As one who confessed that, after having met some remarkable role models, all I ever wanted to be was a great Sunday School teacher, how do I explain all the time and money invested in those later credentials in Sociology of Religion?  The sixties>happened, and they were pretty exciting, whatever else you may have heard about them.  For this young suburban pastor’s wife, mother of four, the sixties were an early taste of the change that swirls around us now, overwhelming many and bewildering most. 

From the early Women’s Movement I learned that the personal is political.  I learned that centuries of church history only told part of the Christian story, which is a nice way of saying that, if it didn’t lie, at least it didn’t tell the whole truth - - about women, about power, about institutional preservation.  From there it’s an easy matter of connecting the dots to the academic discipline that drew me in.  The sociologist’s fundamental question is, what is going on here - - not what do people say is going on, but what is really going on?  It is the relentless probing and sifting and connecting of human behaviors. 

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Theocracies are not new, of course. They spring up all throughout history (and literature), sometimes as a result of a group that sees itself as a “remnant” and splits off from a larger religious culture, and sometimes they come about as a result of a reactive or pro-active stance against the wider “secular city.” In a world that many describe as “post Christendom” a Christian “city of God” seems newsworthy:

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I’ve got a book on my bookshelf that I’ve had for years titled How To Run Any Organization, by Theodore Caplow. The clever title caught my attention and I snatched it up from the used bookstore I frequented during my pecuniary seminary days. I was eager to learn any secrets it could reveal as I was heading off to my first administrative job. Never having been in a position of primary leadership in any organization I was hoping for a crash course in “how to succeed in business without really trying.”

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I “grew up Baptist” as they say. My own religious and cultural tradition colored our Baptist heritage with a particularly pietistic bent. We weren’t fundamentalist but not liberal either. Growing up the phrase “The Baptist way” often served as the preservative equivalent to the infamous “seven last words of the church” (“We’ve never done it that way before.”) Like many, my own spiritual journey has kept my feet on my denominational path though I’ve wandered byways that have given me new vistas and perspectives on faith and belief. They have expanded my horizons and, as is the nature of journeys, now there’s no going home again. But it’s safe to say that while my faith is different than it was (some of my friends acuse me of being an EpiscoBaptist), I’ve not strayed far from the faith of my forbearers.

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I recently got an e-mail from a former student who was in the middle of an interview process with a congregation for a pastoral staff position. She’d gotten news from the church that the senior pastor, who’d been involved in the search process conversations, had just announced his resignation (he was moving on to another congregation). The congregation plans on hiring an “intentional interim” but also wants to go ahead with the search process for the staff position. My former student is in the midst of a dilemma. Does she accept the call and the risk or does she pull out of the interview process?

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What happens when a Pentecostal preacher turned house painter and an atheist walk into a church? Well, a book in this case. Jim Henderson is a former pastor turned researcher and is interested in what non-Christians think of the church, so he hires Matt Casper, an atheist, to go with him to twelve churches in the US and observe and comment on what he sees and hears.

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This is a recommendation for an interesting read that speaks to issues of centralization and decentralization regarding leadership. The description of the book is as follows:

“If you cut off a spider’s leg, it’s crippled; if you cut off its head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish’s leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish.

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The other day my wife and I went out to breakfast at a local I-Hop. She had the day off and I had a craving for waffles for some strange reason. When you head out to a place that specializes in a particular thing—like breakfast—you tend to build up certain expectations for what you’re going to get. We got our booth, my wife ordered her pancakes, I ordered my waffles and we settled in to wait for our orders. I finished off my glass of orange juice and poured myself a cup of coffee from the plastic faux-bronze personal-sized pitcher. It was the worst coffee I’ve ever tasted.

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Over the years I’ve heard the statement that the church is a business and needs to be treated like one. I suspect that any time money is involved there’s a tendency to think this way. Comments like this are, in my opinion, examples of an unclear theology of big “C” and little “c” church and more specifically—Christian stewardship. It’s to the latter that I would like to generate some discussion.

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Where do we draw the line?

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