Almost 20 years ago two students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who were best friends, came from neighboring small towns, and were rooming together during their freshman year would sometimes lock themselves into a study room to yell at each other about theology.
One was Lutheran, you see, and the other was a burgeoning Calvinist. Both were 18-year-old men with somewhat bookish, nerdy inclinations. Shouting at each other about their theological disagreements was a love language of sorts. But when they shouted in their dorm it was apparently disruptive to others on the floor. So they'd find a study room and shout about predestination and uses of the law and sacraments and the other things that Lutherans and Calvinists fight about.
Eventually that friendship led to more friendships. The Calvinist went to Reformed University Fellowship while continuing to room with the Lutheran. When he got married in 2007, the Lutheran was his best man and most of the wedding party was from RUF. When he came back from his honeymoon, he found his roommates and his RUF friends had become friends. Eventually a group of ten of us coalesced, at least eight of whom were fairly involved in the RUF chapter at UNL during those years. (And the Lutheran has long since become Presbyterian.)
Then in 2009 our group of friends had our first summer retreat together—a practice we have continued in almost every year since. These days what started as two friends shouting about theology has become ten friends, all now married, with something like 30 kids across the entire group. We just had our most recent retreat a couple weeks ago, in fact. (The photo in this post is of the yard game Kubb, which is a staple of all our retreats together.)
One of the things that interests and sometimes troubles me is how all this happened. To be a man in your late 30s and possess so many friends one could talk to about anything and go to in an emergency is no small thing. About a month ago one member of the group got married—and the majority of our friend group flew or drove in for the wedding, including several who weren't even in the wedding but just wanted to be there was witnesses. We don't all talk regularly during the year, yet the bond is still strong.
To be sure, we ourselves played a role. We made choices that allowed friendships to take root and to persist. We were also fortunate: Friendship in the good is both a discovery of common loves and a series of choices to work for the other's good, even when they perhaps don't entirely understand that that's what you are doing. We were fortunate in finding those common objects of love very early and, likewise, fortunate in finding in one another a deep sense of loyalty, commitment, and trust which allowed us to persist in friendship even amidst difficulty.
Even so, that only tells a small part of the story. There are other layers to it too.
We had good pastors in our lives—pastors who cared about us, could hold their own with us, and sometimes put us in our place intellectually. We had good churches in town where many of us would also see each other. And we had a series of places in and around campus that were favorite haunts—preferred coffeeshops, restaurants, bookstores, and so on.
What we had, in other words, was an ecosystem made up of various and overlapping institutions in which friendships grew readily. At the heart of it all was the church and the university, but everywhere along the edges one could find other collaborating institutions of various sorts.
We might put it this way: The choices we did make to move toward each other and to persist in friendship were choices which themselves happened in a context. They happened slowly through time spent on the dock at the Mill in the Haymarket—a coffeeshop in downtown Lincoln that has a porch of sorts that was once a loading dock in the early days of the building over a hundred years ago when the district we now call "the Haymarket" was a major fruit and produce market in downtown Lincoln. There were many meals shared at two particular restaurants next to the Mill, and our friend group had an apartment nearby that passed from person to person over a number of years.
Significantly, it wasn't just that the institution created space for our friendships, or that they helped to aim them, as it were. The institutions were also a place of moral and spiritual formation for each of us. Many of us, though not all, were rather rough around the edges. We still are to a degree, but there has been a sharpening and shaping that has continued over the years.
Our classes at the university helped to humble us, making us aware of the immense amount of things we did not know or understand—and seeing the humility of several professors far beyond our own abilities helped to teach us that this would always be true.
There was also the shaping that took place in RUF and at church—the experience of being cared for pastorally, of being challenged, and of being loved. It is not necessarily a bad thing that brainy teenaged men would have loud, unruly arguments about theology, after all—it is indicative of a healthy bit of thumos and passion. But if that thumos is not guided or disciplined or aimed, it becomes ungovernable and the men defined by such ungoverned thumos virtually always come to bad ends. I am grateful that during a season of life when I was at my most vain and hotheaded I had pastors around me who could see my sin and my weakness, love me through it, and call me to something better. All of this was only possible because of RUF and the local church.
What I am saying, I suppose, is that part of the reason I feel as strongly as I do about the health of local institutions is because I myself have been the recipient of their gifts many times over and I desire that those institutions would be able to go on blessing others as they have blessed me. Institutions of various sorts have provided the train tracks on which relationships grew, affections were strengthened, weaknesses were addressed, and good work was done. I want Lincoln to have thriving third places, like those haunts we had in college. I want the university to have professors like the ones we studied with. And I want the RUF chapter and local churches there to be as well-resourced, well-led, and cared for as they were when I was there.
Why wouldn't they be supported in that way? I can think of many reasons: as social skills erode in our smartphone-addicted era, coffeeshops cease to be genuine third places and instead become a soft version of a coworking space. As universities struggle for finances, they will be unwilling to invest as they should in genuinely elite academic work in non-STEM fields. As churches and campus ministries feel the brunt of the great dechurching, they too will have fewer resources and less support.
These are all cultural factors that are now moving with such force and speed that it is unlikely we can slow them; probably we can only attempt to build small good things where we can to try and stem the tide and preserve what can be preserved.
But there is another factor here, as well: One byproduct of living in a low trust moment, such as our own, is the fact that many of us are fully primed to believe the worst of institutional leaders, be they small businesses or churches or nonprofits or, frankly, anything else. Given this inclination toward mistrust it is not surprising that media producers, often working in fairly desperate financial positions themselves, are finding ways to profit off that mistrust and sell it to others.
Viewed sympathetically, media projects working in this space are good and legitimate journalistic endeavors meant to shine a light on corruption or injustice and to aid those who wish to correct that problem. Corruption should be exposed, of course. But also presumptions of corruption should not be normalized or encouraged. In practice what these works can do is provide ordinary people with scripts that teach them how to interpret the behavior of institutional leaders: That pastor said something that made me uncomfortable (maybe it was the Holy Spirit convicting you?), therefore he must be abusive. That pastor quoted Tim Keller favorably, therefore he must be a shepherd for sale. In short, these projects of institutional arson encourage community members in habits and practices that corrode common life because they encourage them to assume the worst of their own leaders and ascribe motivations to them which may or may not even be true. The problem, at bottom, is simply this: Common life is not safe, nor does it necessarily tend toward each individual becoming exactly who they wish to be defined purely by themselves. To live in community is to be obstructed and offended and frustrated and then learning that oftentimes in those offenses and obstructions and frustrations that you were the one at fault. It is, in short, to be confronted by the truth that Eliot spoke of here:
You are not the same people who left that station ...
Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
The common life we experienced through RUF and the church and the university and through many other places besides was a life that forced us to recognize that we needed to change, that we could not be the people who had once left that station, nor were we now the people who would one day disembark.
What is troubling about institutional arsonist media is that in its attempt to spotlight genuine abuses it often overreaches and consumes many good people and good places that unfortunately found themselves in the blast radius. And when those good institutions and good leaders are gone, how will the next generation have that experience that we did? Who will tell them the things we needed to hear? Who will walk with them as they learn and grow?
I cannot speak to the motives of the people who produce these works, of course. But I can see the ramifications by simply looking around and observing: Sometimes the sin of one institutional leader becomes a template that is then retroactively applied to anyone unfortunate enough to slightly resemble that failed leader. In other cases, the habits of suspicion and cynicism have caused us to leap to conclusions, ascribing the least charitable motives and not even pausing to consider if we might be wrong.
Healthy institutions, above all else, require trust. I am grateful that in my formative years that trust still held. I hope that by the time my kids are the age I was in those vital years that they will be as fortunate as I was. But that hope now hangs from rather slender threads.