Neil Postman argued that our metaphors demonstrate our thought patterns. I’ve argued that our metaphors fence our thought patterns such that we can’t think outside of them.
I suspect the relationship here flows in both directions rather than simply downstream, but metaphor and thought connect in important ways. When we use machine language to describe ourselves, we both reveal that we think we’re machines and we persuade ourselves that we are machines.
Reality, as it always does, pushes back. We should be concerned by thinking that humans can recharge, because it undermines the Biblical reality of rest in the gathered people of God. We should be concerned by the idea that we need to process things rather than think or feel them.
Wendell Berry, in his essay ‘Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems,’ argues that after the industrial revolution the machinery metaphor has changed how we think. He highlights three examples, each of which I think is worth reflecting from the perspective of church ministry.
Efficiency
Berry argues that we now see efficiency as an end. We assume that the best thing for each thing we do is for it be run efficiently, because that’s what a good machine looks like.
We would commonly criticise public services for being inefficient, but why should a particular service that the government offers be efficient? I want to react against the question—after all, they’re spending my money as a taxpayer—but I think seeing efficiency as an inherently good thing is a product of these shifts, and an arguably less humane one. This is not saying that efficiency is bad as a means to good ends, but it becomes bad when it is pursued as an end in itself.
We are not efficient beings; you only need to look at the way we sleep for around a third of our lives. Churches should take money seriously, but they should do so based on Biblical ideas of stewardship rather than modern ones of efficiency.
Discipleship is inefficient. It’s slow, it’s messy, it can involve going the wrong way for large periods of time, it’s painful, and it always involves suffering.
Production
Berry argues that we have come to understand nature to engage in production rather than work in cycles.
Churches don’t ‘produce’ anything, but I think if we think of trees as conveyor belts for the making of fruit then we can end up thinking the same way about Christian ministry: we do these things to get that fruit.
Instead, trees die and rise again each year bursting with fruit and then dying and then bursting with fruit. I know from my own heart that our struggles and besetting sins can seem cyclical—they aren’t, they’re a spiral growing towards Christ, but we do keep having to deal with the same old things over and over again.
We also follow the pattern of the year, so Church work is cyclical, and its generational. It takes a long time to grow a tree to fruit. It might take generations to change the fabric of your town or city, and that’s absolutely fine. Aim your church’s arm generational, think about the next hundred years in your community, don’t get caught in short-term thinking: grow an orchard, not a tinned fruit factory.
Units
Berry argues that we now see people as units, to be plugged into workstations and produce goods for other units to consume.
This is ubiquitous in the modern workplace. In my own employment we routinely refer to a person by either their grade (a number, e.g. “Phil is a 6”, I’m a 7 if anyone is counting. No not the Ennegram. On that I’m a 5) or their FTE (anything from 0.1 to 1).
Thankfully churches don’t do this so much in my experience, though it does happen. While a term like ‘giving unit’ might be useful on our spreadsheet we can always find a humane term that will help our thinking instead.
Probably the way it does happen in churches is where we expect people to fit our mould. On the one hand, the church is an institution and in the practice of moulding people. On the other, we shouldn’t picture a factory line where we get stamped with an image, but a gardener with a set of shears and a picture of a tree. He has to work with what’s there in the plants he prunes while he aims to get them into semblances of the Platonic tree in his picture.
Pastors aren’t managers, they aren’t CEOs, they are gardeners, they are shepherds.
Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash
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