We don’t shy away from challenging theological inquiry here in the Oikonomia Network. That’s why we were intrigued when our longtime community leader Dean Blevins came to us about a new book: The Church after Innovation by Andy Root of Luther Seminary. That title may startle some in the ON community, but Blevins convinced us to take a closer look.
Blevins teaches ministerial entrepreneurship (among other things) at Nazarene Theological Seminary, and he’s shared with our community how entrepreneurship brings flourishing to communities at Karam Forum, in an ON webinar and in this newsletter. So nobody knows better the importance of entrepreneurial innovation to Christian ministry in the world – and why we need to keep ourselves theologically honest as we pursue it.
That’s where Root has a word we can benefit from. Like Chris Armstrong in his EWP Talk on how the faith and work movement can secularize the church if we’re not careful about it, Root points out that a lot of church and denominational bodies are uncritically assimilating cultural scripts for “innovation.” Instead of the church transforming the world’s idea of what innovation ought to be, the world is often transforming our idea of what the church ought to be.
Here in the ON, we’re as committed as ever to empowering people in the economy to use freedom in Christlike ways to cultivate flourishing for their communities, especially through innovation and entrepreneurship. But for the sake of both theological integrity and practical effectiveness, we have to interrogate the cultural scripts we are handed for things like “innovation” and “entrepreneurship.” Orthodoxy is permanently subversive of all worldly ideologies – and nothing will cause our economic efforts to wither more quickly than a captivity to pagan standards of what economic freedom is for and how we are to use it.
So we asked Blevins to interview Root about his book, and we think you’ll agree there’s a lot to chew on here! A few selected highlights from the interview appear below. And members of Karam Fellowship can read an excerpt of Root’s new book elsewhere in this month’s ON newsletter.
On how this book continues an ongoing line of inquiry:
And it really felt like for the last decade, but in a pretty intense way in the last three or four years, across Protestantism there’s been kind of “innovation fever.” Innovation has just popped up everywhere, from my own school, my own seminary that I work at, to congregations, to all sorts of denominations that I visit, and denominational leaders, to even camps. And then, of course, endowments and funding agencies. Everyone’s kind of talking about innovation, and I guess I’m just kind of the weird person who wants to know: All right, what are we really talking about here? And what’s at stake? Part of the underlying emphasis of the five books [I’ve written] is that – following Charles Taylor and others – there are certain ways that our imaginations have, and particularly moral frameworks that get infiltrated into, or come into, our imaginations without us really knowing them. There are all sorts of unthought realities. And so, this is really an exploration, a thought experiment if you will, on: What are some of the unthought realities, or what are some of the moral horizons, that get brought into our innovation fever, and what are we really talking about in innovation? Where did it really come from? And why is it everywhere?
On the secularization of the Reformation’s vocational legacy:
Part of the devotional life coming out of the Reformation was: How you worked now mattered. It deeply mattered. And that’s not to say it didn’t matter in the medieval period, but it wasn’t so tied to God’s economy. As Charles Taylor says, there was a choreography of people living at different speeds during the medieval period. So that didn’t mean work was equalized under God. Some people really worked for God. They were the praying class who spent most of their time in monasteries, but the rest of the laborers were just to support – in some ways, we’re just the support for that praying class. And of course there were others who protected the realm, and actually, at times, killed for God, and they were the knight and others.
But the Reformation really equalizes all work. Luther and then Calvin both say, you know, what you do at work really matters, and you do this before God. The metaphor I use is that from Protestant forms of believing in God and believing that you’re living under God’s precept, God’s commands, that belief filters out into how we work.
But something kind of crazy happened in this secular age, something we should be aware of, which is a certain form of work has now backflowed back into the church, and has started to qualify what’s good ministry. So this certain form of work, that’s now had this long history of becoming disconnected from God, is filtering back in. And we’re saying, the best pastor has to be an innovative pastor, that we have to really think about our churches as entrepreneurial. And again, I don’t want to be a opposed to that! But I want us to be aware that this comes with all sorts of different secular forms.
What I try to trace at the beginning of the book is that capitalism, for good or for ill, fundamentally has a contradiction within it. And just a little bit of work historically shows that. I mean, it’s a fundamental contradiction that the people of God’s free grace would feel like we have to work really hard. The Protestant work ethic comes out of free grace. Works don’t matter! That’s a weird contradiction that works there.
And the way you would balance that contradiction is that you worked really hard and you were a priest. Now, we were all priests – the priesthood of all believers. And that was balanced by, you were doing this before God. But how that gets secularized, and that contradiction of capitalism gets balanced outside of direct engagement with God, with direct consciousness that you’re doing this in obedience to God, is really interesting.
On broadening the church’s perspective of what counts as “creativity” and “innovation”:
I want us to be aware of the way money can even function as God in a certain sense, which of course the biblical texts been very aware of and warn us about. That leads to this final chapter, where I want us to pivot away from trying to be these Silicon-Valley-lite centers of innovation, to think what it would mean to create schools of poetry – which does have a certain kind of innovative, creative quality to it!
But what’s ultimately really significant about the poetry piece is, it becomes about epiphanies with otherness, and particularly forms people to think about how they might encounter one another, and encounter God, as other.
And that does take language, and it does take a certain form of creativity. But it ultimately takes me out of myself. I’m not trying to be this creative, singular self. I’m trying to, almost, get out of my own way. So I can be pulled out of myself, to have an encounter with something outside of me.
And the example I use is, these guys – who would be considered innovative, creative people – in the UK, who came up with this process called “PEEL,” of poetry with young people, that gets them to write poems about someone and take a photo, a portrait, of someone. But it’s a real reversal of the “selfie culture,” where it becomes about my expression. They go through this long, five-day process of really meeting and knowing someone and seeing them. And there’s a kind of theological dynamic to what it means to really hear the other, what it means to really see the other, which is ultimately what I’m trying to call the church to never forget.
And so, let’s innovate, let’s be entrepreneurs, but let’s always have that be about otherness, and an encounter with our neighbor, who positions us to encounter a living God.
