A Crisis of Christian Maturity?

Some notes on ecclesiology and the stories we tell about faith and practice

Thanks to those who are new subscribers; this post may be a bit of insider baseball as it addresses words and trends particular to those of us who think a lot about Christian formation and discipleship. I’ll be back next week to speak more generally about metaphor. Thanks for being here!

***

Last week, Bryce and I were invited to attend Westmont College’s Martin Institute’s workshop titled: The Crisis Among Us: The Problem of Christian Immaturity. A multi-disciplinary academic and practitioner workshop means that much of the time is spent trying to translate and locate terms, as well as the confines of what constitutes a “problem” or “crisis.”

While I have lots and lots of thoughts, there were two things that stood out to me.

Firstly: A comment early on by

James K.A. Smith

: “Our ecclesiology determines how we think about sanctification.”¹ In other words, if we’re coming from a Reformed, Episcopal, or Catholic understanding of sanctification and growth (for example), spiritual growth is an always “on the way” experience. In my Reformed (Presbyterian) experience, we enter the church through baptism as infants — baptized into the unity of the church, recipient to grace before we can say and agree with a Creed, and grow up imbibing the rites and rituals until one day we find that they, too, are ours. Testimony is often “I never knew a day without Christ and his church” in this strand.

If we come from a non-denominational often decision-based ecclesiological (and theological) tradition, there’s a higher degree of emphasis on individuality (rather than being brought along the stream of tradition and church) and an emphasis on evidence. How might we mark or even show fruits worthy of repentance? We might look to the moral character of an individual to determine one’s rate of spiritual maturity.

Both of these strands have something to teach us. Often, this isn’t so cut and dry (especially as people change traditions from the one’s in which they’re raised or convert as adults). Nevertheless, we lose much when we’re unclear about our own starting points. And when we assume that we’re all coming from the same line of thinking, the same starting place, we lose our way.

Photo by Rowan Freeman on Unsplash

The question of ecclesiology is also a question of belonging. To whom am I accountable? Are others — and even the institution of a local church or parachurch programs²— a means to an end (even a good, spiritual end)? Or, are larger institutions deeply formative places of belonging? In other words, do we use church or belong there?

The vantage point from which we ask these questions matters. We can have profitably conversations across theological divides and traditions and we need to have these in our moment in time, but — if we assume that we’re all coming from the same place or we’ve got the corner on the market we’re likely to wade into polarizing waters. We must resist the package-deal fallacy.³ We need to name where we’re coming from and why it matters, how it provides the contours of our conversations.

Secondly: There was little mention of imaginative formation, particularly regarding an apologetic of beauty⁴. I appreciated Rebecca DeYoung drawing attention to this omission in her closing remarks, and as someone with an English Ph.D. it was obvious to me but perhaps less obvious to the practitioners, psychologists, or philosophers in the room.

Nevertheless, I’m aware how in the human experience, we learn and know through story. It’s in the reading to my own children, that my imagination is also kindled alongside theirs. It’s often through vision that we begin to want to want to change. It’s in the experience of beauty (of a person, sunset, line of poetry, biblical text) that we are transformed. The forward pull of beauty is so much more enticing than the push of law.⁵ As DeYoung mentioned, we talked a lot about truth and goodness, but not so much about beauty.

I wonder if part of our reticence to name beauty and its storyifying forcefuless is fear. Those of us who enjoy the life of the mind may fear our lack of control in a world of beauty. Beauty absolutely unmasks. Beauty undoes.

Beauty also has an apologetic — it makes a case for faith, for transcendence apart from what we measure, what we know, what we ourselves puzzle out. It de-centers the individual will and rationality.

But you know what? Repentance in the life of a Christian does that too. Repentance entirely reframes what has come before and what comes after. Repentance also cedes control to someone outside yourself. Both remind us that we are not authors of the Real Story, but rather that we receive it as gift.

Ultimately, we didn’t come to any clear endings on the problem of immaturity. We did have fun thinking through what’s at stake and what’s involved. I did come away thinking more deeply about metaphor and how it provides a way of knowing (that I’ll likely puzzle about here more later) and the word that kept popping up in my own head was the idea of coherence.

We want deeply coherent lives — where who we are in one context doesn’t change in another. “Coherence” speaks to what Jamie Smith called “existential rest” and it speaks to the wish behind the fragmentation of culture, the fragmentation of the self into neatly divided categories we endlessly interrogate and diagnose, and between ourselves and of our places of belonging. Coherence seems the posture of maturity.

---

N.B.: All my writing is free and then later put behind a paywall. For paid subscribers, I also offer very short book reviews of what I’m reading (coming this weekend!) and links to what I call my “Essential 3”: three articles or things I’m reading that bring beauty, truth, and goodness. Consider subscribing at a free or paid subscriber rate. You can always support my work by liking, commenting, sharing, and purchasing one of my books.

1. I’m also deeply grateful to Jamie for allowing me to accost him and ask him all my questions about imaginative formation in-between sessions!

2. This is an entirely different conversation that I might have at a later time. But not now.

3. (not all Prius owners care deeply about climate change, knit, and enjoy hiking in National Parks).

4. Kristen Deede Johnson did ask about the story of discipleship in her paper on the Great Commission, to be fair!

5. Don’t get me wrong. Law is needed.