Be the change by Jason Valendy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Like Parenting, Christianity is Less Carpenter; More Gardener
A few weeks ago Hidden Brain had a wonderful little episode titled Kinder-Gardening. You can listen to the episode to the right if you would like.
If you have not heard this episode, it focuses on two competing metaphors for being a parent: a carpenter and a gardener. Where most of the books parents are encouraged to read and much of the conversation about how to raise children are influenced by the parent as carpenter metaphor, it stands to reason that for most of human history it is the parent as gardener metaphor that has guided us.
The key difference in these metaphors, as you can imagine, is the locus of control. If a carpenter does the proper work they will get the proper product. The carpenter is a metaphor of control and is the dominate metaphor for living in the United States. Those of us in the United States have a false sense of control in our lives that it is almost laughable at how fragile we are when we are only slightly out of control. Just watch many Americans stand in a line or have to wait for the server to bring the menu, you can see frustration boil over because the lack of control is maddening (I know this all too well myself!).
Photo by Igor Ovsyannykov on Unsplash
The dominance of the carpenter metaphor bleeds into parenting to the point that society believes that raising children is like building a table. Just look at the most popular books on parenting. The carpenter parent metaphor is booming business. However, for anyone who has raised a child you know that there is so much that you cannot control that it is almost laughable to think that anyone could build the proper child to being with! Thus the metaphor of parenting as gardener may be more helpful.
Just as you cannot control the weather, birds dropping odd seeds and bugs eating your fruits, so too you cannot control much of a child: their DNA, their likes and dislikes, their strengths and weaknesses, their friends, etc. Parenting today feels like having to unlearn the carpenter and learn the skill set of the gardener.
Which leads me to Jesus.
Jesus was raised by a carpenter and yet the vast majority of his parables use gardening imagery. In fact, other than the parable of the foolish builder in Matthew 7 and again in Luke 6, I could not think of any parable that connected to carpentry.
It is interesting to me that even Jesus had to unlearn the carpenter and learn the skill of the gardener so to teach God's children how to live.
Perhaps the invitation is to put down the hammer and pick up the shovel.
I love the church! But I love my little tribe more.
Nancy Gibbs gave a wonderful speech which was adapted for TIME magazine titled How we Deserted Common Ground. The piece is directed to journalists but is worth reading because she is a very good writer and her insights are always helpful.
In Gibbs' article she cites Yale Law professor Dan Kahan who said, "What people 'believe' about global warming doesn't' reflect what they know, it expresses who they are." Clearly this is not limited to global warming. To make the case, Gibbs also cites a southern Democratic Senator who said the debate over gun control is "about who you are and who you aren't."
When we are more concerned about our personal brand, our ratings, number of likes, and retweets, every issue is not about the issue but a proxy discussion for how we desire to be seen. It stands to reason that the debates in the United Methodist Church are also about "who you are and who you aren't."
And therein lies the difficulty of the situation we are in. We are so insecure of who we are in Christ that we have to constantly define ourselves as something else. "We are orthodox Wesleyan." "We are the prophetic voices of God." We are arguing with others in order to show them who we are, all the while unaware that who we really feel we need to convince is is our own tribe.
A large reason we continue to be entrenched is because if we give the impression that we are not 100% with our tribe then we risk our tribe abandoning us. And hell hath no fury as a tribe who eats their own for not being pure enough for the tribe. So in order to avoid being cannibalized by our own tribe, we take steps to prove our tribal devotion which moves us farther away other non-tribe members.
This is why we all have words and ideas that we don't like to use. Conservatives do not like to identify themselves as social justice advocates (even though they they are) because even as they believe in social justice they don't want to give the impression they are liberal. And Liberals don't want to talk about how they are orthodox (even thought they are) because to do so means they could give the impression they are conservative.
Much of the arguing in the church that divides us farther apart is rooted in efforts to convince our own tribe of who we are. And there is no greater devotion to the little tribe than being willing to break the larger Church for the sake of the little tribe.
How to Shrink Your Church - by Tim Suttle
A few days ago, the recently retired Rev. Mike Slaughter tweeted this little article (gem) from 2011.
In the event you did not read the article in full, the author is a pastor named Tim Suttle. His main argument is stated in the opening paragraph:
Pastors and churches spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year attending conferences, buying books, hiring consultants, advertisers and marketers, all to try and accomplish one thing: to increase attendance -- to be a bigger church. I'm absolutely convinced this is the wrong tack.
Rev. Suttle argues that the drive to get larger churches is fueled by two sources: Sentimentality and pragmatism.
He defines sentimentality as: "tell me something that will make me feel better".
There are many seminarians who have a ton of conversation about the creeping sentimentality in a church. The sentimentality is very real conversation that needs to happen, but my interests reside in the conversation about pragmatism.
He defines pragmatism as "tell me something that will work".
The emphasis on the pragmatic is something that has come into the mind of anyone who has taken a class and thought, "why do I need to know this? I will never use this in my life!" While seminaries and church leadership work to diminish sentimentality in the church, these same bodies work to elevate pragmatic.
For instance, every preaching class I have ever taken or any church leader that I have head speak about preaching there is an emphasis on the practical. Every sermon needs a "take away" or a "life application" for the people. The assumption is that unless the preacher can give a practical application of the sermon then the sermon is severely lacking. Preachers need to speak to people's heads (teach), heart (inspire) and hands (action).
Photo by Silvestri Matteo on Unsplash
If pragmatism continues to be idolized in the preaching moment then the proclamation of the Gospel will devolve into a Jesus-sheen TED Talk. Or even worse, preaching will move from a symbiotic relationship to a co-dependent one. Where preacher and congregation are less interested in the difficult process of dying to ourselves and more interested in weekly Christian life hacks.
I encourage you to read the Suttle article which lays all this out much better.