The Participatory Church

I stumbled across this blog post by Steve Knight over at Knightopia. In it, he quotes Eric Weiner in a recent New York Times op-ed piece:

“We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones among us. And for all of us.”

Knight argues that this movement is already here, with such people as “Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Rob Bell, Shane Claiborne, and Peter Rollins (among others)” leading the way.  Going on, Knight challenges worship leaders across denominations to consider this idea of “participation” seriously, pointing out that many churches do things to people rather than inviting them to participate in the doing.

I’m a bit torn by all of this.  Part of me sees the Church throughout history, at its most faithful and life-giving, as just this sort of thing: engaging people, inviting them, making room for them, being “interactive” and “experimental.”  In other words, there’s nothing new under the sun in his assessment—this is what the Church, at its finest, simply does.  Good liturgy is truly “the work of the people”: it is participatory, interactive, experimental.  Good liturgy also flows into mission, sending people out into the world to be Christ—how much more interactive can you get than people feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, etc.?

On the other hand, part of me disagrees with the assessment of Knight and one of his sources, Dr. Bolger that we live in a “participatory” culture shaped by the internet.  At least in my experience—and therefore this is purely anecdotal evidence—the context of my ministry has been rarely a culture of participation.  It’s more like pulling teeth to get people involved.  It is a small fraction of people who actually sing in worship (assuming they even show up for worship) and truly interact with one another in the ways that would truly transform the world were they to do so.

In the book Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah writes about Joe Gorman, a dedicated volunteer in Joe’s community of Suffolk:

"As a traditional American patriot, Joe Gorman deeply cherishes the American ideal of freedom, even though in many ways it is precisely the ideal of freedom that makes his dream of a united Suffolk family impossible to achieve. The success of Suffolk's family spirit depends, as he has discovered, on the willingness of a few people like himself to volunteer freely to sustain community life with their own efforts. Yet he recognizes that very few people in Suffolk are willing to undertake the burdens of sharing community life, and that a man like himself is therefore likely to become exhausted, repeatedly finding himself the only volunteer."

The sort of participatory culture required for the Church to engage the world in a “ministry of reconciliation,” as the apostle Paul wrote, requires the sort of hands-on, in-the-trenches work that the internet culture tries to avoid: people shop online so they don’t have to deal with real people in a store; people give offerings to missions so they don’t have to volunteer at the soup kitchen; congregations hire full-time staff to do the work of ministry that would otherwise require the coordinated efforts of laity.  In other words, the culture of participation needed by the Church is, I would contend, incompatible with the participatory culture shaped by internet and technology, one characterized by privatization..

To summarize: I think the Church, at it’s best, is precisely what Weiner wants—straightforward, unencumbered, intuitive, interactive, experimental, participatory.  It has always been that in one form or another.  But the culture around is is not one that can support the sort of corporate work ethic that the Church requires, a disparity that I suspect will only continue to worsen.

Perhaps you have a different take on the issue.  If so, please share it!