The church is facing a number of issues right now. Here in the UK the ongoing crisis of leadership in the wake of numerous high-profile cases of Pastors abusing their positions might be the most obvious.
I’ve written about another crisis, of discipleship, where the average Christian’s faith doesn’t touch the sides of their life. Christians don’t know the basics of the faith, they don’t think ‘Christianly,’ and their lives are largely indistinguishable from those of their work colleagues. Liberalism reigns supreme.
Our wider culture is also in crisis, a host of them, but the one I’ve touched on most is what John Vervaeke first named ‘The Meaning Crisis,’ which is in essence what happens to a culture when it stops running on the Christian metanarrative: all the stories run dry.
All of these are deeply influenced by what Matthew Lee Anderson calls our ‘Attention Crisis,’ where the attention economy keeps us punch drunk in ‘information cocoons,’ and we can’t distinguish truth from lies.
We could name numerous other challenges—crises, even—in the culture and probably in the church. Some are overblown and it’s good to chuckle at them, many are not. I don’t think any of the ones I’ve mentioned are overblown in their usual telling.
Christ is still on the throne, he sits in the heavens and laughs in derision at the rage of the nations (Psalm 2), and we must all ‘kiss the Son.’ That’s vital to remember, but that doesn’t mean that the Church or culture can’t be in crisis or that we shouldn’t consider what to do about it.
The solutions are deceptively simple. The leadership crisis is solved when we appoint shepherds rather than wolves to the pastorate. The discipleship crisis is solved by teaching the Bible. The solution to the meaning crisis is Christianity, which YouTube is waking up to, even if my neighbour isn’t. The solution to the attention crisis is to gather with others around tables.
I think every sentence in the previous paragraph is true. At the same time, I suspect it comes across as trite, we’re already doing all of those things, right? Of course, the answer is yes and no, there is more that can be done in each instance and yet I don’t think they’re going to make these crises go away. Someone else would have done so already if they could.
Should we throw up our hands and declare defeat then? No. We should think structurally about how to do each of those things in new and old ways in our contexts. There will inevitably be other things we can do to help us navigate and live within the tides of crisis. That’s the metaphor I think we should be using, ‘live within the tide,’ rather than ‘fix the world.’ Except, we should be ready for the day when it’s time to fix the world Nehemiah style and rebuild the ruins. It may not be in our day, but its coming is as inexorable as Jesus rising from the dead. Worlds die, and they rise from the grave.
I want to try and dig just one tiny bit deeper—as deep as a blog post can go, anyway—because the challenge from Anderson would be that I’m not thinking about this the right way. We don’t need solutions, because solutions are what got us in this mess in the first place.
In his Called into Questions, he describes how the intellectual life can help with the attention crisis. He’s keen that it is not a solution—by which he means a technique that can be mastered—but instead a mode of being. Riffing on the grammatical term, he calls it ‘the interrogative mode,’ we could as easily speak of a questioning life. His contention is that what we need isn’t a way out, but a way of being. We don’t want to tick the boxes; we want to enter the way of life.
Our ‘solutions,’ if we can even speak that way without falling into talking like we want a technique, can’t be simply structural. It can’t be run this thing and set up this institution and do this other thing; even when those are good and will help. We need anthropological ‘solutions,’ we need a way of being.
This is why I think the ways ‘out’ of our problems are still what I listed above, but they aren’t solutions, they’re ways of life. I hope they’re what in the first century would have been called ‘the way,’ and we now call ‘Christianity.’ We are conditioned by the structure of the world to expect to do a thing and solve a problem, it’s why we can’t read anymore. We need instead a new mode of life.
Which is, surprisingly enough, to argue that the way back from the crises we face is… a vibe.
I know how stupid that sounds. We already have online communities that decide their intellectual positions through vibes, by which we mean a sense that they like the cut of the other guy’s jib rather than that what he is saying is persuasive. If we are observant, I suspect everyone has noticed that they tend to be more likely to agree with arguments from the guys who are ‘on our team’ and less likely to be persuaded by those who aren’t. We live in an age of aesthetics.
Yet, we still need a way of being. A set of intellectual arguments—which are good and should be prized—isn’t the way back. There is a reason that Jesus started a religious movement that he called the Way. Following is the nature of it. It takes a life to learn to be a follower.
If there is an ‘answer,’ it’s Jesus. That’s my whole schtick. I know it seems stupid and Sunday school-esque. It’s certainly simple. It isn’t simplistic.
Why’s that? It will take your entire life, everything you have and own, everything you are, to follow Jesus in his death and resurrection. It also happens to be the only way ‘back,’ and when we get there we’ll find that our route back to Eden has led us to a New Jerusalem garden-city. It’s a whole vibe.
It sounds like I’ve gone pious and switched from talking about problems now to the final redemption of all things in the new heavens and the new earth. I am actually arguing that the solution to our problems right now is to live the story that takes us to the new heavens and the new earth; if we do, we’ll find we build a bit of the New Jerusalem where we are. That’s why it’s a ‘vibe,’ or a way of life: point every fibre of your being in the direction of this story and all these crises will be navigable. It won’t be easy—no one ever promised it would be—but you’ll find that you can do it.
What does that look like in the face of all this mess? Not to mention your own sin and the sin of those who sin against you and a thousand more horrors besides?
We started by thinking about laughing about overblown crises. The way of being that the way of Jesus leads is serious business, which is why it makes us laugh a lot. I am still learning it, but the way is a way that charges into the fray with laughter on our lips. We’ve read the end of the story—we’re even living it now—and the other side of the grave is its fulfilment as we blossom into maturity, and the Lamb wins.
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
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