K. Ponton, “The Transition from Autonomous to Self-Directed Learning,” in Navigating the Doctoral Journey: A Hanbook of Strategies for Success (editor Amanda J. Rockinson-Szapkiw and Lucinda S. Spaulding; New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 100. [2] Ponton, “The Transition from Autonomous to Self-Directed Learning,” 99. [3] Ponton, “The Transition from Autonomous to Self-Directed Learning,” 99. [4] Christopher J. H. Wright, The Misison of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Kindle ed.; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006), 42. [5] Douglas A. Sweeney, The American Evangelical Story: A History of the Movement (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), 23–24. [6] Sweeney, American Evangelical Story, 18. [7] Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 45. [8] Douthat, Decadent Society, 8. [9] Douthat, Decadent Society, 136. [10] Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies. (Kindle ed.; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2009), Kindle location 74. [11].Kevin Vallier, Trust in a Polarized Age (Kindle ed.; New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 11. [12] Vallier, Trust, 1. [13] Pew Research, “In U.S. Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace: An Update on America’s Changing Landscape.” [14] Diana Chandler, “State of the Bible: 40 Percent of Gen Z Believe Jesus Sinned.” [15] Vallier, Trust, 3. [16] Veli-Matti Karkkainen, An Introduction to Ecclesiology: Historical, Global, Interreligious Perspectives (Kindle ed.; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2021), 26. [17] Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies., Kindle location 148, 412. [18] Paul Sparks, Tim Soerens, and Dwight J. Friesen, The New Parrish: How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship, and Community (Kindle ed.; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 44. [19] Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Pictures at a Theological Exhibition: Scenes of the Church’s Worship, Witness, and Wisdom (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2016), 205. [20] R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew (The New International Commentary on the New Testament; Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2007), 262–63; Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2009), 233. [21] Joseph H. Thayer, Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2009), 388. [22] F. Brown, S. Driver, and Briggs C., The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (18; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2018), 52–53. [23] Karkkainen, Intro to Ecclesiology, 30. [24] Karkkainen, Intro to Ecclesiology, 33. [25] Karkkainen, Intro to Ecclesiology, 33. [26] Jack O. Balswick, Pamela Ebstyne King, and Kevin S. Reimer, The Reciprocating Self: Human Development in Theological Perspactive (2; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2016), 42. [27] Balswick, King, and Reimer, The Reciprocating Self, 47. [28] Balswick, King, and Reimer, The Reciprocating Self, 38. [29] Karkkainen, Intro to Ecclesiology, 34, 67. [30] Wright, The Mission of God, 52. [31] Wright, The Mission of God, 265 This argument is not meant to dismiss the power of imperative statements in scripture, or propositional content. It merely points out that those types of statements sit in and originate from the story of God acting among his people. [32] Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Kindle ed.; Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1989), Kindle location 1526. [33] Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Kinle location 1526. [34] Sparks, Soerens, and Friesen, The New Parrish, 23 The additional question of how the church is to relate to the physical location of their neighborhood, how we love and care for the physical environment in which we have been placed, falls within the scope of this conversation, although the scope of the assignment does not allow for more detailed conversation here. [35] Sparks, Soerens, and Friesen, The New Parrish, 56. [36] Leonard Sweet and Michael Adam Beck, Contextual Intelligence: Unlocking the Ancient Secrets to Mission on the Front Lines (Oviedo, FL: HigherLife Publishing, 2020), 51. [37] Sweet and Beck, Contextual Intelligence, 15–16. [38] Sparks, Soerens, and Friesen, The New Parrish, 125.
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