Church after Innovation (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #5)

Andrew Root

Description

Churches and their leaders have innovation fever. Innovation seems exciting--a way to enliven tired institutions, embrace creativity, and be proactive--and is a superstar of the business world. But this focus on innovation may be caused by an obsession with contemporary relevance, creativity, and entrepreneurship that inflates the self, lacks theological depth, and promises burnout.In this follow-up to Churches and the Crisis of Decline, leading practical theologian Andrew Root delves into the problems of innovation. He explores where innovation and entrepreneurship came from, shows how they break into church circles, and counters the "new imaginations" like neoliberalism and technology that hold the church captive to modernity. Root reveals the moral visions of the self that innovation and entrepreneurship deliver--they are dependent on workers (and consumers) being obsessed with their selves, which leads to significant faith-formation issues. This focus on innovation also causes us to think we need to be singularly unique instead of made alive in Christ. Root offers a return to mysticism and the poetry of Meister Eckhart as a healthier spiritual alternative.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian theology

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493438358
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Endorsements
“This book will help you to consider the possible costs of chasing innovation and entrepreneurship—for you and your church. By tracing their origins, Andrew Root invites readers to examine the ends and aims of both innovation and entrepreneurship. Rather than helping the church and its congregants to thrive, unreflective practices of innovation and entrepreneurship can shift values and loyalties, and along the way contribute to anxiety, depression, and an overinflation of the self which works against genuine formation of the self in Christ. The Church after Innovation provides significant insights and questions regarding some of the most pressing challenges of our time.”
— Angela Williams Gorrell , Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University
“There’s something satisfying about a story that is this big, bold, and revealing about how our cultural presumptions came to be—especially when so beautifully told. Root’s grand narrative offers the significant benefit of showing in fine-grain detail why Christians who do not account for the shaping effects of our economic practices evacuate the content of the Christian confession. When Christians fall in love with ideas of leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship, we can be sure they have ignored for too long the secular economic context in which they live and breathe. A timely wake-up call.”
— Brian Brock , University of Aberdeen
“This perceptive and engaging book is a godsend for leaders and pastors seeking to cultivate the life of the church in a contemporary Western context. In a market saturated with quick-fix, innovate-or-die polemics on church growth, Root weaves a more nuanced philosophical and cultural critique of the captivity of innovation in capitalist culture with the theological insights to liberate the creativity we actually need. The tongue-in-cheek real-life stories of people like us struggling with this task humorously but effectively emphasize the real-world need for such a view of innovation and change. This book offers a richer path to help realize a transcendent creativity of epiphany (over innovation) that values people, nurtures personhood, and promotes flourishing for the church in a secular age.”
— Nick Shepherd , FRSA, Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England
“With penetrating analysis and prophetic force, Root exposes how the false idols of capitalism are being smuggled into the church through the Trojan horses of innovation and entrepreneurialism. Fashionable trends touting church ‘growth’ are fueling self-absorption and drawing us away from the cross of Christ. This is a bold, necessary, and urgent book.”
— Richard Beck , Abilene Christian University; author of Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age
“Have you ever read a book and thought, ‘This is on point, and I wish I wrote it’? That’s what happened to me when I finished The Church after Innovation . Ministers hear so many leadership mantras today: Innovate! Be efficient! Get creative! Time to pivot! Find your voice! Be authentic! In this book, Root reveals these mantras and the engine that generates them to be the problem. They are not the jewelry but the chains that keep the church captive to a soul-sucking culture. Seminaries need to assign this book. Ministers need to read this book. I’m grateful to Root for so powerfully articulating the biggest problem facing the church—namely, our supposed need to innovate.”
— Tripp Fuller , founder and host of the Homebrewed Christianity podcast
“Peppered with real-life examples, The Church after Innovation opens up innumerable pathways of faithful thought and action for our exhausting times. Root is especially adept at exposing and probing the cultural contradictions of neoliberal capitalism, exploring how they have shaped (and warped) the mission of the church and our very selves. Come for that critique and stay for fascinating dives into management theory, the promise of nothingness, the mystics behind Martin Luther, and so much more. This important book is worthy of reading and rereading.”
— Rodney Clapp , author of Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2022 by Andrew Root
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-3835-8
Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and post-consumer waste whenever possible.
Dedication
To Nancy Lee Gauche with gratitude for the years of our work together
Contents
Cover
Endorsements i
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Dedication v
Preface ix
1. Only the Creative Survive: How Mission Became Married to Innovation 1
2. We’re All Sandwich Artists Now: Work and Backwash, Reversing a Historical Flow 21
3. Hungry, Hungry Markets: Workers in Contradiction, Children in Consumption 37
4. Let’s Get Extra: Exploring the Secular Contradiction of Capitalism 61
5. Leave It to Management: Managing for Permanent Innovation 89
6. The Viennese Worm That Exposes the True Self: When Work Becomes about Flexible Projects 111
7. Justification by Creative Works Alone: When Creativity Becomes King, the Self Becomes a Star 137
8. Why You’re Not That Special but Feel the Need to Be: Singularity and the Self 159
9. Standing Naked against Money 187
10. The Three Amigos of the Mystical Path: How the Self Is Freed from Singularity 203
11. Aesthetic Epiphanies, Mad Poets, and a Humble Example of What This All Looks Like 225
Index 238
Back Cover 243
Preface
(Don’t Skip! Read Before Using)
In our family’s best moments, our dinner table is a philosophical workshop. We once held a long debate about what makes something a chip. Owen was claiming that gluten-free chips were not real chips. We wondered what elements or components make something the thing it is. We all like to think about where things come from. Once, as we were eating birthday cake, Maisy, at thirteen, wondered about the origin of the phrase “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” She mentioned that it was nonsensical. She had her cake and she was eating too. She offered to us that it would be better if the phrase were “You can’t have your cake and eat it twice,” which is basically what the phrase means. During that dinner we talked for nearly an hour about cake and possession and the loss of something even when having it. We were all, to different degrees, mesmerized by where things come from.
This book is born from that same inclination. If there is a popular or important new emphasis in Protestantism, it’s innovation. Everyone seems to be talking about innovation. Innovation is popping up everywhere—congregations, denominations, colleges, foundations, camps, parachurch ministries. Institutions and leaders across the church have innovation fever. And why not? Innovation seems exciting, a way to infuse verve back into waning institutions, a way to embrace creativity and to be proactive. After all, innovation and entrepreneurship, along with creativity, are superstars of business, particularly in Silicon Valley.
Before the church baptizes innovation as the answer to its problems (or design ideation as the way to uncover new church practice), we should ask where innovation and entrepreneurship come from. Nothing comes from nowhere. All perspectives, ideas, and practices have deep and rich moral codes hidden within; they all have a history. This book seeks to excavate innovation and entrepreneurship so that those advocating or using innovation and entrepreneurship in the church can know where these ideas come from and what they are tied to. The reader should beware that this book is only a first step. In this project I wear my cultural philosophy hat more securely than my theologian’s hat. This book is interpretive—where did innovation come from and what moral visions of the self does it deliver? I can’t really solve all the problems I raise. This is only a beginning step. Other projects and people will need to pick up where I leave off. This project fronts some questions for engagement if innovation is to avoid creating more problems than it promises to solve for the church.
I am deeply committed to the Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor school of cultural philosophy that reminds us that our ways of being, and particularly the ideas that shape us, have long historical tails. My goal in this book is to point out the tail of innovation, entrepreneurship, work, the self, and the church. Cornel West, in his superb book The American Evasion of Philosophy , expresses just what I hope to accomplish in this book, giving flesh to how such thinking works. Referring to his own book, West says, “In regard to method, this work is a social history of ideas. It conceives of the intellectual sphere of history as distinct, unique, and personal sets of cultural practices intimately connected with concomitant developments in the larger society and culture.” 1 This is exactly how I’m thinking of this project. Innovation and entrepreneurship—for good and ill—are inextricably connected to capitalism. You can’t engage with them without coming up against the claims and commitments of late capitalism. This project examines the economic shape of our lives, seeing how the economic shape of our lives is bound in a secular age, pointing out how innovation and entrepreneurship play their part in how we work. Perhaps it’s better, if we are to get our feet on the ground, to say that innovation and en