“One: Unity in a Divided World” by Deidra Riggs

I am Facebook friends with a considerable number of Christian writers and poets. Many of these friends I have met face to face, talked with, had deep conversations about serious issues with, worshipped with, and prayed with, together and in a larger group. Over time, as relationships grow and develop, you believe you know people, or know them better.

Then came the presidential election of 2016. I discovered that, for many of these friends, I didn’t really know them at all. Ferocious anger, rage, hatred, outbursts, disdain, and even sarcastic snark poured out all over my Facebook newsfeed. One friend, a minister, said on Facebook that you couldn’t be a Christian and have voted for Donald Trump.

It turns out I didn’t really know my Facebook friends after all. It was disheartening and discouraging.

It is this response to the election that kept recurring as I read One: Unity in a Divided World by Deidra Riggs. Riggs also feels and grieves the division and divisiveness in the church, but she’s experiencing it from a different vantage point. But she always has good, important things to say, and I knew I would learn from reading her new book. And I did.

In One, Riggs is talking to and with the church. Using both Scripture and personal anecdotes, she addresses the deep divisions, the lashing out at each other, the intense political arguments – all that stuff on my Facebook newsfeed. What she says is that we are supposed to be known by our love – not by wearing “Make American Great Again” baseball caps or how many “#Resist Trump” groups we join. Sadly, that is not what’s been happening.

“Our identity is who God sees when he looks at us,” she writes, “and God is not a politician.”

What are the things that divide us? Attitude. Perception. Race. Income. How we understand evil and injustice. Fear. Politics (always politics). Culture. History. We put God into boxes of our own making, without realizing that God is always bigger than those boxes. Far bigger.

Deidra Riggs

Of all the divisions that exist between Christians, race is likely the most stubbornly resistant, and by a wide margin. We still worship largely as white churches and black churches, Riggs says, and the situation hasn’t changed much in the last 50 years. There’s a lot of history to be overcome. That division is a loss to all of us. We are all made in God’s image, she points out, and God doesn’t make mistakes.

Riggs devotes a chapter to discussing the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, a black teenager shot by a white policeman. Two competing narratives emerged out of that death, one considering Michael Brown as victim and one considering Brown as thug. Riggs went to Ferguson in the days after the shooting, and was profoundly affected by what she found there.

I expected to be challenged and jarred when I read One. And I was. She quotes groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center that raise my hackles. But perhaps that is the point – perhaps some issues require groups to be out on the edge to gain attention and for the issue to be taken seriously. Sometimes you need people in your face to understand that there really is a problem here.

Riggs is a writer and speaker. She's previously published  Every Little Thing: Making a World of Difference Right Where You Are. She's spoken at Tedx conferences and women's retreats, and is the founder and host of the One Conference. She and her family live in Lincoln, Nebraska.

One is well worth reading and digesting. It provides insights into some of the thorniest problems faced by the American church. It points to possible solutions. You don’t have to agree with everything it says, and you probably won't. But you will see the value it offers. Deidra Riggs and I might disagree in a number of areas, but we have the important ones – and the important one – in common. And she is well worth listening to.

Related:

My review of Every Little Thing.

The web page for One: Unity in a Divided World.

Top photograph by James Maxon via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Six-to-Eight-Seconds Culture

I work in an environment that requires – demands – an array of communications technologies, platforms, systems, and applications. My team is responsible for managing social media channels – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, a blog, assorted web sites – for the organization. We’re part of a larger digital team that also manages all of the primary web properties.

We use smart phones, iPads, laptops. We’re supported by rather complex IT systems. And we use a number of online tools to help us manage volume and speed.

Our work happens in the dimension of speed, and often in the dimension of crisis.

We go to seminars and conferences. We participate in webinars. We read everything we can get our hands on for trends in technology.

Experts rather cheerfully report that attention spans are getting shorter. For example, we’re told that few people want to watch videos longer than 15 seconds, and six to eight seconds is optimal.

Six to eight seconds.

Speed is exhilarating, for a time. Then it becomes exhausting, and then destructive.

Western culture in general seems to be moving to a six-to-right-seconds mentality. A “fast” culture isn’t just about the internet and Facebook. Everything accelerates, bowing before an insatiable demand for faster and faster.

We want to implement change – now!

We want new programs – now!

We want new systems – now!

The church offers no respite from the six-to-eight-second mentality. A lot of church wreckage litters the landscape, remnants of the battles of organization, size, growth, social issues, economic issues, justice issues, politics, and the worship wars.

As we hurtle down the ever-accelerating speed lane, we’re shedding important things. Time to pause and rest. Time to reflect. Time to think and consider. Time to understand the wholeness of what the church is supposed to be about.

We’re supposed to be the alternative to the world, not a corporate subsidiary of it.

At some point, many churches embraced a corporate model, likely influenced by all the corporate executives who ended up on elder boards. Those who did missed an important fact of corporate life: corporate cultures have downsides that must be constantly attended to and mitigated.

Self-perpetuation becomes all important, sometimes at the expense of what the organization is supposed to be accomplishing. 

Size and growth are usually accompanied by alienation.

Bad behaviors can become entrenched to the point of pathologies.

Leadership, insulated from the chaos of the marketplace, comes to believe that it alone has the wisdom, understanding, and vision to achieve goals and objectives.

Being told that what the organization is doing that is wrong and harmful is not me with a smile, because organizations believe they never make mistakes.

I’ve experienced every one of these behaviors in churches I’ve attended. I’ve talked to people at enough other churches to know that this is not uncommon.

This is why I think Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, by Christopher Smith, John Pattison and Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove, is one of the most important books I’ve read in the last decade, and why I’ve devoted the past many Mondays here to talk about it. I don’t agree with everything the book says, but then, I don’t have to agree with everything to understand that what it does is something vital.

Slow Church points to a different part, a different way. We the church don’t have to swept up in the culture of six-to-eight-seconds. We can resist and abandon what the authors refer to as the “McDonaldization” of society and the church.

“We’ve been formed by a culture of speed,” the authors write, “but if we recognize our malformation, and the selfishness and fearfulness that are fueling it, perhaps we can become less resistant to God’s transformation.”

Slow Church, above all, points to a choice we can make. We can choose a different way, a transformed way.

The church can become the alternative to the sic-to-eight-seconds mentality.

Read Slow Church.

Photograph by Vera Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

We Were All Willow Creek, Once

In 2007, Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago made a rather stunning admission. Its church model, influenced by practices in the business world, defined spiritual maturity as participation in programs. And programs had abounded. Membership had grown phenomenally. Local church leaders from around the country flocked to its training programs and implemented their own versions of Willow Creek.

At the church we were then attending in St. Louis, we had witnessed – and experienced – the implementation of the Willow Creek model. Programs proliferated. Ministries were made over. Studies of books of the Bible were replaced by studies of The Prayer of Jabez by Bruce Wilkinson and Wild at Heart by John Eldredge. Some ministries, successful and needed ones like the prayer ministry, were eliminated.

At congregational meetings, when asked if the church was aiming to become a Willow Creek, the elders would deny it. Over successive meetings, the questions became confrontations. The elders would deny it, often heatedly. And they would continue to send staff to Willow Creek seminars and training programs, and invite the congregation to Willow Creek video training programs.

I was asked to be a member of the elder board on the basis of my experience in corporate communications. I declined, pointing out that it wasn’t one of the qualifications listed in 1 Timothy.

We stayed at the church longer than we should have. I kept holding on and praying for change. It only got worse. Ultimately, the church lost a huge percentage of its members, hit financial difficulties, and laid off numerous staff members.

And then came the 2007 statement by Willow Creek. They had been wrong. The model had been wrong. Programs and participation did not result in spiritual maturity. People were not being helped. People were not become more mature and better equipped disciples.

I do have commend Willow Creek for its admission. But for those churches that went chasing the Willow Creek model, and chased it for years, this was a train wreck. We may never fully know the extent of the wreckage, the wreckage in local churches, the wreckage in the church at large, and the wreckage in individual church members and families.

Last week, I began reading Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, by Christopher Smith, John Pattison, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. I was ten pages into it when I thought the authors were writing about my own experience with churches we’ve attended.

Slow Church is about how churches, and especially if not solely churches in Protestant evangelical America, have been capture by the culture. And it’s about what might be done to find a way back. I won’t call it a recovery program for the Willow Creek problem, but there is at least some truth to that. The book contains so much insight that I plan to write about it here for several Mondays to come.

I wish the authors had written Slow Church a decade ago. It explains much.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.