Faith Formation in a Secular Age (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #1)

Responding to the Church's Obsession with Youthfulness

Root, Andrew

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781493410316
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

A Top Ten Book for Parish Ministry in 2017, Academy of Parish Clergy The loss or disaffiliation of young adults is a much-discussed topic in churches today. Many faith-formation programs focus on keeping the young, believing the youthful spirit will save the church. But do these programs have more to do with an obsession with youthfulness than with helping young people encounter the living God? Questioning the search for new or improved faith-formation programs, leading practical theologian Andrew Root offers an alternative take on the issue of youth drifting away from the church and articulates how faith can be formed in our secular age. He offers a theology of faith constructed from a rich cultural conversation, providing a deeper understanding of the phenomena of the "nones" and "moralistic therapeutic deism." Root helps readers understand why forming faith is so hard in our context and shows that what we have lost is not the ability to keep people connected to our churches but an imagination for how and where God could be present in their lives. He considers what faith is and what steps we can take to move into it, exploring a Pauline concept of faith as encounter with divine action. This is the first book in Root's Ministry in a Secular Age series.

Part 1: a history of the age of authenticity

1
The Boring Church and the Pursuit of Authenticity

As we wandered the streets of Nashville, I wondered, “What makes something authentic?” The conference I was attending was focused on faith formation. Forty or so of the best thinkers in theological education gathered to explore together how our seminary classrooms could be places of formation, places where practices could form students into people of faith. Over the course of two and a half days of discussion at Vanderbilt, we explored pedagogies and approaches that would bring forth the kind of “authentic” formation we desired. Next to “practice,” “authenticity” became the key word; “formation,” it was argued, was more “authentic” than “belief,” “conversion,” or “commitment.” To be formed was the authentic process of faith becoming lived.

And now across the church and its multitude of ministries, faith formation has become our core phrase. Children’s ministry isn’t about babysitting; it’s more authentic than that—it’s about faith formation. The men’s Bible study isn’t just a chance for middle-aged dudes to gather and build social capital; it’s about authentic faith formation. Youth ministry might have its origins in the pursuits of evangelism and conversion, but it’s now more common for us to speak of “faith formation” as our “authentic” objective.

Maybe it was all this talk of formation and authenticity, but as a handful of us decided to make our way from the conference hotel to an evening out, talk of finding the “authentic” Nashville became central. The more we talked, the more confused I was. It appeared, at least to some, that the bars and honky-tonk joints right downtown weren’t authentic. Though none of these people lived in Nashville or had been to the Music City more than once or twice, in their minds the places with live music right downtown couldn’t be authentic because they were located right next door to tourist shops, and everyone, even out-of-towners, knew where they were. They were too bound to the masses and to mass culture, made up of New York businesspeople or Australian backpackers who inauthentically bought cowboy boots, ten-gallon hats, and rounds of whiskey, trying in the lamest way to fit in to Nashville. “I want to go to an authentic Nashville spot, free of tourists; you know, like where the young people of Nashville kick it,” one of us said, never minding that we ourselves were tourists, way too old to pass for young people.

The more we talked, the more I wondered if this high bar for authenticity, for the true Nashville, wouldn’t be met until we’d made our way into the living room of Hayley Williams (or maybe Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, but they were probably too old and commercial to qualify now). Or maybe even this wouldn’t be enough. Maybe the high ideal of authenticity would mean we’d have to find ourselves having a drink in a small, rundown apartment where some young, starving artist in a stained T-shirt and worn-out cowboy boots was strumming his guitar before we’d finally, truly know we were entering authentic Nashville. (Never mind that all the starving artist wants is a chance to play in a honky-tonk bar downtown!)

The Dawn of the Age of Authenticity

Pulling us like a current underneath the steady lapping waves of Western history has been the movement toward authenticity. Ours is the “age of authenticity,” as Charles Taylor has called it. But how did we get here? Five hundred years ago, no one thought to pursue or fret about the authentic; we all lived in an enchanted world. Martin Luther, for instance, opposed relics not because they were inauthentic tourist kitsch but because they offered an encounter with a transcendent reality contrary to the one presented in the Bible (and particularly the Pauline Epistles).

There was little sense that one experience could be more authentic and genuine than another. The self was porous; the measure of what was true, real, and authentic was never assumed to be my own subjective experience. I was always being encountered by other (spiritual) forces. They were all genuine, but some sought to enslave me, while others sought to free me. The problem with the relics wasn’t that they were inauthentic but that they were binding; they were seen not as meaningless or lame but as threatening and demonic.

After the Enlightenment and the victory of a scientific rationality, we slowly shifted from concern over clashing transcendent realities to the genuineness of my own individual experience. The enemy is no longer that which threatens the self because it could destroy me with its transcendent power from outside; instead the enemy becomes that which threatens the self because it doesn’t line up with my project of identity shaping and personal meaning making.

In the nineteenth century a group of intellectuals and artists began to critique Western culture, pointing to its inauthenticity (one thinks here of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality). The self was now buffered1 from transcendent realities (demons and spirits could not enter the self as we once imagined so easily happened),2 the Western world had become disenchanted, and all realities outside the observable natural realm needed to be encountered first with a stick of doubt, poked and prodded until the mystery leaked from their seams. Attention to the natural, and a disposition of doubt, meant now valuing the authentic. Dominant cultural forms and religious dogma were seen as scrims that hid and diverted the authentic passions and desires of humanity. The church dropped on people’s shoulders a dogma that critiqued the authentic desire for strength and victory in favor of gentleness, mercy, and fidelity, and Victorian culture subjugated authentic passion for bodily enjoyment, particularly sex and material pleasure.3 This perspective declared that humanity’s true nature is to want strength, force, and sex, but church and society team up to repress these desires.

These artists and intellectuals turned from the church, not necessarily because it was evil, but because it was inauthentic and with its “dogma” did not allow them to be their authentic human selves (again I think of Nietzsche and others who spoke for the Dionysian side of life). The church came under great critique for bolstering and upholding the most pointless of Western European realities, repressing our subjective experience and keeping us from authentic living.

The great nineteenth-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote to defend Christianity to his friends, whom he called “the great cultured despisers.”4 Their antagonism toward the church had become cultural (not spiritual; it was about an aesthetic of pleasure, not an encounter with the transcendent).5 The church’s problem, in the minds of these cultured despisers, was not that the church had served a false god (as Luther asserted) but that it had become the point of the cultural spear, which sought to enslave our authentic desires with the chains of piety, morality, and dogma. Experiencing the genuine, in opposition to the fake, replaced the previous driving desire to encounter the holy (the good) in opposition to evil (the demonic).

In our own time this has become full blown; for us today, that which is authentic is more important than that which is holy, good, or righteous. What is lame and counterfeit, that which corrupts authenticity and keeps us from being real or genuine, making us a poser or a fraud, is worse than that which is evil, demonic, or perverse. It is better to be bad but authentic than to be good but phony.

The antihero is glorious in the age of authenticity because he is real, genuine in his desires and wants. Sports give us antiheroes that move us, from Muhammad Ali to Jim Brown to Brian Bosworth to Randy Moss. They are considered stars because they are genuinely skilled but authentically bad. They are glorified because they are youthful and hip; they “keep it real” with style and swag; they take no crap, living from their subjective desires and wants; flipping off repressive culture, they most oddly become the noble men of authenticity. If, in centuries past, the noble were refined men and women seeking duty over desire, dressed in top hat and tails, the nobility of our time are those who are real and candid, obeying their desires—even over duty.

Yet our infatuation with Ali and Moss types has its beginnings in nineteenth-century Europe with the cultured despisers that Schleiermacher wrote to. For them the church was bad not because it was corrupt or evil (of course some churches were) but because it was inauthentic, boring, and irrelevant.

In the age of authenticity, of course, sex scandals and money laundering are black eyes, but not because they show that the church serves a false transcendent force or that its leaders have given themselves over to the devil. Rather, it’s because they reveal a deeper problematic for us contemporaries: they expose the church as inauthentic and fake. If they preach one thing and do the opposite, that is inauthentic because it lacks integrity (and also because the things it is doing are evil). But we can at least respect an evil and corrupt corporation for being consistent with its stated purpose. It is who it says it is, and that is honorable. Worse than being evil is being inauthentic.

A famous Bible scholar tells the story of meeting a young muscle-bound man who expressed to him his deep love for Jesus. Judging from his passionate excitement, the professor believed the young man’s commitment, so they talked about faith and the Bible. When the topic of Sunday worship came up, the young man explained that he rarely went, telling the professor that it had none of the adrenaline of his workouts, that unfortunately Sunday worship was just too boring.

“I thought you loved Jesus,” the professor asked.

“I do,” the young man returned with genuine intensity. “I really do!”

“So,” the professor asked, “do you think you’d be willing to die for Jesus?”

Now more reserved, the young man said, “Yes . . . yes, I think I would. I would die for Jesus.”

“So, let me get this straight,” the professor continued, “you’re willing to die for Jesus, but not be bored for Jesus?”

The professor uses this story in lectures and presentations to make a point about the importance of corporate worship, disparaging the young man for a perceived inconsistency—a willingness to die but not to be bored. But the professor misses a larger reality and doesn’t understand our age of authenticity. In the age of authenticity, that which is boring is inauthentic; that which is lame is a repressed lie. The young man was indeed saying that Sunday worship wasn’t entertaining, but more importantly and pointedly, he was saying that Sunday worship was disingenuous because it lacked connection to the depth of his subjective desires. Charles Taylor gives us insight into this young man’s perspective in explaining religious commitment in the age of authenticity. Taylor says,

The religious life or practice that I become part of must not only be my choice, but it must speak to me, it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this. This takes us farther. The choice of denomination was understood to take place within a fixed cadre, say that of the Apostles’ Creed, the faith of the broader “church.” Within this framework of belief, I choose the church in which I feel most comfortable. But if the focus is going now to be on my spiritual path, thus on what insights come to me in the subtler languages that I find meaningful, then maintaining this or any other framework becomes increasingly difficult.6

In the age of authenticity, to be bored is not simply unfortunate or unpleasant; it is to be oppressed, to be violently cornered and robbed of authenticity. We as individual selves are now responsible for our own spiritual journey, so if something is boring, it is worth abandoning.7 To be bored is to find our subjective desires minimized, repressed, or, at the very least, unmet. The professor wasn’t wrong to look a little sideways at the young man; the age of authenticity is open to superficiality and does make pursuit of desire the objective of the good life. But the age of authenticity also reminds us that our experience is deeply meaningful, that our embodied, emotive encounter with reality can and should mean something.

The church is critiqu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: a history of the age of authenticity
• Part 2: A Secular Age Meets Paul, and the Youthful Spirit Meets the Spirit of Ministry
• Conclusion
• Index
• Back Cover