Where do we go from here?

The failure of a dominant narrative & the need for a new social imaginary

I was recently introduced to a magazine called Prospect by an Anglo-Irish friend, Colin Greene. It offers a regular series of cultural and political essays that cover current affairs, the arts, economics and culture. The lead article in the latest edition is by Robert Skidelsky. Entitled “Where do we go from here?“, it addresses some key issues in the current global crisis. (You can also connect with several short pieces Colin Greene and I have written.) Skidelsky argues that the current financial crisis is a failure of the market system: it is a crisis generated by the system itself, not some outside agent or actor. He then outlines three levels of failure.

1. First, institutional: banks, regulators etc., succumbed to the ‘efficient market left to itself’ hypothesis.
2. Secondly, the crisis was intellectual. Alan Greenspan’s confession to the US Congress earlier this year epitomizes this failure: ‘I never saw it coming!’ Why? Because he wore a set of intellectual lenses that blinded him to alternative explanations.
3. Thirdly, the crisis represents a moral failure in a system that worships the absolute priority of growth that has made our moral compass thin and degraded our capacities to imagine an alternative way of life.

Skidelsky explores these issues in more depth through the rest of his article. What struck me are the parallels between this analysis and the challenges that have faced Christian life in North America for several decades. The three sources of crisis, institutional, intellectual and moral, are also at work in the life of the church. The institutional crisis is the failure of church leaders to grasp the ways institutions are socially constructed systems. The institutions of denominational life framed in the early part of the 20th century are no longer tenable. This has nothing to do with theological traditions or ecclesiology, but how those traditions are socially constructed in a particular time and place. Nor is this crisis reason to enter the silly season of debunking institutions. The very nature of our sociality requires us to form institutions. This crisis is the failure of leaders to grasp the way institutions are socially constructed in and for the social imaginaries of a particular time and place. Inevitably leaders became too comfortable within systems they could manage and control and in which they had security and success.

The intellectual crisis is profound. At precisely the time when the church needs local and academic theologians able to re-enter the Tradition to re-imagine Christian narrative in the midst of a radically pluralized culture(s) a significant percentage of denominational and local church leaders are without the training or intellectual frameworks to do this work. As a result much of the current engagement is shaped by platitudes and pragmatisms that prevents the church re-imagining new ways forward in this Heideggarian ‘space’ where it now finds itself. The operative frameworks remain those of modernity — pragmatism (try this it works here) and romantic idealism (I have been to the mountain top and seen the vision (and shape presumably?) of what we need to be). These imaginations remain captive to the forms of modernity from which their authors are claiming to liberate us even while others are seeking to name the new emerging intellectual territory we need to inhabit (see Barry Harvey’s Can These Bones Live? and Greene and Robinson’s Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination as two illustrations). The language of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘missional’ are largely catch-alls and short hand for not having to do the hard work of thinking or entering the Christian tradition or be surprised by the ways the Spirit is at work in the local and the ordinary.

The moral crisis is the most difficult to address because, in Christian circles, moral language is preloaded with notions of guilt and sin. There are many levels to this moral failure and one doesn’t want to make light of its reality. In a culture built on spending, debt and ever expanding pie the notion of ‘growth’ remains at the heart of the North American church. One has to be careful, growth is not wrong; that is not the point. Models of church growth drive too many churches and leaders; not just in terms of seeker driven churches but among missional and emergent leaders whose underlying methods and proposals are new forms of church growth wrapped up in a different language game. The North American church must discover an alternative imagination from growth. It is not that they are so difficult to find; it is that we are so captive to the imagination of success, individuals and need-centered imaginations.

Skidelsky’s article attempts to address the question: Where do we go from here? The next RJ will propose some responses to that question from the perspective of being the church in a ‘metavista’ world of multiple, interacting social imaginaries.