The Death of Smart

I have this idea for a book: The Death of Smart. Here’s what I think: I’m starting to question the value of knowing stuff. I was just at a meeting at church with some other teachers and some of them are in seminary and they were complaining that people in their classes don’t want to learn a lot. That is, they don’t want to learn Greek or study ancient creeds and history of theology or textual criticism. I’ve heard that before from teachers, and felt that way myself when I taught youth. One of the guys in the meeting today expressed it this way: “Well you’re in that world where everything is subject to academic scrutiny and everything is analyzed and thought through.” (I think he meant seminary.) “And you just have to accept that this class will never be that. They aren’t going to want to go deep like you do.”

The Newsboys had a song about this that I used to like. The lyrics said:
I want to preach the word. They want massages.
I check chapter and verse. They check their watches.
I spy another yawn. I might as well be gone.
Let’s stand and say, ‘Amen.’

The implication, I think, is that people in Sunday School classes just aren’t ready for such deep study. They haven’t “arrived” at that point in their spiritual walk. I don’t think I believe that any more though, and that’s what my book would be about. There are two reasons for this.

First, I think the church may have over-emphasized the importance of intellect and reason in recent years. That would have been only natural in the cultural of the last two centuries in which reason and science have dominated. Our churches meet in lecture halls. Our classes are based around a teacher. The very geography of our meetings reveals what is most important to us. If the church considered service to be its most important task, wouldn’t we meet in soup kitchens? If we considered evangelism our most important mission, would we meet at all? If fellowship were our primary goal, why not meet in homes? Instead, it’s learning, knowledge, and growth (which even for all of our “life application” baubles is still seen as an intellectual exercise: we have “life application studies” not “life application activities.”) that form the central mandate of our modern faith. Worship is encouraged, but better not to worship too late on Saturday night lest we miss the worship service on Sunday. Fellowship is important, but let’s keep the retreat to Friday night and Saturday so that everyone can be present for lecture on Sunday.

I don’t think it was always like that. The first church met in homes. The original rule of St. Francis included a vow to abstain from education. Francis originally didn’t allow his brothers to own books. I wonder how important learning is to God. Certainly, He doesn’t want us to float through life “fat, dumb and happy”. But if learning is the central purpose of the church, why didn’t Jesus talk about it more? In fact, I can’t think of many people in scripture who are praised for their learning. The Bareans, I suppose. And there were “men of Issacar” who “understood the times.” And Jesus himself “grew in wisdom” and said to “take my yoke upon you and learn of me.” But those seem to be more about wisdom, as influenced by lessons learned living life. I don’t know that any of those have a classroom in view.

I hope, in saying this, that I don’t seem to be complaining about church. I love my church’s worship service. It feeds me. It encourages me. I miss it when I’m not able to attend. Nor, am I complaining about format. I enjoy a good lecture, and my church works hard to avoid the “sage on a stage” format and present messages in creative ways. But when I try to put myself in the shoes of a non-Christian, I can’t think of any format that I would find less appealing than a church service. Which brings me to the second reason for my book: smart churches aren’t post-modern churches.

Fifty years ago, what you knew was very important. We elected leaders and trusted teachers if they had amassed an impressive amount of information. They must have studied. They must have done research in windowless libraries with dusty books. But now information (both good and bad, accurate and inaccurate) is available to a much wider audience with must less effort in its discovery. Thus we don’t value knowledge as much as our grandparents did. We elect politicians because we liked them in a movie or a sport. We shrug when a president can’t recall the name of a country’s foreign minister. And we raise an eyebrow when our pastor reads a suspicious quote from Winston Churchill. We may even visit famousquotes.com after the service to see if Churchill was really the author.

Witness this blog. I don’t have a degree in social science of any kind so why read something by someone who is obviously not an authority on the subject? Or consider the blog format at all: part of the function of newspapers and publishers used to be that they were vouching for their content. The reporter or essayist was someone who knew their stuff, someone the public could trust. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have his own book or column. So why do post-moderns read blogs by people they don’t know and don’t know if they can trust? Because facts aren’t as important as they used to be. Facts are cheap. Thus the teacher, the person with all the answers, is no longer the leader we’re drawn to follow. In fact, we’re suspicious of anyone who has answers. And because of all of that, the target for a “culturally-relevant” church has moved while the intellectual format has kept its static aim. As a result, we might as well be shooting blanks.

Churches nowadays like to talk about being “culturally relevant.” It’s a buzzword. But I wonder if we are making ourselves relevant to the wrong culture. For instance, our services, programs and auditoriums have gotten increasingly modern. The church in America has spent millions of dollars so that its leaders can “repackage the ancient message in a culturally-relevant way.” I think what that means is putting hymns and Bible verses in PowerPoint. That’s a very modern idea. (So modern that it took years for my home church to come around to the idea. The old lights called it, “music on the wall” and wanted no part of it.)

But the post-modern person isn’t impressed with PowerPoint. She uses it in office meetings. Not only that, she has experienced life on Tatouine and watched some roughnecks blow up a meteor to save the world and seen a lot of other fancy tricks with technology that’s way better than PowerPoint. Years ago, before I thought of any of this and when I would get really excited that a Christian band could pack out a football stadium and put on something really cool like a laser show, a friend of mine saw all this coming. His name is Andy. We were at just such a concert. It had smoke and it was very loud and I thought it was so cool – just as cool as anything a secular band could do, so there. (Except that it was in a church, which wasn’t as cool as if it had been in a football stadium.) Anyway, my friend told me, “You know, we will never be able to outdo the world, the secular bands, with big, expensive, flashy shows. That’s not what the church is about anyway. The one thing that we can offer the world that secular bands can’t is genuine relationships. Love.”

<>I nodded as if I agreed with him, but deep down I was thinking. “No! My youth pastor told me I could be Christian and be cool too! And that’s what I want! Plus, we’re doing this to be ‘culturally-relevant’.”

But my friend was right. In the post-modern culture, my friends don’t care that much what I know or how convincing I am. So they won’t really care what the people at my church know or how convincing my pastor is. If there is one, highest virtue of our post-modern culture it’s tolerance. But if there’s a second-highest virtue, it’s genuine-ness. We have enough data. We want something more.

So the book will be called The Death of Smart, or Smart Church. Dead Church, or something like that. And it will sell millions of copies. Watch for it coming soon to an amazon.com page near you.