5.2 Unregulated Discretion
5.2.2 Establishing Importance
It is important to keep in mind that the Emerging Churches in this study are not resisting the use of professionals or even of the processes professionals tend to use.
Indeed, they see professionals as valuable for both the legitimacy that they lend the organization and the specialized knowledge and skills they offer. Instead, they want to resist two very particular things that normally occur with professionals. First, while they actively seek professionals for their organization, they want to avoid giving those
professionals too many opportunities to institute the technical training they receive in seminary. Second, they also want to avoid the creation of institutionalized processes that
might occur while the clergyperson occupies his/her position. It will be the task of this chapter to explain how these organizations create environments which decrease the opportunities for religious professionals to both use and create institutionalized organizational procedures. For example, pastors might learn in a seminary class on pastoral counseling that they should open and/or close a hospital visit with prayer. While the congregations in this study would not have a problem with this particular
institutionalized practice, they would be resistant to having this practice become the way that hospital visits are always conducted.
Diane explains the incompatibility of this routinization with her faith when she describes her previous, more mainstream, church experiences. She feels she was really limited by the professionals who ran the churches she attended.
I could look back on it and go I think the people who are in ministry are really trying to follow God the way that they believe God wants them to go and based on how they were trained so I don’t have any ill feeling toward that, but I think there’s an innate unhealth about it because I think that when you’re shown a way, I think people start to look the same and talk the same and act the same and ah, you can’t realize it when you’re in it but when you’re out of it you’re like wow, I was really conforming. I wasn’t having fresh thoughts, and even the curriculum for the children’s ministry we just picked the best that was out there to buy. We didn’t have the opportunity to think about what else is there. There was no dreaming. It was so corporate. It just didn’t feel authentic even though we were trying to do what was right.
Diane explicitly identifies the source of her feelings of inauthenticity as deriving from the
“corporate” or institutionalized environment created by a pastoral staff that had undergone an extensive process of professionalization, but is just as quick to point out that she does not think pastors are bad people or even necessarily bad for congregations.
If it were possible to retain the professional without limiting creativity and individualism, then Diane would be all for it. It is this search that ultimately lead Diane to the Emerging
Church.
George validates Diane’s feelings and suggests that traditionally trained
professionals can create conflict in a resistant organization when he discusses the pastor at Living Word.
Ronald’s been great for us in a lot of ways, and there’s no way we could afford to pay someone else full-time, but I wonder sometimes if he really gets how we’re trying to do things here. In some ways it’s nice to have direction and you have to grow, but at the same time, it has to be done in the right way. He doesn’t always have to be ‘the guy.’
Living Word had a history of relatively open decision-making with meetings being organized as needed by congregants and open to anyone. However, they faced some structural restraints due to their official ties with a denominational church which both founded and continues to finance their operations. This relationship required certain budget formats, and leadership structure and qualifications. However, with the
appointment of Ronald, an ordained minister in the denomination, as pastor earlier in the year I conducted my research, they began to move away from a resistant governance structure and toward a more traditional, centralized arrangement where the pastor has far more power to institute procedures and programs based on his training. Ronald
increasingly served as a gatekeeper, creating a cadre of people who were “leadership oriented” to help him direct the congregation. He indicated that there was a Biblical basis for this kind of decision-making structure as directly opposed to democracy.
We don’t do voting. Somebody asked that. They said “When are going to vote for [the leadership team] because otherwise this isn’t representative?” Well there were like no votes in the Bible, okay. Come on. Do you want to be Biblical or do you want to be democratic? This isn’t a civics class…Like we’re having a big meeting at the end of the summer and I’m hand picking the people to go to that-some of our more leadership oriented people. In the past they’ve done the gatherings where anyone can come, and I just said, let’s put that aside for a while.
These new policies were not met with overt resistance during the time I was there, but there were signs of dissatisfaction that I noticed. Individual comments during interviews and conversations and the formation of a group thinking about leaving to start their own church were directly tied to Ronald’s method of pastoring. The lack of self-sufficiency, however makes it difficult to formally resist the pastor’s efforts and maintain the status quo as the congregation could not afford to call a full-time pastor on its own. Two-thirds of Ronald’s salary is covered by the mother church for Living Word, where he also works part time as a minister. Thus, Ronald is immune, to some extent from resistance within the congregation since they do not pay most of his salary or have the ability to replace him, and there is nothing compelling him to employ context specific governing techniques. However, these structural barriers should not negate the point that the congregants consistently and consciously linked the role of the professional pastor with their dissatisfaction with congregational changes.
As I discuss in Chapter 1, intentionality is of paramount importance for any group that wishes to resist institutionalization. The greatest evidence that a congregation can provide of their collective distaste for institutionalized organizational procedures is in the way they conduct corporate worship. Liturgy selection and worship construction are often the domain of the religious professional. Thus, a rejection of a formula for worship is, to some extent, a rejection of the institutionalization of pastoral authority. To this end, the congregations in this study are off to a good start. My fieldnotes and interviews were littered with comments and exchanges like this one between myself and a longtime member of Fellowship:
Interviewer: Yesterday, before worship, someone made an announcement and said we were going to do something different. What part was different?
Aaron: [laughter] They always say that we’re going to do something different. We hear it all the time. “We’re going to do something different” and we’re like “Okay.
Whatever.” Every week there is something different going on. We don’t have the same weeks. I mean if you were even there for the first hour before we have church we have bible study we always hear Okay, we’re going to do something different today. And it’s like since I’ve been going there nothing has been the same. They completely broke the mode about walking into church and sit down and prep your bibles and have worshipful hymns and we all sit back down and then the guy talks up here and then we pray and then we go out to eat at Denny’s. I mean this whole routine that everyone is used to, we don’t do it that way at all.
A husband and wife from Calvary echoed these sentiments, arguing that the routinization of worship at traditional churches was a major drawback to their previous church
experiences.
Interviewer: What appeals to you about this church?
Jessica: You’ve got to come up for yourself what is going to work for your own congregation, because they’re all different.
Wade: Yeah, it’s really formulaic at most traditional churches.
Jessica: We’ve been in a lot of different places and one message does not fit everyone. What’s that book that everyone is using now?
Wade: The Purpose Driven Life.
Jessica: Yeah, the whole nation is into the purpose driven everything. And what was the one before that? The prayer of Jabez. I was like oh my gosh can anybody go to the bible and find their own stinkin answers and can anybody pray and ask the Holy Spirit to enlighten them? Or do we all just suck up the leftovers of other people. Why do we do that? We can find God for ourselves it’s just laziness. It’s fast food nation. You know.
The people I interviewed consistently linked the lack of routinization with organizational processes as a key reason why they were attracted to the Emerging Church. Even if they did not understand that this would be a crucial aspect when they began attending, they are clearly able to identify its importance to their ability to have a unique religious
experience. One should not get the impression from the above quotes, however, that
activities in these congregations approach chaos. In fact, quite the opposite is true.
Pastor Ricky does a good job of explaining the role of worship liturgies in an Emerging Church.
Interviewer: When people show up on Sunday nights do they know what to expect?
Ricky: Our intent is that we start with a blank slate every week. Something that I’ve explored is whether we could take the form of the Catholic mass because they have the same worship order every week sort of built in the elements sort of rotate through but the structure is the same so that’s one of the things that I’ve wanted to do since we started was to take a season and do that because there’s a different thing that you learn and experience in that approach to worship.
This last quote by Pastor Ricky exemplifies the unique approach of people in the Emerging Church. Just as I showed in Chapter 4 that they are not anti-hierarchy and bureaucracy, I want to make it clear that they are not anti-liturgy either. In fact, the services I attended employed lots of liturgy. As Pastor Ricky’s quote points out, they are not resisting any particular liturgy, but rather the idea of being liturgical or locked in to a specific form of worship to the exclusion of all others. If one of the points of chapter 4 was to show that the Emerging Churches do not want to be beholden to any one
organizational structure, bureaucratic or otherwise, then one of the objectives of this chapter is to establish that these congregations similarly do not want to be wedded to any one set of organizational procedures, traditional or contemporary.