On this Labor Day here are a few thoughts on the labor of the church. It is an excerpt from my book:
Vocãtiõ: Imaging a Visible Church.
You can find various versions of the book here.
Humans, Tools, and Commons
Whatever structurally does not fit
the logic of machines is effectively filtered from a culture dominated by their
use.
 |
Teeming Ingots
by James E. Allen, printed by Charles S. White, 1935 |
Throughout the book
Vocãtiõ I have critiqued the post-Constantinian Church and demonstrated how vocations have
been compromised by both chrematistic valuation and complicity with secular
power. (The word c
hrematistic means related to or occupied with the gaining of wealth.) But there is still more to say about the impact of our shifting economic
practices. Our global economy has obliterated local communities, rendering them
insufficient to meet their own needs, and making the people who live in them
terminally isolated. The vast majority of human beings do not make anything,
let alone make anything for themselves. Berry writes, “Outsourcing’ the
manufacture of frivolities is at least partly frivolous; outsourcing the
manufacture of necessities is entirely foolish.”
[ii]
Household economics must reclaim a local focus. “Neighborhoods” and
“neighborliness” must remerge as important values. A yearning for neighbors is
baked into the small-batch movement, which is reconnecting producers and
consumers, and individuals with the creative minds behind the products they
purchase.
[iii] The
small-batch trend is bringing about local production of foods and household
goods--many created inside homes and garages. Small batch bread, bourbon,
clothing, and the farm-to-table movement are sacramental views of this trend in
neighborliness.
The Gospel community can further
undermine the dehumanizing practice of the global market by focusing locally
and adding value to the neighborhoods where their communities are embedded. The church must partner with others and help people in local communities to relearn
the art of household management, which has been obliterated from cradle to
grave because chrematistic patterns of exchange have adhered to every part of
life. The Church must help individuals re-member themselves as parts of a
family because families are the foundation for rebuilding local communities.
Jesus went to families. He met in homes. Family is the core of the shalom
community. Chrematistic rituals of exchange wear away family bonds and even
collapse friendship circles by the weight of the powerful, urgent drive to
accumulate money. Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke to a
group of economists about the emerging issues that an unencumbered system of
competition has on individuals, their families, and their children. He said,
An atmosphere of anxious and
driven adult lives, a casual attitude to adult relationships, and the ways in
which some employers continue to reward family-hostile patterns of working will
all continue to create more confused, emotionally vulnerable or deprived young
people. If we're looking for new criteria for economic decisions, we might
start here and ask about the impact of any such decision on family life and the
welfare of the young.
[iv]
Williams
also points out that the human creature is meant for creativity. We have
already spoken about God’s invitation to be a partner. But chrematistic systems
of exchange force people to live without space for imagination. Imaginative
play is how we learn to question, to problem solve, and to see the world with
its future differently. Adults need space and time to play as much as children
do.
It is the extra things that make
us human; simply meeting what we think are our material needs, making a living,
is not uniquely human, just a more complicated version of ants in the anthill.
One of the greatest legacies of the British labour movement has been a real
commitment to this--to the enlarging of minds and feelings (anyone who's been
able to see that wonderful play, The Pitmen Painters, will know what I mean).
So the question is how far economic decisions help or hinder a world in which
that space for thinking things might be different is kept open.”
[v]
In Philip K. Dick’s classic sci-fi
novel entitled,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, later made into the popular film
Blade
Runner, androids can only mimic empathy but cannot truly express it. For
Dick, empathic connection is the exclusive purview of the human being. Nurturing
family and friendship circles through play and a leisurely sharing of life and
time expand the human capacity for understanding, sympathy, and empathy.
Chrematistic systems of exchange demand that life be oriented around work.
Self-interest and success are promoted in the workplace. Williams points out
that such a culture, “encourages you to struggle for your own individual
interest and success, you are being encouraged to ignore the reality of other
points of view--ultimately, to ignore the cost or the pain of others. The
result may be a world where people are very articulate about their own feelings
and pretty illiterate about how they impact on or appear to others--a world of
which reality television gives us some alarming glimpses.”
[vi]
We generally scapegoat individuals who demonstrate villainous lacks of empathy
without looking at the social determinants that make such toxicity possible.
The Church as a community of
shalom has much work to do in a world dominated by chrematistic exchange.
Christian charity pushes us to reach out to the casualties of society, and the
number of broken people continues to mount. The community of shalom is a
different kind of life where families are celebrated, new families are formed,
and all these families bless one another. People recover the value of the
Sabbath. They discover that they are made for partnership with God and that
imagination, play, and discovery rejuvenate human relationships. Such a
community of shalom names the lie that things and people can only delight us if
we have them in large quantities. To actually die with the most toys (a bumper
sticker popular in the West) is to die with nothing. God comes as mystery,
inviting human participation in a great narrative, which stands in stark
contrast to the world where relationships, friendships, and families can only
be known as commodities.
[vii]
Williams points out that “an economic climate based on nothing but calculations
of self-interest, sometimes fed by an amazingly distorted version of Darwinism,
doesn't build a habitat for human beings; at best it builds a sort of fortified
boxroom for paranoiacs (with full electronic services, of course).”
[viii]
The modern Church has failed at grafting a theology of charity into the
dominant culture of chrematistic exchange. The inverse has happened:
chrematistic exchange has grafted itself into the heart of the Church. We have
made the baptized and the clergy into commodities for the maintenance and
support of the institution.
A renewed gathering of the
followers of Jesus must break into the world, and break up the world. The
gathering where bread is broken, stories shared, and prayers are offered
reminds the local community that they are implicated in a narrative of peace.
Such a renewed gathering also breaks up the constant work expected by
chrematistic institutions. The gathering in God’s name to proclaim the message
of grace, reminding each other that all are invited into partnership with God,
and giving thanks for a creation that has enough for all is an act of defiance
in the face of chrematistic institutions promoting works righteousness, limited
success for only the most devoted apostles, and a philosophy of private
ownership and scarcity. In his book Political
Worship Bernd Wannenwetsch observes,
Worship again and again interrupts
the course of the world. Through worship the Christian community testifies that
the world is not its own. And this means also that it is not kept alive by
politics, as the business of politics, which knows no sabbath, would have us
believe. That is why the celebration of worship is not directed simply against
this or that totalitarian regime; it is directed against the totalization of
political existence in general.
[ix]
Christian
community is one of the few ways that people can successfully resist the
colonization of our bodies by the institutions of chrematistic exchange. We are
slowly reverting to a model of social and political life where, through
technology, the powers and authorities have a total claim on the body of every
human being. Humans, once again, are seen as resources rather than beings.
[x]
The gathered community of shalom reveals this total control to be a lie. The
human body is meant for a different end altogether. Gathering reminds the
community of our heavenly purpose. Worship reminds the community of our heavenly
purpose. In fact, the true beneficiaries of Easter are those who have suffered
and died at the hands of unjust powers and institutions of chrematistic
exchange for not even institutions as powerful as these can separate God from the
faithful. (Romans 8:37-39) Christians remember the dead when we gather because
our remembrance is a sign of our hope, and a declaration that the powers of
death will have no victory.
[xi]
Sunday morning worship services
are being changed as people make new communities that share meals in other
settings. Certainly, the missional movement and the farm-to-table gatherings of
Christians are whittling away at the traditions we have received through the
institutional Church. Borrowed spaces, public and private, are reshaping
assumptions about what is needed for gathering. Jesus said that there is
something “more here than temple.” (Matthew 12:6) Jesus broke open the
centralized faith of his day and redistributed the faith of his forbearers. For
instance, Jesus used the term worship in only a few instances.
[xii] Worship
is indeed part of what Christians do. We continue the notion of giving thanks
to God, prayers, and worship that we received from our faith ancestors in the Mosaic
or Sinai tradition. But Christians are doing more than simply worshiping God.
The very act of gathering in relationship and holding hands resists
commodification of our bodies.
[xiii]
Another basic tool the shalom
community uses to resist colonization is the
chabûrah --the feast of friends. Neighborliness, as Peter Block,
civic engineer and author, argues, is rooted in friendship. The community has
an opportunity to engage in friendship with its surroundings. It bears witness
to Jesus’s willingness to eat and drink with others by engaging relationally
with the community around him. “Service can be commoditized, friendship
cannot.”
[xiv]
The missional movement across the Church is rooted in this principle of
friendship. This kind of friendship leads beyond outreach and the dehumanizing
practices of toxic charity into a relationship of collaboration. It breaks open
our inherited models of Christian community and knocks down the walls that
buffer our private spaces. Friends are not bound by private space or false
ideas of secular and sacred, but by agape: friendship love. As Wendell Berry
writes, “A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the
place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the
possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of
each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the
freedom with which they come and go among themselves.”
[xv]
He reminds us that the abdication of communal authority to the powers and
authorities through governmental systems has freed us from each other in a
toxic way. Reclaiming neighborliness as part of the communal life is essential
to Christ’s vision. No person can live unto themselves. It is simply
impossible. But, more importantly, the personalization of neighborliness returns
authority to the members of the small community the local church serves. Its
members start to care for one another again, which taps into the inclusive DNA
of the Jesus Movement.
A shalom community engaging in
friendly partnership with its neighbors will gravitate towards the urgent
issues that preoccupy the local community. If people in our neighborhood care
about safe public spaces, transportation, economic development, crime, or
education, then God cares about these things, as does the community of shalom
in a living partnership with the neighborhood will invest in local remedies to
all of these issues. It will invest in economic development and partnerships
that empower those in need of a better life. Along with the financial
investment and time investment, a community of peace will focus on raising up
new leaders within their neighborhoods. Indigenous leadership or contextual
leadership is essential for the success of such partnerships. This is how
friendship works. Friends empower each other to share their voices and do
things they did not think were possible. A Church resisting colonization will
be busy helping its neighbors invest in each other so that cycles of violence
are broken and a new vision of life together in peace becomes possible.
Gathering for worship and service bears a visible public witness against the
powers of this world, and undermines them by resetting the boundaries of
physical space in the world.
Finally, a community of shalom will
resist the powers of chrematistic exchange by recovering a commons that can be
enjoyed by every member of a neighborhood. The privatization of land as
resources, the eventual carving out of mineral rights, or immanent domain has
contributed to our isolation by placing new boundaries upon our shared space.
We view space as a commodity we individuals have the right to exploit rather
than as part of a created order in which we all live and are invited to be
partners together with God in managing. (Genesis 1:26) The transformation of our
lived environment from a space held in common to a series of spaces held
privately serves the interests of the few while impoverishing the many. This
has amounted to a slow appropriation of the “commons.” Historically, the
commons
in the West, or the word
iriai in the East, has designated the
environment in which people lived. The commons were governed by custom and were
characterized by shared access.
[xvi]
Ivan Illich explains,
People called commons that part of
the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own
possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to
produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households.
[xvii]
The
openness of the commons meant that people could fish, hunt, graze, collect
wood, or plants.
An oak tree might be in the
commons. Its shade, in summer, is reserved for the shepherd and his flock; its
acorns are reserved for the pigs of the neighboring peasants; its dry branches
serve as fuel for the widows of the village; some of its fresh twigs in
springtime are cut as ornaments for the church—and at sunset it might be the
place for the village assembly.
[xviii]
The
use of the commons had limitations for the sake of sustainability, but the
commons were shared spaces that made gathering with neighbors essential for
individual life. The Church’s position towards the practice of maintaining
commons in cities and villages began to change in the fourth century. As became
normative in Western society, the Church became a private property owner.
Somehow the Church must reclaim its critique against the evacuation of the
commons. Privatization of common resources inevitably leads to those resources
becoming assets that undergird invisible wealth. This is the slippery slope of chrematistic
exchange.
Enclosure, once accepted,
redefines community. Enclosure undermines the local autonomy of community.
Enclosure of the commons is thus as much in the interest of professionals and
of state bureaucrats as it is in the interest of capitalists. Enclosure allows
the bureaucrats to define local community as impotent to provide for its own
survival.
Enclosure
of the commons allows for a sort of economic independence upon the enclosed
resources and the commodities produced there. Conversely, people become tied to
the land in a way that they were not prior to shared commons.
Furthermore, enclosed commons
accentuate the separation of the secular and the sacred. The Church can take
steps towards eroding private space by stepping across the lines that demarcate
such enclosures. First, the Church can become a commons itself, gathering the
local community, and sharing its resources for the improvement of the
neighborhood. Second, the Church can offer the Eucharist in public and other
private spaces. In this way, the gathering of people for Haggadah, the feast of
friends, redefines the space. Both of these tools (worship and service)
reinterpret the boundaries of church space and reengage neighborhoods across
the boundaries of private space. The Church’s reentrance into public environs
of any kind is a direct confrontation with the powers and the making of a feast
there undermines the stories of scarcity, the survivalist mentality, and
expands the political boundaries of acceptance.
[i] “Silence
is a Commons” (1982) [edited] Address at the "Asahi Symposium Science and
Man - The computer-managed Society," Tokyo, Japan (21 March 21 1982); as
published in The CoEvolution Quarterly (Winter 1983).
[iii] For
more information see my 2016 book entitled
Small Batch.
[iv] Rowan
Williams, "Human Well-Being and Economic Decision-Making,” The Archbishop
of Canterbury, November 16, 2009, Accessed August 14, 2017, http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/767/human-well-being-and-economic-decision-making
[vii] Peter
Block, Walter Brueggemann, and John McKnight,
An Other Kingdom: Departing
the Consumer Culture (Hoboken: Wiley, 2016) 37, 64-66.
[ix] Bernd
Wannenwetsch,
Political Worship, trans. Margaret Kohl, Oxford Studies in
Theological Ethics (Oxford University Press: New York, 2009) 127.
[x] Jean
Bethke Elstain, "Christianity and Patriarchy: The Odd Alliance."
Modern Theology, November 12, 2008, accessed August 15, 2017, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0025.1993.tb00297.x/abstract
[xi] Wannenwetsch,
Political,132-3.
[xii] Matthew
14:32, 28:9; Luke 24:52; John 9:38.
[xiii] Brueggemann,
Sabbath, 89.
[xiv] Block,
“Kingdom”, 132.
[xv] Wendell
Berry, "The Loss of the Future." Manasjournal Volume XXI, 47.
November 20, 1968. Accessed August 15, 2017. http://www.manasjournal.org/pdf_library/VolumeXXI_1968/XXI-47.pdf
