A CLERGY colleague was, at one point in his ministry, responsible for three churches. The third church was the smallest — just a few people hanging on at Sunday services — and the parishioners often told him that they felt ignored in the shared ministry. One year, he decided that, to address this, there would be a single service on Good Friday for all three churches, and it would be held in this third church. The congregation of the third church was delighted, and began making preparations.
A few days before the service, however, one of the leaders of the third church called. “Well,” he said, “you can still have the service in our church. But none of us are going to be there.” “Why not?” asked my colleague with concern. “The local outlet mall has announced a 50-per-cent-off sale for Good Friday, and most of us have decided that we need to get to that. So, we won’t be able to be in church.”
When my colleague shared this story with me, he said that he felt a tremendous sense of failure. He had ministered among these people for several years, and had done his best to be faithful and to share with them the good news as he understood it. In response, all they could think to do was to go shopping on one of the holiest days of the year? Surely, he had done something wrong.
If you are in Christian ministry today, it can be very easy to feel like a failure. Lots of very well-meaning clergy and lay people are working hard to put together interesting programmes, write compelling sermons, and lead engaging worship. Yet sometimes these efforts just don’t seem to gain traction. People don’t show up. They stare off into the middle distance distractedly, or glance at their phones too often. The ministry efforts fail in their intended purpose.
In recent decades, mainline Christians have struggled mightily to transmit their faith from one generation of believers to the next. It is this, probably more than any other factor, that is the cause of the current fragility of these churches. This struggle has given rise to a narrative among some Christians that suggests there has been a long-formation failure in the Church.
The thinking is straightforward. Teaching and instructing people in the Christian faith is vital to forming them as Christians and passing the gospel across generations. If the gospel is not being passed across generations, then Christians must be doing a poor job of formation. If only, this line of thinking goes, we could get our act together and do formation properly, then we could ensure that our Christian communities are thriving. They would come to church on Good Friday instead of heading to the outlet malls.
PART of me has long wanted to accept this argument. I work in theological education, and I generally believe that more theological education of all kinds is good for the church. Still, I hesitate. I generally believe that all Christians at all times have sought to be as faithful as they could to the gospel in the best way they could discern. I also know that it is not just mainline churches that struggle to transmit their message. Churches with widely differing formation practices are encountering similar issues.
The trouble with thinking that we have individually failed in ministry or that the church has collectively failed is that it places tremendous weight on human action. It is in keeping with the logic of a neoliberal, performance-driven world. But what if it is a matter not of human action but of the structures in which we find ourselves?
That seemed to be the case with my colleague who lost his Good Friday congregation to the outlet mall. His congregants lived within a set of structures that made them desire low-cost goods and made those goods readily accessible through nearby outlet malls. The congregation was being formed by these structures in ways that were more powerful than any of his efforts at formation. He hadn’t failed. He had been defeated.
The distinction came to mind when I was a delegate to the 2023 General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada in Calgary, Alberta. Alberta is the heartland of Canada’s oil production as well as home to much of its agriculture, including cattle ranching, and Calgary is at the centre of both. During the synod, members debated a resolution making worthy commitments regarding climate change, including a commitment by all parishes “to work on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
It was the kind of resolution that made abundant good sense. By the time of this meeting, much of Canada and the United States had in that summer already endured weeks of intense smoke from wildfires made dramatically worse by climate change. Yet at the same time the resolution felt impotent in the face of the challenge. I was struggling with that sense of impotence when later that same day an announcement was made reminding delegates of the details of the synod’s closing banquet.
As befits Calgary, the banquet was to be a steak dinner held at an event venue called Gasoline Alley Museum. Given the significant carbon emissions associated with eating meat, especially red meat, and the obvious connection between petroleum products and global warming, the synod’s commitments both to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and to eating steak at a museum dedicated to gasoline seemed, at best, incongruous. A friend at synod sent a tart message: “The political economy is stronger than our God.”
That moment in synod — from worthy resolution to emission-producing banquet — was a moment of defeat for the Church. To say this is simply to recognise that there are powers in this world that are stronger than the efforts of Christians to witness to the gospel, form people in the way of Jesus, and pass our faith from one generation to the next.
That we struggle to see this in the Church is an indication of our inability to see with an apocalyptic clarity. But if we can reclaim that apocalyptic clarity, then the nature of the formation defeat — and the possible path forward — becomes clearer.
IMPLICITLY or explicitly, one way to understand the goal of Christian formation is that it is to help people deepen their commitment to the gospel and the Church. That prompts an important question: Why does a person change religion or make a renewed commitment to it?
For many people, the answer to this question is so obvious it is rarely discussed: a person makes a decision to do so. The Gospels tell us many stories of what seems to be precisely this. Jesus says to James and John to “follow him” — and they do. In the Acts of the Apostles, the early disciples are constantly preaching to and teaching people — a Roman soldier, an Ethiopian court official, a jailer — who then say, essentially, “I want to become part of this movement. Show me how.”
True, there is a strand of Christian theology that has emphasised God’s action to predestine some people to salvation regardless of their decisions. But this has weakened in recent centuries. Instead, many people are implicitly comfortable with the words of a hymn popularised by the American evangelist Billy Graham in the 20th century: “I have decided to follow Jesus.”
Following Jesus is about making an individual decision for oneself. If we think in this way, then the formation failure argument makes sense: Christians have done a poor job of showing people why they should make the decision — and keep on making it — to follow Jesus and belong to the Church.
Yet this line of thinking proceeds largely in ignorance of the considerable scholarship dedicated to religious change, conversion, and Christian adherence. What this scholarship suggests is that, contrary to popular belief, religious change is not simply a matter of individual decision. Structural factors matter as well.
Understanding the importance of structural factors in religious change does not necessarily contradict how biblical stories of conversion have often been read. In fact, it may enhance our understanding of the Bible. While the Gospels tell us about the handful of named individuals who made decisions to follow Jesus, they don’t provide a clear answer for why Jesus was able to attract such massive crowds to him throughout this public ministry.
For that, it may help to know something about the structure of the time in which Jesus lived. The province of Palestine was part of the vast Roman Empire. Economic changes brought about by incorporation into this empire meant that what had previously been an economy based on rural agriculture and small landowners was being transformed into an economy based on large-scale agricultural production for export on huge farms owned by absentee landowners.
One result was the creation of a new and growing class of landless poor, who were alienated from the economy as well as from the religious traditions of their time. These are the crowds who followed Jesus.
It is not surprising that Jesus is so attentive to agriculture in his teachings, including to the reality of absentee landlords, tenant farmers, and wealthy owners who feasted while others starved. Part of the reason Jesus’s message may have been perceived as good news is that it was responsive to these changing structural conditions. No wonder so many people were interested in following him. If we can understand why the landless poor followed Jesus everywhere, we may find deeper insight into the meaning of Jesus’s teachings.
When religious change is seen not simply in terms of individual decision, but also in light of structure, the formation defeat idea becomes clearer. Christians are struggling to transmit their message from one generation to another because there are powerful structural forces that make it less likely for people to consider religious affiliation and church membership as a logical decision. That was what my colleague experienced when his congregation went to the outlet mall. It is in that outlet mall that we find a clue to the nature of these contemporary structural forces.
I THINK the dominant structural forces of a crisis-shaped world are economic. We live amid economic structures that propound a damaging and harmful set of values that are antithetical to the Christian gospel and which continue to extend their reach into ever more domains of our lives. It is hard to proclaim a gospel message that declares our salvation is not dependent on our action, but on God’s, while at the same time living in an environment that incessantly proclaims in implicit and explicit fashion that we are to be judged by our ability, our performance, and our deeds.
It is hard to form people into an economy of giving and receiving if the dominant messages we receive are that we are to understand ourselves primarily as consumers who should find meaning through purchase and consumption. It is challenging to form people into a Christian community that meets for worship and service when labour practices of the gig economy, “side hustles”, and algorithmically designed work schedules that materialise a day before they begin to shred the plans of your members and prevent them from gathering together at the same time, in the same place, and on a regular basis.
It is next to impossible to teach people that there are values independent of price — values like truth, love, or hope — when the market has taught us that the only value that matters is paying the lowest price of all.
None of this is to make excuses for Christians and our formation practices. It is simply to say that, if we are serious about the future of Christian witness, we need to think seriously not just about what we are doing, but about the structural context in which we find ourselves.
Thinking about the importance of structures and their connection to Christian witness leads to an important realisation: true formation is about more than just affecting someone’s mind to get them to think the right thoughts. Yes, we are all shaped by what we think, but we are also shaped by desires, habits, feelings, emotions, and so much else that makes us human.
If Christians are to engage in formation, then we need to engage all parts of the human person, not simply the mind. After all, Jesus told his followers to love God with all their mind, yes, but also all their heart, soul, and strength. Following Jesus engages our whole selves. Formation needs to do the same.
In a landscape shaped by rival powers to the Christian gospel, it is important to remember that Christians are not the only ones trying to form people. Other powers are as well. The Canadian theologian James K. A. Smith has been especially attuned to this. He sees the world in terms of rival liturgies. Liturgies, for him, are a “love-shaping practice” that orient our desires (or our loves) to a vision of the good life and deeper human meaning. He calls them liturgies because he is referring to practices, such as the practices that make up Christian worship services.
But, when Smith looks around the world, he sees lots of other liturgies. A hallmark example for him is a trip to the shopping mall. Everything from the architecture of the space, the familiar signs, brands, and symbols, the sense of escape it provides from the world outside, and the consummation of the visit in purchase suggests to him that visiting a shopping mall is a religious experience akin to the feeling a medieval pilgrim may once have had in visiting a cathedral. The liturgy of the shopping mall shapes our loves and orients us toward a vision of the good life. It’s just that it is a vision of the good life that is not coherent with the Christian vision and does not ultimately lead to fullness of life.
If Christians do not pay attention to both the context in which we find ourselves, as well as the fullness of the person as a loving and desiring person, the result is that we could end up living in rival liturgies and “be worshipping other gods without even knowing it”. Like my colleague whose congregation went to the outlet mall, there are times in my ministry when I’ve felt like a failure. It is a debilitating and, at times, shaming feeling. It saps energy for future efforts. It is not conducive to resisting the powers and principalities of the world.
Defeat, however, is different from failure. I think about this by thinking about a sports team. Whatever the sport, by late in the season, it is clear that some teams just are not going to make the playoffs. This just isn’t their year. For these teams, it can be hard to muster up the energy to get suited up and out of the locker room, let alone care about what happens on the field. These teams have failed. They have given up on themselves.
But every year there are teams that work hard, practise well, and come together as a team to execute their plays — and still end up losing out on a championship. These are teams that have been defeated.
As fans know, there’s a world of difference between failure and defeat. There may be agony, but there’s no shame in playing valiantly, confidently, and well — and losing. What is problematic is being unable to even enter the arena, or playing the game so poorly you might as well never have suited up.
The Christian gospel provides the archetype of defeat: Jesus himself. When Jesus was hanging on a cross, he, his good news, and the reign of God he proclaimed sure seemed like they had been defeated. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” two of his followers said afterwards (Luke 24.21). But, the implication clearly is, he was not, and did not. His Kingdom had been defeated.
But what Jesus on the cross was not, was a failure. He had, in sports parlance, left it all on the field. He had lived confidently, spoken with authority, and confronted the powers directly, and the powers had won. But the great good news of the Christian gospel is found in precisely this: defeat is not the end. Victory is coming. Jesus was defeated, but that does not mean we need to be defeatist. Quite the opposite.
Sometimes when I look — lovingly but honestly — at the Church I know and care so deeply for, trying its best to share its message in a crisis-shaped world, it seems like the Church doesn’t even know what game it is playing, let alone what arena it is taking place in. The failure to see in apocalyptic terms means we flail about. Our best efforts simply are not good enough.
Not only are the powers and principalities too strong: we fail to see them and name them as such. A defeatist cynicism is not far behind. But there is another path. That path is to see with an apocalyptic clarity that names the powers and principalities that obstruct God’s reign, and then cultivate communities in Christ that share an ethos and set of practices that form people to live in hope, resist the powers of this world, and be a foretaste of the Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed and enacted.
Yes, our Christian communities are fragile. Yes, the powers of this world are overwhelming in their strength. Yes, these powers shape and affect even us who proclaim that we live by the values of a different kingdom. Yes, we will almost certainly be defeated at times in our efforts to form people in the life of the reign of God. But that does not mean that we have failed. It simply means that, in that defeat, God is waiting and working to bring forth new life in the way God has always done.
This is an edited extract from Faithful, Creative, Hopeful: Fifteen theses for Christians in a crisis-shaped world by Jesse A. Zink, published by Church Publishing Inc. at £16.99 (Church Times Bookshop £15.29); 978-1-64065-738-0.
