Two Models of Stewarding Church Communities

I have lately found myself wondering if perhaps some of my past writing on the affairs of my home communion, the Presbyterian Church in America, has relied on using Tim Keller's proposed categories for our church in ways that Tim himself did not necessarily embrace.

To explain briefly, Keller's much-cited schema described three particular sub-groups that tend to arise organically within the Reformed or Calvinist tradition. Those groups are:

• Pietists, who tend to be most concerned with the day to day practices of Christian piety and devotion
• Culturalists, who tend to be concerned with what some have called the "creation mandate" and who are keen to see society remade and transformed in response to the preaching of the Gospel
• Doctrinalists, who tend to be concerned with the doctrinal purity of Christian churches

In Keller's account, he is not particularly interested in political advocacy for one faction or another or, indeed, in creating any kind of factionalism in the PCA. He is, rather, seeking to name something that tends to happen over and over again in reformed history and propose a healthy way of responding to that reality. Specifically, Keller argues that since the Reformed tradition tends to organically produce each of these distinct groups, healthy Reformed denominations shouldn't make a point of over-identifying with any one group, but should instead seek to find ways of helping all three to coexist. The only other option, according to Keller, is that denominations would become rigidly committed to one of the three tribes and would therefore implicitly commit itself to regular purges to insure the other blocs are kept out, even as they are organically produced by the faithful ministry of those churches.

That said, because of the relative accuracy of this assessment (even if some do understandably protest that this schema leaves a sort of "high church presbyterian" unacknowledged) it has become easy for people like me to perhaps be over-dependent on it and to interpret events in our communion primarily through this framework, as I have done several times in the past.

More recently, however, I have begun to wonder if I am overly dependent on this framework and if my attempts at analysis have sometimes left out an important factor in my home church's life, but also perhaps in the life of other denominations and networks within American Christianity. Frequently, the divisions within various ecclesial groups in the US can get depicted along a horizontal axis, with the more doctrinalist types tending toward the right and the more culturalist types toward the left, largely because they are more evangelistically minded and more willing to tolerate greater diversity of practice and even a more limited sort of theological diversity than many doctrinalists.

In the PCA of the past, this typically involved imagining someone like Dr. Ligon Duncan as a figure of the doctrinalist side (or, more recently, figures like Kevin DeYoung) with Keller as the quintessential culturalist. But you could very well fill in the names for a similar sort of analysis in the Southern Baptist Convention, the Anglican Church in North America, or Acts 29.

The factor I now suspect that such analysis excludes is, essentially, the question of how one relates to an ecclesial institution. This introduces another split—between what we might stewards and disruptors.

Institutional stewards see ecclesial bodies in the way Athey Keith, one of Wendell Berry's greatest characters, saw his farm:

Over a long time, the coming and passing of several generations, the old farm had settled into its patterns and cycles of work - its annual plowing moving from field to field; its animals arriving by birth or purchase, feeding and growing, thriving and departing. Its patterns and cycles were virtually the farm's own understanding of what it was doing, of what it could do without diminishment. This order was not unintelligent or rigid. It tightened and slackened, shifted and changed in response to the markets and the weather. The Depression had changed it somewhat, and so had the war. But through all changes so far, the farm had endured. Its cycles of cropping and grazing, thought and work, were articulations of its wish to cohere and to last. The farm, so to speak, desired all of its lives to flourish.

Athey was not exactly, or not only, what is called a "landowner." He was the farm's farmer, but also its creature and belonging. He lived its life, and it lived his; he knew that, of the two lives, his was meant to be the smaller and the shorter.

In contrast to this, there is another type of agent in many Christian communities in the US that is not really outside those institutions, as in a completely unaffiliated non-denominational church, but also it tends to relate to those institutions in a way not unlike Troy Chatham's relationship to the farm, as also described in Jayber Crow. These are institutional disruptors:

I (Jayber) know too that (Athey's) principle was always to maintain a generous margin of surplus between his livestock and the available feed, just as between the fertility of his land and his demands upon it.  ‘Wherever I look,’ he said, ‘I want to see more than I need, and have more than I use.’  And this is a principle very different from what would be the principle of (Troy Chatham), often voiced in his heyday: ‘Never let a quarter’s worth of equity stand idle.  Use it or borrow against it.’ ...

Athey said, ‘Wherever I look, I want to see more than I need.’  Troy said, in effect, ‘Whatever I see, I want.’  What he asked of the land was all it had. ...

For Troy, the farm existed as a vehicle for fulfilling his own ambitions and making him something greater than he could otherwise be. So he does still belong to the farm, in some sense, but rather than stewarding the farm with the goal of the farm's ongoing health, he seeks to exploit the farm with the goal of making himself wealthy and respected.

It seems to me one could observe a similar dynamic applied to church communities. It is possible to be a culturalist and an institutionalist. Indeed, Tim Keller is a marvelous example of precisely that. It is also possible to be a doctrinalist and an institutionalist. Both Duncan and DeYoung would be good examples of this approach.

That said, two other possibilities exist: to be a culturalist disruptor or a doctrinalist disruptor. This group will seek to handle church affairs via social media posting or podcasting rather than working through the established channels of our denomination for addressing conflict or disagreement. Some will skirt church rules or policies by following the letter of the law in the most legalistic and wooden way possible while ignoring the obvious intent of the rule or policy. Others will generally tend to move regularly from one church or presbytery or even denomination to another because they are unable to stick in one place long-term or to submit themselves to actually real authority that would limit them in their platform building.

In both cases, the disruptor's behavior demonstrates how they regard the institution: If it can be made to serve as a convenient vessel for their own personal project, they are happy to use it. But if they would have to submit themselves and their own ambitions to that institution... well, that is something they cannot do. Crucially, because it is so easy to read the PCA in terms of culturalist and doctrinalist blocs, it is also easy to miss the fact that in many ways the two types of stewards are actually closer to each other than either is to the disruptor faction ostensibly belonging to their wing of the church.

You could find similar examples quite easily outside of the PCA, I suspect. I can't help being struck by the fact that there are sizable numbers of Southern Baptist leaders who have spent considerable amounts of time publicly attacking their fellow Southern Baptists by name with the goal of discrediting them within the life of the SBC. That some who did this represent the SBC version of culturalists while others are doctrinalist is, of course, precisely the point: The most relevant division in our denominations and networks today might not be doctrinalist v culturalist, but rather institutional stewards v institutional disruptors.

The posture of a disruptor is a kind of wretched blending together of the worst qualities of both non-denominationalism and denominationalism. On the one hand, it says "I want to be influential and powerful in the denomination," while on the other it says, "I will routinely behave in ways that are schismatic and corrosive of trust and fellowship amongst Christian brothers."

The methods themselves are instructive here: If the goal is helping cultivate a healthier and more faithful church, then one would seek to work within existing relationships and existing mechanisms of power within the church—cultivating trust amongst leaders in the church and utilizing the polity to help serve and improve the church.

If, on the other hand, one is simply seeking to make a name for oneself and to use an institution to serve one's own purposes, one would spend a great deal of time posting on social media, podcasting, and operating in other ways largely outside the direct influence or authority of existing churches and largely separate from one's actual job duties as a pastor.

This does also suggest that one of the most important distinctions we can learn to make as we live within local Christian churches and broader denominations or church networks is the distinction between a steward and a disruptor.

How can one tell the difference? Several diagnostic questions spring quickly to mind:

• Does the individual in question submit themselves to an external authority or do they flea from accountability and structure?
• Does the individual tend to bounce around regularly from church to church or denomination to denomination or do they attempt, so much as they can, to be more rooted in specific places or communities?
• How much does the individual post on social media about denominational matters and how do they talk about such things? Does their tone and posture suggest a desire to serve and submit, or a desire to control and dominate?

The good news is that there actually are quite a lot of people who behave more like Athey Keith than Troy Chatham. Their desire is to see their farms, so to speak, prosper and thrive so that one day they can be entrusted to the care of new stewards, who will seek to serve them in the same way. Such service is often quiet, of course, and easily missed. But also it is, like Athey's farming, by far the more fruitful and delightful.