In a recent post, I shared my conversation with Peter Aschoff (here), a Lutheran pastor in Germany. Peter described the critical need for churches in the West to become little communities of hope. That’s a word I’m hearing more and more just now - hope or, in truth, its absence. We can speak too carelessly of hope as if it is but a wish away, easily got back without much pain. But it isn’t. Hope has drained from so much of the Western imagination, but for Christians, in this Lenten season of waiting and lament, we look at the Cross and know how costly it was for God to give hope again to us human beings.
Peter talked about the situation in Germany. A period of extraordinary growth (in Germany it was called Wirtschaftswunder, in France, Les Trente Glorieuses) has ended. The French economist Daniel Cohen, in his recent book, The Inglorious Years (Princeton, 2021), describes our time in terms of lost illusions. Our economic and social future will require a massive, downward readjustment. This crisis brings with it pushback. The need to fix and control grows stronger. The need for some future-focused approach (always a method to embrace ideologies of our agency and progress since the future is always better - right? Wrong!) Competing ideologies think they can restore Les Trente Glorieuses. All the way down, these ideologies are about power, control, and the strong man’s seductive promises of prosperity if we give them more control. Today seems to be the time of the strongman who uncovers and eradicates the scapegoat, brings in superior managers and elites who can foresee the future through data. The ancient, beguiling temptation, for all sorcerer's apprentices, the most unoriginal sin - to predict and, therefore, manage the future.
In our conversation, Peter’s insight was wise and prophetic. How should the church understand itself and act amidst these demonstrations of raw power (witness Trump and Vance’s treatment of Zelinski)? Peter was clear and unequivocal - it is time for the church to eschew power, to let go of any need to control. This is our Lenten time. Here is the vocation of the church in this great unraveling. The opposite of power is not weakness. It is self-emptying! No matter which way we read the Biblical narratives, we confront a self-emptying Lord - coming all the way down is not the move of power or control. In Gethsemane and on the Cross, Jesus demonstrated a trust in the Father that allowed his self-emptying without knowing the future of it all.
How, therefore, do communities of God’s people practice hope in this fraught moment when all that is solid melts into air? They choose, in the name of Jesus, an uncontrollable journey, letting go of power in order to seek how the Spirit is calling us to participate in forming alternative ways of economic and social life. They let go of any need, any data, any program that promises them control of some preferred future in order to hear God among the people among whom they dwell. This is witness to the Gospel. It is the weakness and foolishness upon which God’s kingdom is built. Here is where the churches will discern their identity again.
It is in this context that I received a copy of Rodney Clapp’s recent book, Living Without
Control: Political and Personal Faith in Waning Christendom. There it was, again, that word which the Spirit presses in and catches us unaware - living without control. Like Jeremiah’s word to the captives in Babylon, this is the word of the Lord to the once dominant Euro-tribal churches. The title of Clapp’s book is the spoiler - there is what Peter and I were talking about - power. Power is this anxious need to have control, to predict, name, and manage the futures we want. It is the belief that the right method (right now it's innovation, but who knows what it will be next) will give us the power to future-proof our systems and ourselves. Rodney’s book undercuts all this as it re-presents the Biblical narrative of a God who eschews power and calls a people to the same journey.
Living Without Control invites Christians in the West to awaken again to eschatology. This form of eschatology is fundamentally different from the proposals I’m reading right now about how the church can be future-focused. Eschatology is the very opposite; it is about anticipation without the knowledge of how God will bring about the renewal of all things. This is why Augustine, Benedict, the Celts, along with countless others through history, formed little communities of hope in their local contexts, shaped around practices of life. They had confidence that God’s kingdom would come but did not need to make, get, plan, or strategize for it. Christian witness in this unraveling is living, out of control, as an anarchic people. This does not mean a quietism but rather a multi-sided dissent that names and critiques the empire with all its strongmen and their machinations while, at the same time, living deeply into basic Christian practices that model a different way of life. Some ask what those practices might be. They are given to us in many variants throughout church history. As we’ll discuss in the next post, Roy Searle and I have addressed this in our new book Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unraveling which will be published in May. There we present three fundamental practices for living out of control: Dwelling, Discerning, and Exploring. More on this in the next post.
Living Without Control is a critical read for all of us trying to figure out how to live as Christians amidst ideologies of power (secular or religious) with their latest band of sorcerer's apprentices claiming they can sweep the swamp clean through better management, more faithful innovation, and better future-focused leaders.
Among God’s people, in the Euro-tribal churches, there's discontent, a desire to embrace another way, without the need to have power, to live “out of control.” I recommend Rodney's book and the questions it will force us to face. These are the types of questions we want to hear and engage with in the Commons. Why not sign up for one of our 'taster tables'?
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