Book Review: Vintage Church by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears
Slowly
Our church staff has been slowing, and I mean slowly, working its way through Vintage Church by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears. Time elapsed so far is probably nearing a year. Initially we were reading at a reasonable pace, but then everything got busier in “the ol’ church world” as they say, and we’ve all but postponed finishing the book for the time being. But, we will finish. In the mean time, and since I was nearly finished with the book anyway, I thought I’d read the last few chapters.
It’s good. I mean really good. It’s been good all the way through, but it got really good at the end. Driscoll and Breshears start out simple, and move to more complex subject matter. Perhaps complex is actually a bad way to say it, let’s say they move on to more timely subject matter towards the end of the book. All of it’s good reading though. Even the opening chapters, the ones I’ve now labeled as “simple,” are relevant and essential reading. One of the most under-taught areas of theology is probably ecclesiology (i.e. the theology of the church). And because church should not just be this service that we attend in a building once a week, we need to understand what a church is, and why it does the things it does, and even if it should be doing them at all. Vintage Church forces readers to interact with these questions.
My favorite chapters are definitely the last several. They include chapters such as:
Chapter 9) What is a missional church?
Chapter 10) What is a multi-campus church?
Chapter 11) How can a church utilize technology?
Chapter 12) How could the church help transform the world?
The chapters on preaching (chapter 4) and church discipline (chapter 7) also stand out in my mind as highly helpful and extremely insightful.
#12
The most important chapter may be chapter twelve, which as stated above, deals with the question, “How could the church help transform the world?” In this chapter Driscoll and Breshears interact with the collision of church and culture. How should the church influence, transform, and help create and cultivate the larger culture that is around it? I’ve heard Driscoll teach about this subject matter before, but I feel the treatment in Vintage Jesus is the most fully-orbed that I’ve heard so far. So, I want to touch on this specific subject matter for the rest of this review.
Driscoll starts out by defining four commonly held visions for how to transform culture, and then decries each of them as short sided. These visions are:
1) The Evangelistic Vision – if everyone gets saved, the world will change
2) The Political Vision – if we elect the right leaders, the world will change
3) The Fundamentalist Vision – we should flee the sinful, secular culture, which will be destroyed by God soon anyway
4) The Liberal Vision – if we just love people, even if we don’t share the gospel, everything will be ok
Driscoll then proposes a new, 5th vision for how to transform culture, one that has been largely developed by James Davison Hunter, a Christian and professor of sociology at the university of Virginia. Hunter concludes that Christians must abandon the short-sidedness of the previous visions for how to transform culture. They are all based on the false premises that culture will change because of great ideas, or a great man, or the purity of the hearts of individuals. Conversely, Hunter asserts that culture changes because of connectedness to a powerful network of cultural shaping individuals and institutions. He offers the following five ideas:
1) Culture is a resource and, as such, a form of power.
2) Culture is produced.
3) Culture production is stratified (i.e. arranged and sent out) from center to periphery.
4) Culture changes from the top down and rarely from the bottom up.
5) The impetus, energy, and direction for changing the world are most intense where cultural, economic, and even political resources overlap.
Driscoll seems to agree with these ideas and offers the following plan. Churches should be planted primarily in urban areas where they can interact with the culture-makers and become the culture-makers in society. In these large urban areas, the church should exist as a city within a city. It should demonstrate how life should be lived within its own small city (the church), and send its people out to interact with larger city where it is planted. The people of the church are transformed and trained to interact with the culture at large in loving and truth-filled ways. This God-centered culture will then flow downstream to smaller cities and more rural areas and effect them as well. This is a strategic method to reach the largest amount of people and effect the largest swath of culture.
I think the most eye-opening part of this chapter for me was that “the evangelistic vision,” and the “city within a city vision,” are not the same vision. Personally, I had been propagating both and assuming they were the same. But they are not. As Christians we must preach the gospel, and people must be saved. But, we also must create and effect the cultural systems at large by constantly interacting with the culture-shapers in our city. It’s not enough to simply teach our people to witness, they must witness yes, but they must also create and effect the culture in every area of their lives. This is being true to the entire message of the gospel, which is more than “pray this prayer and ask Jesus into your heart, and then be moral.”
This Keeps Making More and More Sense
I still have a lot to learn about what all this entails, and the following synopsis is incomplete, but I think I agree. Personally, I have no intentions of diminishing the priority of evangelism. But I think evangelism is just part of the solution, and actually becomes a more effective tool in the hands of a Christian who is constantly cultivating the culture around him as he shares the good news.
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No commentsTotal Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity by Nancy Pearcey
My brother Andy recently read this book and wrote a review. I’m posting it here. The implications of this book are huge: I can’t wait to read it for myself.
Summary
In Total Truth Nancy Pearcey argues that western (American) Christians have been indoctrinated by secular culture, and by poor theological frameworks within the church, that have caused them to acquiesce into a bifurcated system of living and seeing the world, one in which there is a secular/sacred divide that keeps faith locked into the private sphere of life and out of the public sector (17). Pearcey states, “Many believers have absorbed the fact/value, public/private dichotomy, restricting their faith to the religious sphere while adopting whatever views are current in their professional or social circles” (33).
The problem with this is that it is a breakdown in theology and it highlights the insufficiency of many western Christians’ worldview. A right understanding of Christianity is, “that there is a biblical perspective on everything – not just on spiritual matters” (44). Thus, it is every Christian’s duty to think through and live out all of life from a Christian perspective. “Being a Christian means embarking on a lifelong process of growth in grace, both in our personal lives (sanctification) and in our vocation (cultural renewal)” (49). Christians cannot afford to accept the terms as they stand – leaving faith at home or in church on Sundays. Rather, the Christian’s entire life should be driven by a biblical worldview. This is the only real way to break free from the dichotomies that pervade our thinking and living. As Pearcey states, “The best way to drive out a bad worldview is by offering a good one (58); one that unifies both secular and sacred, public and private, within a single framework (65-66).
And it is the church’s duty to work to this end. The church is a training ground for cultivating people equipped to speak the gospel to the world (67). And by “gospel” Pearcey does not simply mean to share that all have sinned, that Christ died for sins, and that the proper response is repentance and faith. While it is inferred that she does believe this to be true and that it is the central message of the gospel, Pearcey argues that evangelism encompasses more than disseminating these basic truths. She states, “The task of evangelism starts with helping the nonbeliever face squarely the inconsistencies between his professed beliefs and his actual experience” (314). She goes on a few pages later, “In evangelism, our goal is to highlight the cognitive dissonance – to identify the points at which the nonbeliever’s worldview is contradicted by reality. Then we can show that only Christianity if fully consistent with the things we all know by experience” (319).
Moving on in her book Pearcey traces trajectories that led America into its dichotomized way of thinking. By looking from within the church and from the outside, she exposes several contributing factors to the secular/sacred split. First from within, Pearcey explains an overarching three-part theme that should guide the Christian worldview: Creation, Fall and Redemption. She summarizes, “All of creation was originally good; it cannot be divided into a good part (spiritual) and a bad part (material). Likewise, all of creation was affected by the Fall, and when time ends, all creation will be redeemed. Evil does not reside in some part of God’s good creation, but in our abuse of creation for sinful purposes” (86). This system is, “cosmic in scope, describing the great events that shape the nature of all created reality. We don’t need to accept an inner fragmentation between our faith and the rest of life. Instead we can be integrally related to God on all levels of our being” (95). Using this three-part grid as a tool of analysis, Pearcey then argues, “Throughout the history of the church, various groups have tended to seize upon one of these three elements, overemphasizing it to the detriment of the other two – producing a lopsided, unbalanced theology” (87).
One such failure was Aquinas’s overemphasis of Creation, leading him to a theology of “nature/grace dualism” (92). The outworking of this error was that the gospel was restricted to the “upper-story realm,” isolated from science, philosophy, law and politics (93). This gave leverage for the argument that later came to fruition during the Enlightenment; namely, that science and reason are religiously neutral. From this developed the notion that secularism and naturalism are objective, rational systems, binding on everyone, all the while biblical views are dismissed as biased, private opinions (94).
Once there was an accepted dichotomy between “nature” and “grace,” it was not hard to convince anyone that “science constitutes facts while morality is about values” (107). And with Darwins’s theory of natural selection came the ability to have a complete naturalistic worldview (106). The effect of Darwin’s theory has been pervasive. Pearcey states, “Virtually every part of society has been affected by the Darwinian worldview” (155).
What is insightful by Pearcey, though, is that the overwhelming acceptance of this dichotomy and of naturalism as the “lower-level” neutral sphere of truth is all based upon a philosophical foundation. The under girding of naturalism is the belief that matter is eternal and that the “system” is closed – neither of which can be proven on naturalist, scientific terms. Nonetheless, “once people have made that philosophical commitment, they can be persuaded by relatively minor evidence” (168). Furthermore, at this point, the “game” is biased, because once the two-tiered view of reality is accepted, the naturalists define the rules for access into the “lower realm.” Science (empiricism) is put forward as the only viable means for validating truth claims. Or conversely, we must now accept naturalism as a “central tenet” of science (169).
Moving on, Pearcey progresses to show how the dichotomy made its way into the development of our country’s politics and religion. Originally, in the colonial period, the dominant political philosophy was classical Christian republicanism. But with the development of thought – that cannot be divorced from the Enlightenment and Darwinism – came the new liberalism, which replaced the sentiment of self-sacrifice and the social structures of family and church with individualism. The focus was now on self-assertion and self-interest (280). Even evangelicalism1 with all of its positive affects in many ways worked to further the gap. The focus on individual conversion led to a doctrine of one-time emotional decisionalism, which ultimately contributed to the belief that Christianity is a “noncognitive, upper-story phenomenon” (272). Pearcey concludes, “Evangelicalism has largely given in to the two-story division that renders religion a matter of individual experience, with little or no cognitive content” (293).
Pearcey eventually reveals that the bifurcation of public/private has made it into the culture in which we are currently living. And therefore Christians have a great responsibility to fight against this way of thinking because it opposes truth. “What Christianity offers is a unified, integrated truth that stands in complete contrast to the two-level concept of truth in the secular world” (119). So what we must do is “evangelize”2 culture by exposing the flaws of other worldviews and then reveal that the Christian worldview offers a better alternative. And the alternative we offer is not simply for the private sector; we must, “find ways to make it clear that we are making claims about reality, not merely our subjective experience” (119).
Critical Evaluation
The premise set forth in this book has exposed an entire schema of thinking that I have used to interpret reality. While I have thought for some time that what Christians need is an entire worldview from which to operate, I have failed to see the pervasive nature of the public/private dichotomy in the western world and my acceptance of it many times. As a result, there are some questions I now have in relation to this new enlightenment. For one, how am I to understand the concept of “separation of church and state?” Originally, this clause was set forth to guard from the establishment of a church-state and to protect the right of individuals from forced religion. But as it is used now, it seems to “guard” the government from any religious influence (except naturalism), and this seems to be an extension of the public/private dichotomy. It would be fitting to trace how it is that we should specifically think through this concept of “separation.”
Another trajectory worth tracing is what the implications are for the education of Christian children. If evangelism is as broad as Pearcey defines it3, and if, “every subject area should be taught from a solidly biblical perspective so that students grasp the interconnections among the disciplines, discovering for themselves that all truth is God’s truth (129), then is public school even an option for Christian parents? And furthermore, where do we start as Christian parents in building a biblical worldview with our children?
Lastly, Pearcey calls for us to engage culture by exposing to individuals the inconsistencies in their worldview. But at what point do we share what Paul calls of first importance: that Christ died, that he was buried and that he rose again?4 And what’s the order in our attempt to put forward both the central gospel message, and an entire worldview that comes with it?
Review by Andy Adkison
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No commentsMark Driscoll strikes again
Great article in the New York Times on Mark Driscoll. I’ve only gotten to read part of it, but I may add some comments after I get to read the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt that I love:
“What bothers Driscoll — and the growing number of evangelical pastors who agree with him — is not the trope of Jesus-as-lover. After all, St. Paul tells us that the Church is the bride of Christ. What really grates is the portrayal of Jesus as a wimp, or worse. Paintings depict a gentle man embracing children and cuddling lambs. Hymns celebrate his patience and tenderness. The mainstream church, Driscoll has written, has transformed Jesus into “a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ,” a “neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that . . . would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell.”’
Further comments:
1) The article is a little negative in it’s portrayal of both Driscoll and Calvinism, but it still does shed insight.
2) I guess you have to register an account with the NYT to read the article now (but it is free).
3) BUT…You don’t have to register to post on this blog anymore, so I wish some of my faithful readers would post a comment or to. I don’t even care if the comment is negative (as long as it’s not mean).
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No commentsSarah Palin & the End of a Culture War
I just read this op-ed piece from the Washington Post on culture, politics, and why Sarah Palin was the wrong choice for McCain’s running mate. This is an excellent piece of writing and I think it perfectly captures a shift that is happening in American ideals. Here’s an excerpt:
Why has America turned on Sarah Palin? Obviously, her wobbly television interviews haven’t helped. Nor have the drip, drip of scandals from Alaska, which have tarnished her reformist image. But Palin’s problems run deeper, and they say something fundamental about the political age being born. Palin’s brand is culture war, and in America today culture war no longer sells. The struggle that began in the 1960s — which put questions of racial, sexual and religious identity at the forefront of American politics — may be ending. Palin is the end of the line.
Check out the rest of the article here.
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