The Four Kinds of Knowledge and The American Mega Church: The Acton Institute Series

This is the third blog based on my lecture for Acton Institute 2012.

Institutions, like individuals, draw upon four different kinds of knowledge to carry out their vision and do their work. Let's call these types of knowledge theory, phronesis, technique and tacit.

The Greek word teoria refers to a formal structure of thought, an abstract intellectual system (such as geometry or physics.) Theories allow us to develop concepts, which we may or may not ever apply to concrete situations. For example, physicists speculate about such things as wormholes and multi-dimensional universes. Theologians also speculate about issues that may or may not ever arise in our everyday lives. Nonetheless, such speculation is valuable. It strengthens and refines the concepts of the discipline we seek to develop and sometimes helps us discover surprising applications in real life.

Seminaries specialize in theory.

Phronesis describes the process of mentoring and coaching. We usually see phronesis at work in vocational training. It is a type of knowledge gradually acquired by an apprentice as he or she copes the actions of a mentor. For example, construction workers usually learn their craft in this way. Pastoral life also requires phronesis. Knowing how to baptize someone or to do helpful hospital visitation are not things we can really learn from a text but are skills passed from a gifted mentor to a teachable apprentice.

Smaller churches tend to employ phronesis better than larger ones. That is the main reason why most mega church leaders come from smaller congregations.

Techne describes the knowledge of the proper medium, skill, or presentation required to perform or communicate something.

The church growth movement has very effectively employed techne to analyze cultural trends. Church growth technicians taught churches how to use research to make needed changes in their organization, technology, and marketing. The technique of church growth has helped many congregations learn how to attract new members and adapt their organizational structures to maintain, reach and serve larger congregations than we were often able to do in the past.

Tacit Knowledge is a type of knowing that is “caught better than taught.” It is most effectively transmitted through metaphor, symbol and spiritual experience. Gestures, emotional affect, and other non-formal (and often non-conscious or non-deliberate) actions transmit tacit knowledge from one person to another. An example might be of the way we dimly perceive a shape at the furthest reach of our headlights as we are driving at night. We must quickly decide if the shape is a deer, a tree, or something else. We may make a mistake in what we think we see at first, but prudence tells us to slow down or change lanes nonetheless.

Pentecostals, African-American believers, and Southern hemisphere Christians tend to make this form of knowledge a major part of their training and discipleship systems.

Businesses like Apple and Google are rare examples of corporate use of tacit knowledge.

One of the things that helps create mega church culture is that they focus on techne more than on other kinds of knowledge.

In fact, the first generation of many mega churches began with a conscious and deliberate shift away from theological theory. The leaders of a congregation usually makes this shift in order to avoid the doctrinal and hierarchical systems that their mobile constituency often regard as unhelpful for their spiritual needs. This is another way of saying that knowledge about “how to” replaces the old concern about “for what purpose.

When mega churches began to emerge in American culture last generation, management knowledge offered by the likes of Peter Drucker, became much more interesting to many church leaders than the works of Calvin, Aquinas or Tillich. The move away from theory and toward technique deeply affected the theology and spirituality of the following generations, so much so that many influential church leaders theory now widely view theology as a rather esoteric, or even useless kind of knowledge.

The likes of George Barna have called for an even more drastic change in the skill set we should expect of from our senior church leaders. For him, the teacher/pastor as senior leader has become an impediment to church growth and cripples the church in its quest to reach a world that has become radically secularized. Indeed, the entire church growth movement – led by technicians, for the most part – have seemed ill at ease with theoria, phronesis and certainly with tacit forms of knowledge. Church growth, they have insisted, is the result of scientific measurement, evaluation, organizational structure, business plans and marketing.

Church growth technicians have thus influenced many of our largest churches to put doctrinal training and spiritual direction on the back burner. They have advised the churches to focus on meeting the people's immediate and pragmatic needs. As a result, many mega churches have raised a generation of children largely isolated from adults and who consequently formed a spiritual sub-culture differing considerably from that of their parents. As these children became young adults, they had little understanding of doctrine or scripture. They also felt little loyalty toward the church in which they were raised. Different generations of people within the mega church often sang different songs, taught from different material and acted as though they were entirely different congregations. This programmed generational alienation would exacerbate the already complicated process of mega church succession.

The church growth principle of “homogeneity,” which makes a dictum of the common sense observation that people prefer to be with folk like themselves, is also breaking down. Older mega churches cannot thrive in the new melting pot culture of America’s great cities if the homogeneity principle is about race or social class. New churches can operate that way further out in the new suburbs, where society often remains relatively homogeneous. The mega churches of last generation however, are being forced to change the unsustainable model they embraced in past decades. Furthermore, they must do this as they continue to carry the weight of their aging facilities and, in some cases, aging congregations suspicious of their new neighbors.

Nevertheless, older mega churches are usually located in a veritable gold mine of opportunity. The people most likely to convert to Christianity in today’s world – the real seekers – are often immigrants. Since some immigrants are people of means, an outreach to the newly globalized neighborhoods is not necessarily an exercise in romantic idealism. Many large churches around the world now serve congregations of people who come from all parts of the globe. This is new for much our country and is uncomfortable for some people, especially in the most traditional parts of the nation. However, demographic change is increasingly an important part of the environment in which we build and sustain our churches.

Succession is another elephant in the room when mega church leaders meet to discuss the future. Mega churches are nearly always founded by a powerful and innovative leader. He gradually forms a church culture around his style, aims and personality. As the leader ages, a plan for succession becomes increasingly important. However, in practice, a plan for the founding pastor’s succession is rarely discussed, much less implemented, until very late in the game. This is one of the most vulnerable spots of mega church culture. It must be addressed in a much more serious way if we expect very many of our great congregations to thrive after their founders retirement or death.

Southeast Christian is a notable exception. Perhaps informed by their culture of independent local church government, which encouraged various levels of authority and accountability within the church, the weight of the church did not rest entirely upon its founding pastor. This allowed him to peacefully transition to the next generation. Unfortunately, this has proven to be very much the exception.

Perhaps the most important take away point of this blog is that mega churches that want to transition past their first generation need outside voices that represent different perspectives. However great the past, the structures and victories of yesterday will prove inadequate for meeting the challenges of today. The church's original vision must not be lost but it must be tweaked. To do that successfully requires what the Bible calls "a multitude of council,"which ideally should include people with the four different kinds of knowledge: theory, pronesis, technique and tacit.

Theologians, business people, IT experts. artists and saints are some examples that come to mind that can offer different perspectives to church leaders who wish to remain effective as well as faithful to the gospel.

Whats Going on In America's Mega Churches? : The Acton Institute Series

 

This blog is the second of a series based on a lecture I gave at the Acton Institute in 2012.

With few exceptions, mega churches enjoy their greatest success during their first generation. As they age, the mega church tends to plateau, enter an era of gradual decline, or implode as its founding era comes to an end. This presents a major crisis for mega churches. To transition from their founding generation, they must both maintain an infrastructure built to service the larger crowds of an earlier generation and adapt their programs and structures to serve people with different needs than those who preceded them. If they make these changes to their programming, they risk losing their seasoned members, who, after all, pay the bills. If they don’t make the changes, they risk the loss of younger adults and new converts. That can create an age wave, making the church’s long-term future unsustainable.

For these and other reasons, most of our older mega churches are in trouble.

But before we go on, perhaps we should stop to ask, what exactly is a mega church?

Glad you asked.

American mega churches are the result of a massive national migration that took place in the generation from immediately after the Second World War. This migration dislocated young adult believers from their family’s traditional denominations. As they moved from place to place, Baby Boomer Christians lost their loyalty for any specific branch of their faith. As a result, they tended to choose churches for the services they provided, or because those who attended them embraced social values similar to their own.

A generation later, we are experiencing a global migration. This has accelerated the demographic shift of our cities and towns. A generation ago, the members of churches in our large cities came from many different states. Since then, the dislocation, rootlessness and social transition that characterized the makeup of those first mega church congregations have intensified, so that today,  most mega churches consist of people from many countries.

Mega churches are also the result of a post-modern distrust of tightly arranged doctrinal and hierarchal systems. On the “liberal” side of the church, this has resulted in a syncretistic culture that openly relativizes religious and secular systems of thought. On the “conservative” side, the same attitude results in a verbal commitment to basic Christian orthodoxy (Mere Christianity) and an emotional alignment with social and political conservatism. Nonetheless, conservative Christians are as suspicious of authority, and of the institutional church, as their liberal counterparts.

As a result of this loss of confessional identity, the doctrinal content of many mega churches is seriously deficient. For liberals, this loss of doctrine has been intentional and deliberate. For many conservatives however, especially those in mega churches, the erosion is the result of a pragmatic decision to replace theology with self-help pep talks and good music. That is why many “conservative” mega churches have been getting better and better at saying less and less.

This lack of theological gravitas has led some Christian thinkers to judge the mega church as an aberrant form of the faith, utterly lacking in historical roots. Admittedly, the history of the mega church is brief. Unless, that is, we think of the cathedral as a type of mega church.

Thinking of the cathedral as a type of mega church (and the mega church as something like a cathedral) can serve as a thought experiment. It may help us imagine ways in which the mega church can play a constructive role in American spiritual life. It also roots the mega church to history in some helpful ways.

Thinking of churches like the Hagia Sofia, St. Peter’s or St. Paul’s as mega churches suggests that although mega churches may be something different than what Protestants have traditionally expected local congregations to be, they are not aberrant or alien to historical Christianity. In fact, they perform similar roles that some churches have played throughout Christian history.

Like cathedrals, mega churches serve a congregation. However, also like a cathedral, the mega church provides a common space and cultural buttress for smaller congregations around it. Thus, a member of a smaller church may be quite familiar with a neighboring mega church and may regularly use its facilities without having any intention of ever shifting his membership there. The cathedral has historically played a similar role. Although a cathedral has played an ecclesiastical and theological role that contemporary mega churches do not claim, the mega church shares with the cathedral the call to play a different role within the Christian community than its smaller counterparts.

Whether or not they are in any sense “cathedrals,” mega churches are relatively new for Protestant Christianity. Already though, they provide services that traditional Protestant congregations have not. Were this not so, millions of believers would not have been leaving smaller congregations to attend them. This should be acknowledged before offering any critique of the mega church.

Critique is in order though and at least some of that critique should come from those who believe the mega church brings certain unique gifts to the cause of Christ and not merely from those who dismiss the mega church as automatically detrimental to authentic Christian life.

What Can Pastors Say to Economists? : The Acton Institute Series

This is the first of a series of blogs cannibalized from my presentation at Acton Institute, 2012. This year's address (which I cam giving tomorrow at Acton) is  a sequel to last year’s presentation, which is also available on request.

(The Acton Institute, by the way, is a foundation that networks people who wish to learn and share  economic ideas. It works closely with Calvin College in Grand Rapids. Michigan and offers tons of free material on the subject. http://m.acton.org/ This year there are about eight hundred attendees from twenty seven countries.)

Seeing that I am neither an economist nor a financial expert, I was pleasantly surprised to receive your second invitation to speak at the Acton Institute.

I am, as you know, a pastor. My primary responsibility is to attend to the spiritual health of Christ Church Nashville. Secondarily, I am called to offer whatever help I can to the larger body of Christ. Thirdly, I am called to serve humanity in general in Christ's name.

That is what brings me to this conference. I want to learn from you and to share with you from the knowledge and experience I have gained as a Christian pastor. I think that insight can be valuable to your line of work because ultimately secularism will not work, even in economics. Money, after all, is merely a manifestation of spiritual forces and what does a secular materialist do with spiritual forces? Since pastors are called to specialize in matters of spiritual life, they should offer instruction about how spiritual life impacts economics and contributes to human flourishing.

It may come as a shock now, even to Christians, to hear that spiritual life includes how one views and practices finance. Nonetheless, Christianity has much to say about finance, although what it says is sometimes difficult to express in the language of contemporary economics. Difficult or not, Christian theology must deal with it. Economics is, after all the discipline that describes and influences the way we exercise stewardship over the part of creation God has placed within our sphere of responsibility.

I realize that most Christian churches have not had much to say about economics (or many other serious parts of human culture) for some time. The reason for this is intellectual sloth, pure and simple. I have no apologies to offer about that. I will say only that Christians are supposed to learn about how the world works and apply themselves to make a contribution to the health of human society. Historically, pastors have been expected to teach believers to do this.

Believers of equal sincerity, holiness and intelligence will disagree with one another about economics, of course. That is bound to happen if we begin our discussion from a secular premise. That should not be surprising to anyone. A socialist may easily isolate a string of Biblical passages to support his position and a capitalist can do the same. However, that sort of disagreement occurs much less frequently, and will not be nearly as serious, when we begin from Christian precepts rather than from ones rooted in secular ideologies from the secular left and right.

What pastors are supposed to do is shine the light of scripture (and the light of sacred history) upon economics and all other subjects. They are supposed to equip Christians how to perceive and perform their work in a Christian way. It is slothful for a pastor to hide from this task behind a wall of neutrality or ignorance. It is also unethical for a pastor to uncritically present secular theories he has picked up along the way and pass those off as "Christian." What the pastor shares  ought to be the implications of Orthodox Christianity, which will always be “other than” any secular system of thought.

I assume then that there is such a thing as Christian economics. Therefore, there must be such a thing as a Christian economist.

I am not one, but I think I know what one looks like.

If we call a person a Christian economist, we may mean that he is a believer who represents a school of economics acknowledged by other economists, Christian or not. However, we may also mean that he represents an economic system consciously based upon Christian presuppositions. St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Abraham Kuyper are Christian economists in that second sense. Although economics was not their main focus, and this is especially true of the first two, each developed economic theories that resulted in economic experimentation. We can learn from those experiments and apply the lessons they offer to contemporary life. A Christian economist specializes in doing that.

Pastors are rarely economists. However, they should know enough about the history and thought structures of their faith to offer insights on such things as economics to the people of their congregation. We tend not to expect this now from our pastors. We have largely transformed pastoral work into a form of therapeutic labor that offers certain kinds of spiritual experience but which lacks the biblical component of intellectual formation. As a Charismatic Christian, I certainly do not say this to denigrate the value of spiritual experience. I say it to insist that pastoral work includes intellectual formation and that necessarily includes how to view economic theory and practice in the light of faith.

If our secularized Christian culture pushes back with the question about what gives a pastor the right to address such things as economics, the answer is simple: a pastor does not speak from his own authority. He speaks as a messenger and agent of something above and beyond himself. He gives witness to a body of truth that he is charged to study and to communicate to others. This is his unique responsibility. He takes vows to do it. It is insubordinate to his Lord not to do it.

As agent and witness of an authority beyond and above himself however, the pastor learns and applies the lessons of the “great cloud of witnesses,” the “communion of saints,” that have formed his way of viewing the world.

Although largely ignored and forgotten, Christianity has a deeply rooted and highly nuanced philosophical heritage which a pastor is responsible to study and make available to his flock. Some of history’s most brilliant and saintly people gave their lives defending and applying the principles of our faith in times of great challenge and change. Believers accumulated it as they met the challenges late Greco-Roman antiquity threw at the early church. Having met those challenges, Christians met new ones offered by the fall of civilization and its long recovery through the medieval ages. Then came Islam. After that, the Enlightenment. Orthodoxy is what we call the result of their work and offers, we believe, a unique perspective on economic life. Now it is our turn as we work through the issues raised by our globalized, post-modern culture and to add to this heritage of Christian orthodoxy where economic life is concerned.

That is the main reason we have come to Acton and why a pastor should be excited about what happens here.

This long introduction may, at first glance, have little to do with the question I have been asked to address: the nature and future of America’s mega churches. I suspect that I was given this topic based on the lecture I gave last year however and so felt that I should explain the reasons why we are talking about the mega church in this conference.

I spoke last year about the economic impact of mega churches upon their members. It was a relatively easy lecture to prepare. I simply told the story of how two men (Dave Ramsey and Dan Miller) affected the financial culture of our local church.

Dave Ramsey, I said, taught us how to resist the temptation of a consumer society and to live within our means. He said we should tithe, save, invest and grow our assets to the level our vocation and abilities allowed.

Dan Miller, I added, taught us how to discover and live out our chosen vocation with joy, and to do it regardless of how society views the status of our chosen vocation.

The central idea of that lecture was that economics is more about what Dad and Mom create in their house more than it is about what our leaders do in the White House. As Dave Ramsey and Dan Miller poured their ideas into our congregation, the Dads and Moms who heard them made fundamental changes in the way they ran aspects of their homes. This had an enormous impact on our church, and through our church, on our entire city.

That story is true. It is powerful. However, it is also old news because it happened a generation ago.

In a world that has substantially changed since -- locally, nationally and internationally -- our church, like many others, is dealing with new challenges. We face those challenges with physical, organizational and ideological structures we built in response to last generation’s needs. Also, to be truthful, we have drifted somewhat from the principles we propagated back then: curiosity about the world, faith that we had what it takes to meet the challenges, a commitment to continual learning, and a belief that our faith is central rather than peripheral to one’s personal life.

This year, I cannot coast on great stories from the 1980’s. I must address a contemporary situation still in process.

As for what this has to do with economics, I will say that the reason so few of us understand economics is because we think it is mostly about money. Money, however, is a fruit rather than a root of economic theory and practice. What we believe, teach and live affects our financial lives. It is this entire picture that concerns a real economist and not merely the money that results from the structures that produce it. The word “economia” means after all, having to do with one’s oikos, or house. The Christian Church is the household of faith. What we teach and practice in this household affects every part of every person in it.

The subject of this lecture is a particular type of Christian household called the mega church. Because of what they offer or fail to offer, these massive communities affect, for good or ill, all those who choose to attend them. Because so many American believers now attend them, their spiritual health ought to be a concern of all believers. Indeed, they ought to concern nonbelievers as well, influencing as they do a considerable part of American cultural and economic life.

So there is my justification for talking about theology and the management of a mega church at a conference on economics.

With that, I cast myself on your mercy and proceed.