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“The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man’s” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first time I heard this quote, it rattled me big time. The significance of what is being said here is profound. From a ministry-focused perspective, this is particularly weighty, let me explain why. I’ve had the chance to travel quite a bit and during those travels I’ve visited churches all around the world. Coming from a pentecostal/charismatic background, most of the churches I’ve visited have been part of this tradition. Now, one thing that typifies this whole movement is this: imitation.
Imitation plays out in two ways during the establishment of a pentecostal church: the imitation of culture and the imitation of eminent church practice. Lets discuss the first. Contemporary churches look very closely at culture to understand perceived human need. This is a fatal mistake. Let me explain: my understanding of culture is that it is a social apparatus constructed in order to meet the demands of the population at large. For example: people desire faster, easier communication with larger and more diverse audiences. Culture therefore forms itself according to meeting this need through creating social networking, video conferencing, VoIP etc, fundamentally transforming the way people interact with each other.
What happens is that churches then look to culture to understand what people like in order to attract congregants, and in this example create cool websites, podcasts, videos, facebook pages etc to communicate with their congregation. Here’s the problem: culture almost always gets it wrong. Keyword: “perceived” human need. If we define culture, using Robert Redfield, as “the shared understandings made manifest in act and artefact”, or as Clifford Geertz states “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols”, then one needs little convincing to understand that our culture is in a crisis of legitimacy. The individualism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, hyper-reality, obesity, vanity, erotomania, self-centredness and the epidemics of stress, overwork, suicide, waste and indebtedness of our post- modern culture are creating a pattern that is destroying our world.
So why would the church ever need to look to a lost and dying culture for answers that have already been given to them? For instance, people don’t need faster, easier communication with larger and more diverse audiences, they need authentic relationships, to be part of a genuine community. This quote sums it up: “People don’t need enormous cars, they need respect. They don’t need closets full of clothes, they need to feel attractive and they need excitement, variety and beauty. People don’t need electronic equipment; they need something worthwhile to do with their lives. People need identity, community, challenge, acknowledgement, love, and joy. To try to fill these needs with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to real and never-satisfied problems. The resulting psychological emptiness is one of the major forces behind the desire for material growth” – Donella Meadows
It may just be that being ‘irrelevant,’ offering what has always been our strong point, an ‘alternative,’ may just be what those seeking an authentic life are really looking for. To follow Christ and to live out a genuine faith means, more often than not, confronting the patterns of this culture and living out the radical life that Jesus has called His followers to live. Christianity is not just a radical message; it’s a radical lifestyle. It can’t just be believed, it has to be lived. It challenges and confronts the way we consume, the way we interact, what we drive, where we live, what we say, what we eat, what we wear, what we buy, and whom we love. Behind the veneer of plastic promises and counterfeit dreams, lies a culture in desperate need of redemption, not imitation.
I’ll leave it at that today. In the next blog we will discuss the second kind of imitation: eminent church practice. So stay tuned…
[...] is a continuation of Imitation: Part 1, where we discussed the imitation of culture. We’ll now be continuing the discussion on the [...]
[...] in well with the recent posts on imitation, part one and part [...]