The Society of St Anne's and the Work of Repair

This is a rough manuscript of my talk given at Covenant Seminary for their Francis Schaeffer Institute lecture series.

In thinking about Gavin's comments in his talk about the importance of kindness, I'm reminded of a story I heard from a L'Abri worker who had been at an event Dr. Schaeffer did with Bishop Pike of the Episcopal Church in the late 1960s not long before Pike's death. By this time Pike's reputation as the John Shelby Spong or Barth Ehrman of his day was quite well established, so Schaeffer knew quite well who he was debating and what the stakes were. Yet after the debate when the L'Abri worker, then only a young woman who had only just begun what became a long career with L'Abri, was speaking with Pike, she was struck by Pike's comment to her, so much so that she remembered it 40 years later and was able to relay it to a number of students at Rochester L'Abri. It was a short conversation, but Bishop Pike looked at her and said "I've debated tons of evangelicals. That man is the first one who treated me like a person."

As that story suggests, Schaeffer leaves behind an example for us of how we can hold together a robust and uncompromising commitment to truth while also being people of kindness and generosity. And I think being able to hold that together is going to be vitally important for us in the years to come.

I'm also thinking about an experienced I had as a student at L'Abri: One of the workers was asking for our help organizing some things in her basement. We went downstairs, saw some old family photo albums, and started thumbing through them while we waited for her to come down. We found pictures of their family and their life in Switzerland at the Swiss L'Abri when their kids were young. To be sure, some of it was comically idyllic: Small children running in flowery meadows backdropped by the Swiss Alps. But so much of what we saw was ordinary joy and contentment and delight in their life together. I remember looking at some of the students with me and seeing something almost like hunger in their eyes as they looked at those photos. And I think that sort of joy in ordinary common life amongst friends and family is something else we can take from L'Abri that will be vitally important for us in the years to come.

For much of this talk, I actually just want to develop a picture for you of the specifics of the challenge facing the church now. To do that, I want to draw on work from two zoomer writers who I have learned a great deal from—the British writer Freya India (who to the best of my knowledge is not a Christian) and the New York writer Stiven Peter. Together they offer a striking account of the breakdown we are facing along with the opportunity it creates for the church.

To start, I want to try to summarize what I think has shifted in recent years, creating the condition that Paul Kingsnorth has called "the void," with a particular focus on how that has shaped America's young people.

Very briefly, young women in America witnessed Me Too along with the many events that shaped America's racial discourse, from Trayvon Martin to George Floyd, and seemed to come to two conclusions. These events created a profound awareness of their own vulnerability. I will never forget a conversation I had with a young woman who had dechurched after witnessing her church blame a pastor's wife for the pastor's decades of infidelity. "If they could do it to her, I knew they could do it to me," were her words. The growing prevalence of online porn amongst young men, including a trend toward increasingly violent sexual behavior from America's young men, was another factor here. This consciousness of vulnerability produced two outcomes. First, politics existed as a means to advocate for the weak, for victims, for the disadvantaged, and so on. This has meant that American women, particularly young women, have grown gradually more progressive in their politics. Second, they themselves needed to pursue professional success as a way of guaranteeing their own personal and financial independence. "There is something better than your marriage: you," could be the mantra here, loosely adapted from the work of Iowa writer Lyz Lenz, who has written a book in praise of divorce.

Meanwhile, American young men have grown up consistently hearing that they are a threat and being treated as if they are a threat, even when there is no cause or basis for doing so. Moreover, the response to the spirit and energy of young boys in America has too often been to diagnose, medicalize, and medicate their behavior. Additionally, because the American economy increasingly presupposes a college degree as access to a living wage, many young men have felt trapped, as if the only way to success is to spend more time in a classroom chasing yet another credential, all while feeling as if the credentialing institutions regard them with some level of mistrust and fear. This creates a deep sense of frustration and resentment as many young men simply desire an outlet for their own sense of agency and strength and yet they feel cut off or alienated from the socially accepted outlets and thus sense a need to chart their own path.

This, then, is the void experienced by many American young people: Men and women alike feel a profound sense of alienation and even anger, often they assign the blame for their frustration to the opposite sex, and then they separate in predictable ways.

That's my summary. Here is how India and Peter discuss the void. We'll begin with Freya India:

If we feel anxious today we are advised to analyse our past and problems and relationships, rarely our own character. We are asked what would make us happy, never what would make us honourable. We are told to love ourselves, with little care for how we conduct ourselves. We are reminded to find self-respect and self-esteem, forgetting that these things are earned. Self-development is more about ice baths and breathwork than becoming a better person. Living authentically is more about buying products. So much talk about mental health and so little about morality—how we orient our lives, our private code of conduct, whether we even have an overarching sense of good guiding us.

Nowadays we’ve forgotten the word morals and replaced it with boundaries. Boundaries, a popular term in therapy, basically mean the lines we draw in relationships to define what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. In a new romantic relationship, for example, you first need to set boundaries. Boundaries can “be anything, include anything, and change depending on the person/situation/time.” “All that matters is that they feel good to you”! In other words there’s no common moral ground anymore so we are each left to make up our own arbitrary standards, present them to our partners, and hope they find some reason to respect them. We can’t base it on our morality, that’s judgemental, we can’t base it on God, we’ll get laughed at, so instead we base it on our mental health or happiness or some childhood trauma, which makes it feel like an us problem. And we’ve created this messed-up situation where the person in a relationship with a stronger moral instinct often ends up feeling guilty, or seeming the most insecure.

She continues:

But our culture fails to give young people clearer moral guidance, I think, for fear of imposing. Parents are our best friends now, they don’t want to nag us about little things like right and wrong. Friends don’t tell each other how to behave. That’s not education’s job. Therapists don’t want to overstep the line. Some might say something vague about values but won’t dare to suggest what those should be, and probably celebrate whatever we offer. So if you’re young and anxious and looking for actual adult guidance you’ll usually get something like do what makes you feel good, you know yourself best, you do you! And the anxiety gets worse. What do I want? Why do I want that? Who am I?

And the problem is, when you don’t pass moral values onto your children, the world does it for you. It imposes its own values. Values that are ever-changing. Progressive values that endlessly evolve. Sexual values that only become more permissive. Corporate values, consumer values, whatever suits the market. The adults around us stayed lovingly neutral but the world isn’t neutral. Adverts are designed to affect what we value; influencers are there to influence. Think of traditional morality what you like, but we tore away at it because we didn’t want to be constrained, we didn’t want to be controlled—and now we’re free! Free to be exposed to billions of adverts telling us what to believe. Free to be lectured by faceless companies on what is right and wrong. Free to consume constant information, to access every possible worldview, to get muddled about even basic morality. Is cheating always wrong? Is it okay if he betrayed me since we weren’t exclusive yet? Wait what if we were exclusive but not yet official? Do I deserve to feel hurt then? Who knows!

What India describes is a variant of C. S. Lewis's old line about "castrating and bidding the geldings be fruitful." We cut people off from sources of meaning, belonging, and transcendence—and then told them to go create their own meanings, and when they found that this was hard and thankless and miserable they had nothing left to return to. This also calls to mind the Wendell Berry poem featured in the opening minutes of Look and See: "Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now."

Now here is how Peter describes it—and note how the church's presence in the story has shifted in only the last several years:

Growing up, I attended a megachurch of around 4000 people, most of whom were predominantly working-class Hispanics. The Church, though situated in the heart of Brooklyn-Queens, functioned like any megachurch you can find in America: a three-song worship set of contemporary music, followed by a 20-30 minute inspirational message for a roughly middle-class audience to have faith, trust God, and follow their purpose. This is the Church in America that I know. This is the Church where I grew up, found community, volunteered, and stayed. When my high school education put me in the ranks of the secular elite, I stayed. When I became Reformed in 2014, and my theology put me squarely at odds with everything I was taught, I stayed.

Even when I started going to college, which uprooted me and left me free to do what I wished, I not only stayed but increased my volunteering. I stayed despite undergoing a number of personal changes, which could have driven anyone to not attend Church because at the end of the day, that Church was my family. Before any theological disagreement, philosophy of ministry disagreement, or even political disagreement, the small community of friends I had was there for me, and I was there for them. My belonging, dwelling, and living were rooted in my rhythms with them. Going to parks after Church, getting food after a Wednesday night prayer service, impromptu visits to a couples’ home – they all show a way of life structured around enjoying God’s people. I treasured the organic, unstructured, but shared time in between Sundays. The text in the middle of the day to ask how I was doing did more to reinforce my commitment to the Church and the Church’s commitment to me than any sermon ever could. These were my people. We did life together. I was a cage-stage Calvinist, and this was my generic megachurch. They may not have read Bavinck or know any songs pre-CCM, but they loved me. I did not know life without them.

But that life dissolved when COVID came. The lockdowns in New York shut down churches for over a year. The Church, undergoing a change of leadership, leaned into flashier online productions while neglecting care for the community. After a few months and many conversations with my future fiancée, whom I met at this Church, we decided to leave. While we eventually found another Church that we would faithfully attend, many of our peers stopped going to Church altogether. Others I know casually church-hop, but still haven’t committed to a single body. COVID turned everyone inward, disrupting the way of life that kept me in Church, keeping everyone concerned with their own personal success, and yet starving for meaning. They are de-churched, trying to navigate life where the Church isn’t essential but is either an inconvenience or an afterthought. For some, that meant a life centered in politics, but for most, it became the acquisition of personal peace and affluence.

In another essay, he explained the problem this way:

Fundamentally, Culture operates at the pre-discourse level. When I extend my hand to reach out to you, you don't think I'm attacking you. You know immediately what to do — you reach out and shake my hand, because that is how we greet each other in the West. It's just what we do; we were socialized into it. It just feels natural. When we wake up in the morning, we don't think about whether or not we'll go outside with clothes on. We just put them on because that is just what we do. Culture makes these behaviors common sense and effortless. Culture provides the map by which we navigate our lives.

Part of Culture's necessity comes from our biological deficiency. We come out of the womb needing to be specialized. Birds come out the womb knowing how to fly. Fish come out the womb knowing to swim. But we come out of the womb needing help from the world around us on how to talk, learn, and live. Human institutions — family, religion, civic life, etc — supplement our biological insufficiency. The matrix of these institutions forms a culture, which provides us with a set of well-defined parameters in navigating the world. Culture gives us a sense of continuity. Culture allows us to take our social world for granted. Culture gives us the general script to live our lives. We are left to fill in the details.

However, the problem of modern society is that there is no script anymore. German sociologist Arnold Gehlen coined the term deinstitutionalization to describe the process of the receding of institutions underwriting our social world. What occurs in the background, i.e. what we have been socialized to take as natural, now becomes the subject of deliberation.

This, then, is the void: Everything you do in life is basically a game of choose-your-own adventure. Everything you do in the world is effectively molding a kind of play-doh for grown ups, as you attempt to manipulate and shape inert reality to suit your desires—whatever those are, if you can even recognize them or name them or feel confident they are actually your desires. Meaning and belonging dissolve in an ether of infinite choice, which is simply a life of paralysis and slavery.

But, Peter wisely notes, this creates an opportunity as well for churches who seek to repair the ruins of culture—but if we are going to do that, we have to actually recognize the degree of the problem and respond to that, not to what the problem was 25 or 50 years ago.

The Church’s task, then, is not to simply integrate itself with modern American life, marketing itself as one lifestyle choice among many. Nor is it to retreat from the world. The Church’s call is to repair the remains of modern life. The U.S. is aching for a different way of life. Only the Church can offer that alternative. The Church must engage in a grand political project. She must reform a people accustomed to consumption. The Church must see itself as the source and center of cultural renewal. She must take responsibility for resolving the atomisation we all experience because no one else will. Consequently, the Church should think of cultural engagement less through cognitive, propositional, and “winsome” terms, and more towards an approach that prioritizes making Church essential to communal life. The Church that hosts community fairs and car shows is doing cultural repair. The Church that models strong, healthy families, which encourage women to pour into each other, for men to sharpen one another, and for both to have more children than they can afford is waging a culture war. The Church that has its families cheerfully open their homes cultivates commitment to one another through thick and thin is conducting a cultural insurgency.

These practices, emblematic of classic Christian hospitality and morality,  threaten the regime of modern life. The Church is in a culture war, but it must wage it not through incendiary or even winsome rhetoric but at the level of embodied practice. To be sure, the Church wages this war first with the ordinary means of grace: the preaching of the Word and administration of the sacraments. These means, then, cultivate a renewed and abundant life, turning us outward to be builders and defenders of the common good. The Church’s call to discipleship in a crumbling America means modeling, by example, a comprehensive alternative way of living.  

He continues:

In a word - my generation needs a culture. We do not know how to flirt, date, parent, or even grow up. We have no role models. Popular lyrics for my generation include, "Today, I'm thinkin' about the things that are deadly. Like I wanna drown, like I wanna end me" and "I'm so insecure, I think / That I'll die before I drink." How does Christianity minister to this mood? It means showing the way. It means being the role models of communal life. It means offering people a way to live that's grand enough for everyone to participate.

The posture of repair attunes the Church to its need to minister and preserve a society on the verge of breaking down. The Church's rhetoric in other models is blind to the Culture's great need for leadership, character, and vision. Instead of having a defensive or even triumphalist posture, repair taps into what Christians are best at doing: helping those in need. Our Culture does not give guidance on how to interact with the opposite sex.  The Church should aid in modeling romance, flourishing marriages, and fulfilling family life.  Zero-child households are becoming the norm. The Church, in response, should be saying, “Here is how you date. Let us help you. Here is how we've married. Let us help you. Here is how we've parented, let us help you." Our Culture is marked by profound loneliness. The Church should model generous hospitality and deep commitment to the community. Our Culture does not know how to have hope in times of adversity. The Church should model suffering and perseverance. No one else is going to repair these institutions. Only the Church can.

Reading this, I can't help thinking of the depiction of St Anne's in C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength. The community described lives at a rural English manor, one which sounds rather like the English L'Abri house as I think about it now, and they are seeking to preserve the good life in the face of crumbling society and a growing technocratic threat posed by a research institution called the NICE which is taking over British society.

The name St Anne's comes from St Anne, who church tradition says is the mother of Mary, the mother of Christ, thus even the name itself evokes something of fruitfulness and divine favor. And the life at St Anne's is ordinary: vegetable gardening, caring for animals (who sometimes wander into the house to hilarious effect), offering hospitality. And the offer of hospitality is real: It's possible for outsiders to enter into the community and participate in much, if not all, of its life. There is a touching tribute to Lewis's old teacher Kirkpatrick here in the form of the Scottish skeptic MacPhee, who is not a Christian but hates the NICE and so supports the work at St Anne's and is welcomed into it. Over time, this ordinary faithfulness bears fruit, as God providentially acts in the world and the community at St Anne's is lifted up and its way of life is vindicated.

In closing, let's return to Dr. Schaeffer. Here is how Peter quotes him in one of his essays,

Renewal begins by inviting people to Church, but for it to continue it must model the life we are all starving for. Want the dechurched to come back, invite them to Church. Want them to stay, invite them into your life. Resisting the rot of individualism begins with each of us. I can not put it better than Schaeffer:

Don’t start with a big program. Don’t suddenly think you can add to your church budget and begin. Start personally and start in your home. I dare you. I dare you in the name of Jesus Christ. Do what I am going to suggest. Begin by opening your home for the community.

The Church the U.S. needs is the Church willing to take Schaeffer’s dare. It’s the Church that sees, in all the division, an alienated people starving for a center to life. It’s the Church that opens its doors and says, “we don’t have much, but if you let us, we want to walk with you.” It’s the Church that is willing to do the hard, messy work of real love. Ultimately, it’s the Church that takes seriously Jesus' words, “By this, all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35)

This is the church, I think, that can welcome young men and women who have become fatigued by the void and are desperate for something else, something better. In adopting this approach, I think we honor the man for whom this event is named, but more importantly we honor the God who called and saved him and has done the same for us.