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2
Gospel
Veneer
Living Deeply in a Surface Society
by
Jason Locy
and
Tim Willard
The relevant seeker-sensitive model, however, seems to influence most new churches. This well-intentioned model uses many of the same techniques found in magazines and malls and arenas across the country. This church boasts “experience architects” and “producers” and “creative directors” who manufacture environments where the attendee can “experience God.”
If we back up and look at the Christian landscape with as much objectivity as possible, we can’t help but notice how much society influences the church. From building architecture to worship style, the relevant church takes its cues from the Apples and Starbucks and U2s of the world.
We’ve successfully bottled God with a neat worship funnel. By the time song five gets pumping, the audience knows what to expect. This kind of predictability marks our society—the seeking of the sensory so we can feel more. Unfortunately many churches don’t offer an alternative to these expectations; they capitalize on them.
Perhaps the most arrogant presupposition of it all is that we think the outside world wants this as well. It’s not just that we want this kind of environment. We think “seekers” will love that God offers them the same thing they get at the mall.
Leading the way for the church, we find the pastor whose actions ripple through the congregation.14 In part, the position of pastor seems to be tainted by celebrity culture. The pages of Christian magazines are covered with “hot” new pastors and whatever message they’re preaching at the time. They amass followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook and they make short videos in which they star in the lead role. Sadly, if a pastor stumbles, his story then becomes front-page news. In a society that praises celebrities, we find it natural to “celebrate the extraordinary minister more than the ordinary ministry of the gospel.”15
Traditionally, the pastor’s role was that of a shepherd. Today, the role is more entrepreneur and marketer. The skill set of the traditional pastor and the modern pastor could not be more different. A shepherd-pastor’s chief concern is his flock, to disciple and care for it. An entrepreneur-pastor’s chief concern is his product (brand) and results. He must play by the rules of the marketplace: consumer demand, growth, profits and loss, return on investment. When a marketing genius runs a church, the expression—church building and methodology—will resemble his leadership style. This seems to be a natural outcome of a clergy whose “prevalent mood and theme is managerial, organizational, and psychological.”16
What happened to the shepherd-pastor of old? Where are those bright members of the clergy who could care for people, preach a great sermon, and exegete the Scriptures? Pastor and scholar John Piper laments, “We have, by and large, lost the biblical vision of a pastor as one who is mighty in the Scriptures, apt to teach, competent to confute opponents, and able to penetrate to the unity of the whole counsel of God.”17
We aren’t, however, the first to deal with the issue of popularity in the church. Indeed, the Corinthian church existed in a society filled with cults, idol worship, intellectual elitism, and temple prostitution—a culture of luxury and sexual laxity.18 The Corinthian church wanted what was relevant to the culture, a great orator to wow them: “the Corinthians were enamored with sophistry, teachers of rhetoric were in high demand in this city where movers and shakers had a better chance at upward mobility than in older, well-established cities built on bedrock traditions. This is why Paul spends the first four chapters of 1 Corinthians demoting the art of public speaking and promoting the power of a gospel that exalts the weak and the foolish.”19
Paul turns this kind of culture on its ear, instructing the church to serve “people without respect for their persona and their usefulness or any personal political aspirations typical of patronage.” Apparently Paul’s warning to the Corinthians worked. Christians and the church “were no longer the fawning and flattering parasites of private patrons,” writes New Testament theologian Bruce Winter, “subservient to their ambitions and daily agendas, but they were family—the family of God.”20
If anything, the churches of Corinth and Thessalonica remind us that hooking onto the popular culture can have disastrous results for the gospel. Focusing on the outward gifts of men and women and giving them popular preferential treatment because they somehow “measure up” better than others is antithetical to the values inherent in the family of God. If the cultural language speaks in contradiction to the message of Christ, then we not only have to evaluate it and weigh all our decisions corporately, methodologically, and spiritually but we also need the courage to counter the culture.
EVERMORE LESS
The perfect church service would be one we were
almost unaware of.
Our attention would have been on God.
—C.S. Lewis (Letters to Malcolm)
Philosopher Francis Schaeffer, at the end of his book A Christian Manifesto, stated “What does all this mean in practice for us today? I must say, I really am not sure all that it means to us in practice at this moment."21 Schaeffer said this to concede that he didn’t have all the answers, but that there was a definite problem to deal with. Likewise, we don’t have all the answers for the church. We are not offering a detailed step-by-step guide to a new ecclesiology. But we are offering questions to consider because we believe that the church faces grave cultural issues. And in order for the church to regain its “true” form, there must be radical change as a result of deep reflection on our problems.
Some may argue that the Western church is flourishing because mega-churches are experiencing steady growth. This observation, however, is based on metrics for success that are founded on a worldly standard. Unlike the corporate world, the church doesn’t exist for dollars and cents but instead to produce changed lives through discipleship. We cannot continue to apply corporate metrics to a non-corporate entity, as this only drives pastors to develop methods to achieve growth through numbers. Consequently, church methods become more grounded in sociology rather than ecclesiology.
So, a true gauge of the church’s success is its impact in individual lives, which then translates to broader cultural change. We must begin to question our methods and our motives for how we express the Christian faith through the institution of the church. Here are a few questions to keep in mind as we evaluate:
1. Are our methods based on a corporate/ cultural paradigm? (Are we more swayed by sociological trends than solid ecclesiology?)
2. Are we mimicking the language of culture or offering something more captivating?
3. How do our churches measure its success? Or, can a church truly measure
success?
4. How much has the “Christian celebrity” culture affected our methodology?
5. What personal veneers are affecting our church methodology?
We began our discussion with an old sawmill where antique wood is reclaimed. If we could pull out some of those old pieces of wood, we would see the church as fine American chestnut. But, because we do not appreciate the inherent beauty—or because the world does not understand it—we cover it up with a cheap veneer. We put on a veneer when we have nothing to hide.
To see the beauty of the church we can look at its purpose. Most will agree that the purpose of the church is to edify and equip the saints to preach the gospel—through their lives, or otherwise— and to make disciples. This can serve as our starting point for discerning the kind of methods we should use as the church.
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Comments
paul hoyt
I can't help but draw a parallel in my mind between what Locy and Willard write and the prevailing lesson about capitalism from our current economic hard-times. Given the alternatives and taken as a the whole, both capitalism and the church serve their respective purpose very well - in fact, better than any other competing option. But like the 2008 stock market crash clearly brought to the forefront poor economic practices that damage the system's effectiveness and undermine its goals, the message of Veneer highlights mis-guided Christian practices and provides the same needed warning - we must rethink.
Katerina Ilic
Isn't it stunning to think about how many people in the early Church willingly suffered untold tortures in refusing to deny Christ, refusing to deny the Holy Trinity, refusing to deny the True Faith? Their religion was not theoretical, not philosophical, not ideological. (The New Testament canon wasn't even finalized, so while the books were in use and circulation, people were not able to read them handily...those who could read. They weren't motivated by convictions but rather through a profound love for Christ Himself.) Sadly, because the United States was founded on ideology, Christianity has become part of that ideology and people actually stand behind their beliefs instead of the God-man Jesus Christ. People were (and some still are) connected to Him in a way that transcends all the superficiality of our modern world. Western civilization puts such a barrier between the physical and the spiritual. They are not so disconnected. Thus, spiritual life is confusing for people...they don't know where it starts and where it stops, hence all the opportunity for veneer.
The book "Father Arseny" is an account of a person who shared the same true connection to Christ like the early martyrs and his impact on the people around him during the cruelest times in Soviet Russia. If we want to learn what it looks like to be a deeply spiritual person, one who is not caught up in veneers and who can transform the lives of people around him/her, we must learn from someone who lived it wholly, completely, authentically and indescribably beautifully.
http://www.amazon.com/Father-Arseny-1893-1973-Narratives-Concerning/dp/0881411809
Another comparison: the more teenagers are attached to their peers, the less they think, look and act like their parents. The more we are attached to our peers and the things of this world, the less we look and act like our Parent. It is all about attachment.
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