In a previous posts I wrote about Andrew Root’s pre-pandemic insights on the Church which seemed to me to be deeply prophetic. Not long after my post he released a new book called Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology For A Secular Age. I ordered it right away. This is such an important book for our time and I can’t recommend it highly enough. I’ve decided to review it here and hope you find the review helpful. In my view, this is a must read for anyone involved in ministry.
The danger in starting a review by acknowledging an author’s rigorous academic engagement is that you lose readers almost immediately. Stick with me, though, because two things are true of this book simultaneously. First, it’s hugely accessible. Second, it engages a number of important scholars without losing that accessibility. This is not merely because Root is a great writer (he is), but because his writing itself demonstrates what he is seeking to accomplish with his writing. His writing, and not just his ideas, are a kind of pedagogy. Towards the end of the book in footnote, Root writes that “when worked out…ministry always has precedence over theology; the minister or pastor has precedence over the theologian.”1 This is a rather shocking claim, perhaps even a dangerous one, given the divide we sometimes see between the Church and the Academy. But Root is a scholar, and is writing this about about another scholar for whom this insight is important (as is made clear throughout the book): Karl Barth. More on this in a moment. For now, let me just note that book has deeply pastoral concerns and is therefore widely accessible without dumbing anything down. One of the ways that Root makes this book accessible is by incorporating an ongoing story of a fictional church. When I read that he was going to do this I thought, ‘this might be terrible.’ It wasn’t. He managed to tell this story really, really well while also writing about Barth in a compellingly narrative style. The two narratives naturally weave in and out of each other brilliantly.
Root engages three scholars in particular here. First, Charles Taylor, a philosopher who writes on how the West became secular. If you know Root, this is unsurprising as he is a Taylor scholar and deals extensively with Taylor’s work over the course of many books. The second is Hartmut Rosa who writes on time and Modernity. Root really delves into Rosa’s concept of Resonance (see chapters 11 and 12 in particular) which are very helpful (more on this below). The third, as previously mentioned, is Karl Barth. But it’s important to note that the primary lens through which Root is writing about Barth is pastoral, he is writing about Pastor Barth. As Root acknowledges early on, “The story I tell about Barth is the account of a pastoral theology for the immanent frame” (21). Barth, of course, is one of the most stunning theologians of the twentieth-century. When Root writes above about the precedence of the pastoral over the theological then, we need to understand that he is writing about a man who was a pastor-theologian. His comment is not a slight on theology, rather it is noting that theology must be shaped by the life of the congregation. The “immanent frame” that he mentions is Taylor’s language and refers to the ways in which we’ve moved out an understanding and therefore feeling of transcendence as a society over the course of the last, say, 500 years.
Okay, back to Barth. In his early days, Barth bristled against the conservative views of his father and pursued an education with a full move towards a modern liberal theology. Barth hit a crisis, however, when he began to pastor, because Barth’s theology didn’t “land for the congregation” (29). The reason this is all important is because Root, in various ways and places, demonstrates that neither liberalism nor conservativism are “working” in the lives of actual people in the Church. While each “side” frames itself as the answer over against the other, “a closer examination reveals that pietism and theological liberalism are related (and not just distantly). Pietism and liberalism are siblings, maybe even twins with a grudge” (202). Not much has changed. There are many ways in which Barth returned to what he left behind. But we would be mistaken to see this as a return to conservatism from liberalism. Instead, after his father had died and he found himself a pastor, “the theology of a living God, which Karl had once resisted, now called” (28).
In chapter 4 we read about Barth’s claim that “God is God,” which is a significant claim for the duration of the book. Interestingly, this doesn’t really mean anything. It is “a nonexplanation” (63). But this is precisely the point, especially within a modern framework. God is not a concept to be grasped, and “God cannot be known apart from God’s act to make Godself known” (63). What does this have to do with the crisis of decline? Everything, because who we understand (or don’t understand!) God to be, has everything to do with how we will respond to the crisis of decline. It is important to point out here that the word “God” is not so much the problem in our secular age, as Root reveals. Rather, it is the belief in the action of God in our world that is problematic and thus a challenge to our Modern sensibilities. The word we must focus on in the statement “God is God” must necessarily be the word is (81). Root writes,
“Ministry is about the God who is. The preacher must speak of the is, drawing near to her people as pastor with a presence that proclaims God is…The is confesses that God is not a concept but an agent moving in history, penetrating the immanent frame, coming to those in the immanent frame with judgment and grace” (81).
Perhaps all of the things we find ourselves putting so much of our energy into — programs, missions statements, vision statements, etc. — are actually distracting us from the action of God, which we’ve decidedly taken up for ourselves. As Root writes, “Neither mainline nor evangelical congregations are in a crisis due to their failure to have or execute a mission or vision statement” (226). I mean he’s right, right? Instead, “They’re in crisis because they’ve avoided a watchword” (226). What is a watchword? “The watchword is the local and concrete narration of the community’s encounter with the living God who is God in the world” (226). Chapter 15 deals with the importance of a “watchword,” and how such a word comes about.
In chapter 6, Root makes explicit the fact that “The Church Is Not the Star of Its Own Story.” It is easy to think that we, whether liberal or conservative, are necessarily responsible for the rise or fall of the church and thus carry the burden (given to us by modernity). Instead, Root shows us that waiting is a seemingly forgotten act of faith. As a Pentecostal, I couldn’t help but think of how important the practice of “tarrying” was for us when I was young. Waiting was a central part of our spiritual life and practice. This has largely disappeared. This was not by accident, even if we didn’t notice the subtle shift happening to us.
It makes sense that late modernity would make waiting an enemy, because growth is one of its highest goals, if not the highest…Waiting has no place in the drive for growth. In late modernity, if you’re not growing, you’re declining—meaning if you’re waiting, you’re losing. When the church sees its essential issue as one of decline (negative growth), it seeks innovations that often move it far away from waiting. Waiting, even in the church, becomes wasting. But as we’ll see, this only spins the immanent frame closed, compounding our problems by leading the church to think it is (or has to be) the star of its own story. This inevitably pushes the church to see itself as a competitor with the world, not a lover of the world. (142)
I’ll never forget being in a conference and hearing a very well known pastor say that when he was growing up he repeatedly heard (from his father, which is not an unimportant detail), “pray for revival, pray for revival, pray for revival.” He then said bluntly, “Revival never came. So I decided it was time to get off of our knees and figure out how God works.” In other words, waiting didn’t do anything as far as he could tell, so we had to take matters into our own hands. Statements like this reveal a move away from God while (in typical Modern fashion thinking we can explain God, or at least how God works). This is a move away from a God who is God. Root again,
Waiting is seeking. My concern is that facing decline, most church leadership sees waiting as the enemy of survival, because they have assumed, along with modernity, that the only human action that counts is the expenditure of energy. The goal is to do something, to expend some energy, to survive. But the only human action that can save us is to wait. Only waiting as a form of seeking readies us for an encounter with a God who is God. Waiting is the heart of faithful seeking. (164)
I know that some may wonder, aren’t we supposed to do anything? Here is where Rosa’s scholarship brilliantly comes into play. Root especially zeroes in on Rosa’s concept of resonance. “Resonance,” writes Root, “is waiting action” (165). He significantly expands on this over a number of chapters while continuing the fictional narrative for what this resonant engagement looks or feels like.
What I loved about this book is that is calls us out of the weariness of trying to keep up by doing or having more (97), and instead to step into a new way (which is really an old way) of ministry with a focus on the God who is God. After having read, listened to, and watched a number of exposes on how the Church (in the West, at least) is failing, I needed something else. This book lives up to its claim of being “A Hopeful…Ecclesiology.” This is not to say it isn’t also a critique. It is. But it’s a liberating critique. A hopeful and energizing critique. It’s hard to hear that we’ve been, intentionally or otherwise, the star of the show instead of the “narrator” (91), but this truth is meant to free us from the burden which God never placed on us in the first place. Being the star of your own show is draining. There is another way, however, and that way produces life and energy for the Church and its leaders (134). This is the way that Root, via Barth, is calling us into. Each time I picked up the book I felt energized for ministry and hopeful for the Church’s future. I hope you’ll pick it up and find the same.
Andrew Root, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology For A Secular Age (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022), 266. The remaining references will be given via page numbers within the post itself.