Can Churches be Post-Church?

I haven’t written any follow up posts to my series of newsletters on the Post-Church Church (which I’ve gathered as a single essay here) mostly because I’ve been getting to work on the building blocks of Post-Church Spaces: facilitating retreats, designing psychedelic integration programs, leading online emotional health and personal growth groups, doing 1:1 IFS coaching, DJing conscious dance events . . .

But in the past couple of weeks, I’ve had meetings with some pretty cool people from different backgrounds and industries who wanted to talk about this Post-Church idea. They each had slightly different takes but we agreed that something new is needed.

My main argument is that institutionalized religion (that is, people belonging to and regularly attending a church, synagogue, mosque, etc.) is in irreversible decline. Yet humans need two things that religious institutions have provided for hundreds of thousands of years: community and transcendence. But in the modern world, we also have two new needs: emotional healing and personal growth.

A few of my Post-Church interlocutors believe that religious institutions still might be a part of the solution. I laid out in my essay the reasons I don’t think this is possible. But it’s an idea I want to engage with.

Over this past weekend The Atlantic published an article by Jake Meador, a writer and editor committed to Christian orthodoxy (in his own words), who argues that secularization is at least in part due to religious institutions demanding too little from their adherents.

In his words:

American churches have too often been content to function as a kind of vaguely spiritual NGO, an organization of detached individuals who meet together for religious services that inspire them, provide practical life advice, or offer positive emotional experiences. Too often it has not been a community that through its preaching and living bears witness to another way to live.

As an example of such a community, he points to Bruderhof, a collection of fundamentalist Christian communes, where members share property as they work and live together. Perhaps this intense level of commitment is what could bring the disinterested back to religious institutions?

He argues that former church-goers aren’t necessarily disinterested in orthodox faith and practice, but rather they lack time due to modern “workism”:

Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. . . . Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.

What could draw folks back to church, for Meador, is:

a community marked by sincere love, sharing what they have from each according to their ability and to each according to their need, eating together regularly, generously serving neighbors, and living lives of quiet virtue and prayer.

He concludes that churches must ask more, not less, from their members.

In the Gospels, Jesus tells his first disciples to leave their old way of life behind, going so far as abandoning their plow or fishing nets where they are and, if necessary, even leaving behind their parents. A church that doesn’t expect at least this much from one another isn’t really a church in the way Jesus spoke about it . . . it also is likely a church that won’t survive the challenges facing us today.

I’ll cut straight to the chase: I think Meador has badly misjudged the situation for modern religion. As a Wall Street Journal article reported yesterday (and I quoted at the top), modern folk aren’t becoming flaming atheists. They just don’t care about institutional religion because it doesn’t make sense in the context of their lives.

Meador claims that religious adherence and attendance has declined over the past several decades because of an increase in “workism.” But average hours of work has continually declined throughout U.S. history right up to the present, just as religious attendance and adherence has declined.

It’s not working hours but rather the lack of relevance that leads people away from institutional religion. Meador talks about the benefits of a community like Berdhorf (“sincere love, sharing what they have from each according to their ability and to each according to their need, eating together regularly, generously serving neighbors, and living lives of quiet virtue and prayer”) but doesn’t recognize their real costs to modern people: irrelevant doctrines and dogmas that are requirements of admission to these communities; irrational biases against expressions of non-traditional gender and sexual identities; an inability to honestly and effectively speak to the modern needs of individual emotional healing and personal growth.

“The problem,” Meador believes. “is that many Americans have adopted a way of life that has left us lonely, anxious, and uncertain of how to live in community with other people.” But he gives us too much volition. Loneliness, anxiety, and uncertainty are fundamental features of modern life not because modern people have made poor choices (“adopted a way of life”), but rather because the macro-social institutions of modern life (the nation state, market economies, bureaucracies, and so on) necessarily produce loneliness, anxiety, and uncertainty.

Meador and others like Berdhorf are trying to solve these problems by turning away from the modern world and attempting to recreate the vision of the early church from the Acts of the Apostles. This obviously creates at least as many problems as it solves.

What we need in a Post-Church movement is first a recognition that the benefits churches, synagogues, mosques, etc. provided people––community and a sense of transcendence––were not unique to any particular faith tradition. So, returning to any particular tradition is unnecessary.

Second, a viable Post-Church movement cannot reject modernity, but rather must welcome and integrate it. The larger social institutions of the bureaucracies, market economies, anonymous contractual relationships, etc. are here to stay because they’re the best way humans have discovered to coordinate relationships among a massive and diverse number of people. Post-church spaces must work with these institutions rather than run from them.

Finally, a Post-Church movement needs to be rooted in practices that require little to no prior beliefs, and ideas that stand the test of public reasoning. If a practice requires belief in a set of doctrines and its ideas rely on faith and assertion, then they’ll be limited to cults.

Meador’s call for a return to communal piety of the early Christian church isn’t new. This has been a common desire of Christian reformers from Martin Luther in the early 1500s to today. And it’s always been doomed because the modern world requires something very different than what these first century ideas and practices can offer.

What would a Post-Church movement look like that leaves the dogma and doctrines behind and simply focuses on the fundamental needs filled by religion (community and transcendence) and the fundamental needs faced by modern people (emotional healing and personal growth)?

It won’t look like a cloistered rejection of modernity. But we need it badly.