Friday, March 17, 2006

Who's Feeding the Fishdog?

The eminent naturalist, Charles Darwin, once wrote, "In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment." A few years later Herbert Spencer, one of Darwin's colleagues, in his Principles of Biology (1864) coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" as a simplification of this observation. Whether you agree with this or not is irrelevant for the discussion at hand. I would like to accept this statement as true for the time being in order to elucidate a problem I notice in some church & culture literature.

Extrapolating the pith from Darwin's theory, let us imagine that dogs-humanity's best friend-evolved millions of years ago from some primordial, fish-like creature. As the ice age folded into the Mesozoic era and the temperatures in the seas increased, the larger animals of the early Mesozoic gradually began to disappear while smaller animals of all kinds, including lizards, snakes, and perhaps the ancestor mammals to primates, evolved. If Darwin and his intellectual progeny are correct, there would have been a lengthy transition period between the primordial fish and our friendly Canis familiaris. A mommy fish and daddy fish didn't just hook up one night and out popped a school/pack of dogs. There must have been some period of transition as minor genetic adaptations enabled this evolving species to adjust to its host environment. At some point, there must have been a fishdog.
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My question then, as the title of this post indicates, is, "who's feeding the fishdog?" Frost and Hirsch's work is helpful though presumptuous. They seem to assume that static church structures, which have been enjoying the posh-position of Christendom for 1600+ years, will suddenly pivot and become postmodern, indigenous, incarnational communities. It's as if traditional, attractional churches are fish that are noticing their environment is changing and futurists, like Frost and Hirsch, are trying to help those fish become dogs. This ignores the proven fact that church structures change very slowly.

I know that Frost and Hirsch, and Gibbs and Bolger for that matter, have a different audience in mind than the church I currently serve. They are writing for people like me. In keeping with our metaphor, many in my congregation have just begun to notice that the environment is changing. Others have noticed that they are able to breath air, bark and scratch behind their ears in the "world" but are able to swim back into the confines of our hallowed church walls and breath through gills with relative ease. For these fishdogs, I am trying to feed them healthy doses of Bosch, Guder, Newbigin and McLaren in order to sustain them through their evolutionary transition.

Many in my church are just now beginning to take note of "contemporary worship." This is not a criticism; rather, it's an indicator of how patient church leaders need to be with their congregations through this transition. Becoming conversant with postmodern ministry approaches is still to come.

Another thing we need to bear in mind is this. Just like with Darwin and later, Spencer's notion of the survival of the fittest, only those species who are able to adapt to their changing environment pass on the genetic material necessary to enable future generations to survive. True, some species will fail to adapt and will become extinct, but not for many years. As those called to serve in this epochal transition, we must bear this in mind. We do more harm than good when we rush in with a text like Frost and Hirsch's. This is a text for dogs, not fishdogs. Moreover, the rise of postmoderninity and post-Christendom will not mean that one day we will have no more institutional, attractional churches. We still have fish, don't we? Peace.

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