About a month ago I was involved in a friendly but slightly heated conversation about human action. My very good friend was suggesting that the majority of the time, people will make the best possible decision based on the information they have available to them. He argues that this is hard coded in our DNA. He is convinced that this makes the need for participation in a community of faith — or even holding a “personal” faith– unnecessary.

I argued the opposite. Namely, that we continually make poor decisions, even in spite of the best information we have available to us and that more often we follow a script of our dominant culture. I cited as two examples the way we consume food and the way we save money. The majority of people in this country, I argued, continue to eat food that is not healthy and do little or no exercise, even though they know at a basic level that it is not healthy to do so. Likewise, most people do not save money. Rather, the majority actually spend more than they earn and find themselves behind the giant mountain of debt, even though we know this is not a wise decision. I suggest that to pull out of the gravitational pull of that dominant culture, we need to participate in a community that follows an alternative beat.

I bring this up because it touches on part of my own frustration with finding where I fit. I am not only displaced from a traditionally recognized community of faith, but also feeling increasingly disconnected from myself. I am convinced that we are creatures that are shaped by the communities we give ourselves to. I believe at a very deep level that I need church if I want to be a faithful follower of Jesus. But I do not think it is wise to participate in a community of faith that simply reinforces the scripts of the dominant culture.

So, as I am reading through Will and Lisa Samson’s Justice in the Burbs: Being the Hands of Jesus Wherever You Live (emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith), I find myself bouncing between hope and despair. I love the book and I think the Samsons hit the nail on the head and drive it. But I find the book whetting my appetite for a community in my own backyard that takes issues like justice and its role in faith formation seriously. But communities like this are few and far between in my corner of the world. And all of this goes back to reinforcing some convictions that I currently embrace about the current state of the church and what I think would improve things.

But before I jump into that rant, I want to point to two completely unrelated articles that are helping me rethink large pieces of the dream–or at least, re-framing them and giving me a new perspective. The first is an article with predictions about what may lie ahead for Apple’s hold on the music industry with their potent iPod/iTunes cocktail. The article points out that:

Too many people are already ingrained in the iTunes+iPod experience, and for many of them, DRM doesn’t matter. They buy tracks on iTunes and put them on their iPods. As long as iPods control the player market, iTunes will control the download market.

Like eating fast food and overspending our income, our music purchasing habits seem to be scripted by a dominant paradigm. Even though this option is the most proprietary system available and severely limits our choices and options it owns a near monopoly on how people purchase music. But there are some who have been pointing out the problems with systems like these for a long time and they are finally seeing a tipping point on the horizon. Surprisingly, the unavoidable downfall of the music industry will not be the result of a small group of people struggling uphill. Instead, it will be ushered in by a majority downhill battle. ¹

I think there is a lot of interesting things going on here. Certainly the fact that people are not buying into the illusion that there is only one choice–or relatively few choices–available is something that should be celebrated. And it is also an idea that is spreading across disciplines. But the most exciting thing to me is that when ordinary people begin to gather together around counter-cultural ideas and begin practicing things that go against the grain good things happen. One could paraphrase the article above and suggest that much like Apple’s hold on the music distribution model, as long the only visible options for local church are consumer-based, edutainment models that cannot sustain themselves² we will not like the byproduct. On the other hand, if we can find ways to embody and exploit a more excellent way we will find ourselves coasting in a downhill battle.

Let us be very mindful and intentional that we don’t hurt those caught in the undertow or leave wounded in the wake.

1. if the site is down you can find the cached version with numerous links to a ton of great information here. [back]
2. the economic, long-term sustainability of the current church paradigm and the lengths one goes to to defend and justify it is, in my opinion, one of the leading indicators of what script any community of people is really following. [back]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 11:48 pm and is filed under Books..., Ecclesial Dreaming.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.