After Christendom
Recognizing the age we live in & deciding what to do with the time we have been given
Looking at Barna’s 2020 statistics on the State of the Church, it’s evident that in the first twenty years since the turn of the new millennium, there has been a serious decline in the United States in nearly every aspect of what we would consider Christian life and practice. The decline is even more pronounced the further we extend the data period back into the twentieth century.
Recording data is one thing. Assessing what is going on, is something else entirely. I appreciated James Shea’s book, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission, which for me, contains some of the the clearest assessment of what’s happening and pointing us in the direction of how to address it. In the book, Shea makes the argument that historically, the church has existed in one of two modes. Christendom mode, where an entire society goes forward under a singular narrative and imaginative vision cast by the church. Or Apostolic mode, when the church must make her way against the current of the narrative and imaginative vision of a wider society (or in our generation, a society without a singular, sustaining imaginative vision).
Reading Shea’s book, it becomes apparent that the Western church has mostly been in Christendom mode for the past 1,700 years, riding the crest of the cultural waves it helped create. However, as the current slowed and drifted away from a Christian narrative and vision, Christendom has continued to drift with the cultural current until it has become just one more (and perhaps one of the least relevant) remaining cultural institutions. Shea is putting the church on notice that we are once again entering an age that requires us to completely reorient ourselves to an apostolic mode of existence.
“Those accustomed to functioning in a Christendom mode, or those who have lost the Christian narrative and have been largely captured by the overall vision of the wider culture, will no doubt find this difficult: it will seem doctrinaire [as if imposing a doctrine without regard to practical considerations], rigorist, or intolerant. They have become accustomed to floating with the current, and the energy and clarity needed to navigate upstream is alien to them.” - pg. 46 of From Christendom to Apostolic Mission by James Shea
Shea isn’t so much critiquing what went on during the age of Christendom. He looks back and recognizes that our predecessors worked hard to address the cultural issues and challenges they faced, and that resulted in the creation of institutions which carried the church (and the culture) for millennia. I agree and recognize that in many cases our predecessors did all they knew how, in order to maintain an orthodox faith. However, what they mostly missed was an apostolic faith - the type of faith that was critical to the formation and expansion of the church in the first few hundred years of its existence.
David Bosch states it in another way.
...protagonists of the old tend to immunize themselves against the arguments of the new, they resist its challenge with deep emotional reactions, since those challenges threaten to destroy their very perception and experience of reality, indeed their entire world.1
I contend that while Shea keenly recognizes the necessities of the age we are entering, he misses the fact that apostolic authority and mission, as they were traditioned by Paul in the first century, were intended by Jesus to be perpetual. Not that Christianity cannot or should not influence the wider culture, but that its influence was never meant to beome institutionalized, shaping the culture by becoming the dominant institution among a crowd of competing institutions. The church was, and is, meant to influence the culture through simple, but deep, loving relationships that are built around weekly family gatherings that are networked together by apostolic-type leaders who work to expand and multiply these gatherings by helping them shape their entire lives around the gospel and become strong bases from which the gospel can go forth into new cities and regions.
While I don’t believe we are meant to stand in judgment of those that came before us, it would be foolish not to assess what they left behind for us and either repurpose or eliminate anything that is not helpful in our emerging apostolic age. It would be unhelpful, and ungrateful, to cast shade on those that came before us. However, we are responsible for what we do with the time we have been given, and our current time calls for a return to the way of Christ and His apostles. This is a necessity if we are to participate with His Spirit in building His kingdom. We must return to the patterns in Acts in order to shape what is emerging. In order to shape what comes… after Christendom.
“Our task is to understand the age we have been given, to trace out how the Holy Spirit is working in it, and to seize the adventure of cooperating with him. May we be given the wisdom and the courage to rise to the challenge of the new apostolic age that is coming upon us and to prove faithful stewards in our generation of the saving messages and liberating life given us by Jesus Christ.” - pg. 90 of From Christendom to Apostolic Mission by James Shea
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
Bosch, David. Transforming Mission; Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. Orbis. Pg 185