I just stared reading The Great Giveaway by David Fitch last night.  I just read through his blog as well.  I am very excited, very.  Maybe I haven’t read enough McLaren or other ‘post-moderns’, but I am glad of not doing so.  These thoughts that Chris and I wrestle with come from our own conversations and internal conversations with God.  So when I stumble upon a book like this or a blog like Fitch’s, I realize I am not going mad or completely alone in my heretical thoughts.  It gives me hope that I am on the right path to rediscovering what God wants his church to look like, to be doing.  Not what type of building it is housed in, or what type of entertainment it provides itself (read: programming and worship). 

I initially purchased this book from the Allelon bookstore, when they had a 50% off sale.  It was the sub-title that caught my attention, honestly.  This was back in the spring and the book has sat on my dresser, along with 30 other books I have/need/want to read for class and leisure since then.  Yesterday, I accompanied my mom to the emergency room to be with my grandmother and grabbed this book on the way out of the door in a random response to recent conversations with Chris (more on those in another post).  I flipped through it briefly while waiting, but didn’t start reading until last night.  I mention this because I don’t know how I’m going to respond to the book as a whole.  If the introduction is anything like the rest of the book, then ‘favorable’ will be an understatement.

The entire title is The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch Organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism, and other Modern Maladies.  You have to admit that sounds somewhat subversive.

OK, so I want to throw out some quotes from the introduction so you can see why I’m excited to read the rest of the book.  This is from pg. 13:

…[T]he main culprit in this “giveaway” is evangelicalism’s complicity with modernity.  For it is our own modernism that has allowed us to individualize, commodify, and package Christianity so much that the evangelical church is often barely distinguishable from other goods and services providers, self-help groups, and social organizations that make up the landscape of modern American life.

I think you can surmise that there was some resonating within my thoughts when I read this part.  While I do not necessarily agree with Fitch’s idea that evangelicalism can be saved, needs to be saved, or even should be saved, that comes more from me withholding a decision, than wanting to throw everything out and start over.

Like myself, Fitch started to question the relationship between evangelicalism and modernism on pg. 15:

…[C]ould I still be evangelical and dump modernity?  …[C]ould I still minister within evangelical churches yet unload the scientific manipulations to defend the Bible, the overstated attempts to make Christianity intellectually attractive to the society at large, the obsessions with decisions for Christ and megachurches, the vigorous rationalizations conducted in the name of individualist objectivity, that evangelicals seem so attached to?

Think back to the Scopes Trial.  Or look up circular reasoning.  Or any other ’scientific’ method of proving our faith.  Somehow that Genesis is literal and can be proven.  All of these things take away from the beauty that should be our faith.  If we can prove it, is it faith any longer?  The problem is trying to be culturally relevant when we should be set apart in juxtaposition to the culture of the day.  I find myself wondering if Fitch is going to address this or, if in his defense of evangelicalism, try to morph evangelism into the post-modern world.  He talks about those who have left the evangelicalism on pg. 25,

I have noticed on the one hand a propensity to react against evangelicalism’s modernity with versions of Christianity that look similar to to classic Protestant liberalism.  On the other hand, some emergent and/or self-described postmodern churches look like more extreme versions of self-expressivist evangelicalism.  They repeat the drive of earlier evangelicalism itself to be new, innovative, free from history, and experiential.  I fear if we are not careful, all of this could lead to the same self-indulgent accommodative Christianity we lament today.

I mentioned this before on Josh Brown’s website.  That emergent is just a repackaging of the same old, same old.  While I don’t necessarily want to see evangelicalism thrown out, I still don’t think it can be revived.  Maybe Fitch can convince me otherwise.  But like Donald Miller’s story of creating a confessional booth for the church in Blue Like Jazz, there needs to be a lot of apologizing to do and a lot of admitting we got it wrong.

Pg. 17:

Many no doubt will counter, saying, “Evangelicalism is alive and well in North America.  Compared to our Protestant mainline and even Roman Catholic brethren, our churches are bursting at the seams.”  But in response I ask, “Are megachurches the sign of vitality in the church?”

Other questions along this line:

…[I]s what we are witnessing in the evangelical megachurches today what it means to be the church?

…if we have shuffled the same amount of people from smaller local parishes into megachurch buildings and become more efficient by doing so, is this necessarily the sign of church vitality we should be looking for?

I love that last question.  The comparison can be made between Wal-Mart and the megachurch.  Wal-Mart eats up all of the local business as people flock to the easiest and cheapest form of shopping.  So to do megachurches deplete the smaller churches of their livelihood and mission within the community.  All of the sudden people look around (hopefully) and see how devastating the convenience was to their community.

Finally, his thesis on pg. 17-18:

…[T]he main thesis of this book is that evangelicalism by virtue of its marriage to modernity has not only failed to engage the current cultural shifts of postmodernity, it has indeed structured our churches out of meaningful existence.  Because evangelicals articulate salvation in such individualist terms and because modern science and individual reason carry such authority for evangelicals, we do not need the body of Christ for daily victorious Christian existence.  In some ways, frankly, we can do without it.  We don’t need the church to live salvation because we have personal salvation augmented by reason, science, and immediate (charismatic) experience.  The church is left with nothing else to do but distribute information, goods, and services to individual Christians. (emphasis mine)  …[T]he church in essence is left to be a sideshow to what God is doing for, in, and through individuals.

…[E]vangelicals are prone to farm out the functions of the church whenever it is more efficient.

…[E]vangelicals are prone to borrow concepts and definitions of what we are to do and be from society at large as opposed to engaging these things critically out of who we are as the “called out people” of Jesus Christ.  Science and technology, marketing and advertizing are therefore all modern wonders given to us to do things more efficiently.

…[O]ur churches have quit being the church…

…[O]ur local churches rarely function as organic local bodies of Christ.

…[O]ur people look more and more like secular Americans as opposed to Christians.

In essence, evangelicalism has portioned off the tasks of being the church to modernity and in the process quit becoming the the body of Christ in North America.

Nice, huh?

-mike