Church as the ultimate new social movement

My research and my daily work as a church planter, and pastor have me located within Political Theology.  I’m trying to understand how consumerism and secularism are analogous to religious systems, using key theological discourses of the Church in history, and explore the implications for ecclesiology.

How are people formed, what are they formed into, and how does this compare, intersect and contrast with the nature of Christian identity and formation, and most critically what are the implications for ecclesiology.

As I’ve been surveying my cultural landscape, I’ve come across the suggestion, usually made with great fervor that ‘New Social Movements’ (NSMs), provide an understanding of human identity and formation, that the church must be located within.  The references to NSMs by seem to run along these lines (if I can put them crudely):

 

1. Western society has changed, for ever.  The ways people organise, and structure themselves, in work, play, and family interactions have emerged into a new cultural realities.

2. Church has no choice, it must track these social realities, and form itself around them, or become extinct.

How NSMs are post-marxist, and are the cultural post-materialist concerns of western bourgeois middle class, isn’t something I want to delve into.  But I do want to call into question, the methodological and in particular ontological assumptions of this kind of reasoning.  In doing so, I know that will make me appear trapped in ‘old skool’ theological methodologies and paradigms, at least to devotees of NSMs.

Yet within this I’m not anti social science and theory, but I do question the headlong rush into sociological methods, and the ‘social imaginaries’ that flow from them by the church, in particular those within practical theology.  And I do believe that commodification so completely disconnects beliefs from practice (Vincent Miller in Consuming Religion convinced me of that), that the quest to produce better theologies, specifically better anthropologies to dissect and repel those of consumerism/secularism, won’t solve the churches problems.

But I do believe that theology, should set the ‘social imagination’ of the church, sketch out and narrate a ‘social reality’ of it’s own.  Ecclesiology under the spell of NSMs, and other sociological methodologies, seems to have been reduced to a ‘social doctrine’, one so flexible, that the church has become just one option amongst the many voluntary clubs societies and options within the NSMs of western culture.

Maybe the problem isn’t so much that the Church is shouting it’s theology into the howling wind and reality of NSMs, but that the church has lost any ability to articulate and imagine itself, as the ultimate new social reality.

Perhaps Church, the people of God, is not a voluntary choice, within the plurality of choices of NSMs.  Church, is not penultimate, but the ultimate choice we make (For example we see this social conception within the household codes of the new testament).  

Until we understand Church as The New Social Movement, shifting culture realities, rather than a Christological reality and ordering of the resurrection of Jesus will be taking shape within and between us.

Comments

[Andy Rowell]

Interesting Jason. I haven't heard of these and just finished a course on sociology of religion here at Duke.

I have been in my own work trying to identify the most important practices of the local church (in the work of Rowan Williams and John Howard Yoder) and am now looking at recent sociological work that tries to identify churches that are "doing church well."

Is it growth and baptisms? (Ed Stetzer, Comeback Churches)
Cultivating spiritual maturity? (Willow Creek's Reveal and Follow Me and Randy Frazee's Connecting)
Or is it reaching outsiders? (UnChristian)
Or is it some other intangibles? (Gibbs and Bolger, Emerging Churches or Jones, The New Christians)

The four practices I draw from Williams are these:
The (1) practice of moral discernment oriented by martyrdom, (2) participation in the sacraments, (3) the standing under the authority of Scripture, and (4) the practice of communicating the Good News.
See
http://www.andyrowell.net/andy_rowell/2008/03/the-missional-e.html

Though less comprehensive, I think I would prefer to go to church where not only are the minimum requirements addressed--see also Miroslav Volf's After Our Likeness for minimum requirement to qualify as a church--but where the church is firing on all cylinders. John Howard Yoder describes well the thriving church:
(1) Binding and Loosing
“The law of Christ” “the Regel Christi—the Rule of Christ,” “loving dialogue” “reconciling dialogue”
(2) Disciples Break Bread Together / Eucharist
(3) Baptism and the New Humanity / Baptism
(4) The Fullness of Christ / Multiplicity of gifts
(5) The Rule of Paul / Open meeting
See
http://www.andyrowell.net/andy_rowell/2008/11/the-ecclesiology-of-john-howard-yoder-paper.html

all the best,
andy

Andy Rowell
Doctor of Theology (Th.D.) Student
Duke Divinity School
Durham, North Carolina
Blog: Church Leadership Conversations http://www.andyrowell.net/

[Jason Clark]

Hi Andy,

The outline of your research and schema, are fascinating. So you're running Williams & Yoder against those groups for a theological assessment?

What made you select those two, was it for an anglican and anabaptist contrast, as traditioned ecclesiologies?

I'm not familiar with those ecclesial minimums, I'll take a look. I've found Oliver O'Donovan's suggestion that ecclesiology is invitation and participation and recapitulation of the Christ event helpful.

The 4 movements of Advent (eschatological gathering), passion (suffering through incorporation with Jesus with powers and authorities), Exaltation (participation in the recovery of creation, the moral re-ordering of life, the new anthropology), Exaltation (
speech of God to us as prophecy through admin/art/music etc but out of the identity of the church, and us to God as prayer).

If we don’t recapitulate the full Christ event, we end up choosing one mark. "The evangelical church of mission, the romantic church of suffering, the bourgeois-liberal church of social responsibility, that catholic charismatic church of triumph" (P 191 Desire of Nations)

Without such an imagination for church we produce something other than the Body of Jesus.

If the ecclesiologies of the modern church were rather solipsistic, emerging ecclesiologies seem to be continuing on that trajectory, collapsing even further into worship aesthetics and private God spaces.

The current desire for holistic mission, and social justice (rightly so), cannot be achieved through an abstract fragmented ecclesiology of isolation. There is no-post church, religionless missional church.

[Andy Rowell]

Jason,
My language of "ecclesial minimums" is my own phrasing though Volf says something similar in After Our Likeness; he tries to develop a "postconfessional ecumenical conceptual framework" (20-21).

I haven't read Oliver O'Donovan though many folks here at Duke Divinity School have. I think I agree with all you have said though we use different phrasing. I look forward to reading your books to get the full account.

andy

P.S. There is an interesting post entitled "Church" by Adam Kotsko at http://itself.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/the-church/

[Jason Clark]

As we've been interacting Andy, I also wonder, and I should put this in the main post perhaps, that we have seen a turn to a narrative theology, that is shaping the imaginations of the church with 'Cultural-linguistic' approaches with the Yale school etc.

I do think Kevin VanHoozer with his 'Drama of Doctrine', who gives a nod to Lindbeck’s postliberalism, but a offers a self-conscious ‘canonical-linguistic’ approach to doctrine rather than a ‘cultural-linguistic’ approach.

O'Donovan's 4 movements of the Christ event, are traced from scripture, and offer a similar ‘canonical-linguistic’ approach perhaps.