Colonized Hopes
The buildings remain. The schools remain. The bank accounts remain. The pension remains.
The publishing houses, administrative districts, boards, committees, conventions, constitutions, bylaws, and carefully maintained historical brands. People come and go on Sunday mornings. Salaries clear. Taxes are filed. The instituted machinery moves.
But a forest does not survive because old trees remain standing.
It survives because seedlings become trees.
It Doesn’t Matter If It’s Church
This is bigger than declining memberships and denominational loyalties. Bad leadership, theological controversy, and financial pressure are red herrings. Those things are downstream.
The crisis is generative. Those systems that remain increasingly incapable of receiving difficult young men will also in due season find themselves incapable of forming great old ones.
Great men are usually not great men in their twenties.
The twenty-five-year-old who may someday possess extraordinary courage is quite capable of presently being reckless. The man who will someday exercise excellent command may presently be domineering. Intellectual independence can first appear as argumentativeness. Conviction can be arrogance. Ambition outruns wisdom.
The definition of a young man is that he is nearly impossible to manage. This is precisely why a young man needs older men, both to scare him and to prop him up against his fears.
The question is not whether the young man needs correction. Of course he does. The question is whether we can correct the vice without extinguishing the potency.
But this formation cannot happen among families, towns and networks that insist that they begin every new hire with finished men, that every young man who visits be mature and complete before he is fully grown.
A healthy culture knows how to foster such men. It rebukes arrogance without training courage out of a man. It restrains aggression without feminizing strength. It teaches prudence without rewarding cowardice. It disciplines ambition without making mediocrity the price of belonging. It forgives yesterday’s stupidity because it expects tomorrow’s maturity.
A broken system labels potency pathology. The difficult young man is the dangerous young man. The dangerous young man is the problematic man. The problematic man is a risk. And risks get managed.
Nobody wants to come to worship for more management.
Up to Seventy Times Seven
Christianity possesses extraordinarily strong categories for repentance, forgiveness, maturation, restoration, and sanctification. Christianity uniquely possesses the words for saying, “That man was a fool ten years ago. And, look at him now!”
But bureaucracies remember differently than fathers do. Management keeps a file on you. A father can forgive. Bureaucracy remembers.
Then we wonder where the men went.
Some went where they could grow. Some learned to hide. All of them just needed a few more good uncles.
Old Natural Selection
Every system selects for survival. The only real shame in it is pretending it is not so.
You can quickly judge a system by the kind of men it rewards. If speaking plainly repeatedly produces punishment while speaking cautiously produces advancement, men learn caution. If independent judgment creates reputational danger while consensus creates safety, men learn consensus. If confronting disorder is risky while managing perceptions is rewarded, men learn management.
If an accusation can travel rapidly through institutional networks while vindication travels slowly, men learn that accusation possesses power. If difficult personalities are treated primarily as liabilities rather than material for formation, older men stop investing themselves in difficult younger men. Eventually the institution begins selecting for the ability to survive inside the institution.
That is not selecting for excellence.
Caution, collegiality, procedure, diplomacy, credentialing, and administrative competence are not necessary evils. But when the inversion occurs, when the secondary things become the criteria by which virtues are judged:
Courage becomes acceptable only provided it is collegial.
Truth-telling becomes admirable only provided it does not disturb procedure.
Leadership becomes desirable only provided everyone already agrees.
Strength becomes useful only provided it never makes anyone uncomfortable.
Such a people may still have some fathers. But it will not produce many.
Take it to the Bank
Where it is helpful to think of the American financial experiment as a casino (a la Dr. Adam Koontz), I find it also helpful to see old American denominations as modern, privatized banks. These accumulations of civilizational wealth don’t handle your financial interest the same way as your local credit union does. But, when you look at their org chart, you find that they don’t only share the bottom line.
Generations of faithful Christians deposited their mammon in heaven’s story. They built churches. They endowed schools. They founded seminaries. They established universities. They funded missions. They created publishing houses. They constructed pension systems. They accumulated property. They developed theological traditions. They built reputations.
The non-profit corporation, a fully international non-government organization, inherits all of it.
Survival therefore proves remarkably little.
Buildings can be sold. Endowments can generate income. Older members can continue giving. Institutions can consolidate. Administrative structures can shrink. The inherited reputation can continue attracting loyalty long after the culture that created the reputation has disappeared.
The question is not whether the old trees remain. The question is where are the seedlings.
Evangelical Communism
I do not believe that the majority of American evangelical administrators are secretly become card-carrying red guard. I just believe a cultural heuristic conditioned to survive by leveling natural distinctions, distrusting asymmetric authority, transferring judgment from persons and households toward administrative systems, legitimizing grievance therapeutically, and treating equality as interchangeability are the means by which communism is infiltrating our speech.
Managerial egalitarianism is just the tip of the iceberg. Headship may remain somewhere in the book, but household relations are driven by the assumptions of a moralistic, therapeutic deism. “Forgiveness” remains central to preaching, but reputational restoration becomes nearly impossible once fights break out. “Vocation” can still be a fancy word, but functional interchangeability governs the pervasive question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” A “Male pastorate” may remain an official doctrine, but the anthropology that makes that oversight intelligible steadily disappears.
The Last Exception
Yes, the ordination of women.
Whatever today may appear to be, no teaching will long survive as an exception to an anthropology that has already been surrendered nearly everywhere else.
Read that again.
The historic Christian understanding is not that women are incapable of intelligence, speech, prophecy, courage, administration, service or any other profound manifestation of the Spirit of God.
It is that women cannot be fathers.
The distinction concerns the Office. But it is not of the Office. It is of nature.
Fatherhood is not motherhood with a different body. It is Godhead with a different angelic, a different medium, a unique face. This does not merely impact the unique spiritual communion children have with their father. It impacts the way every pack of humans operates dynamically.
Among homo sapiens, an elementary linguistic survey reveals that the office of overseer is not merely a matter of whichever competent person happens to possess the relevant smartness. An elder is not a function. A husband is not a partner. And a master is whoever bosses you around.
Human offices arise from the ordered creation. Household, sex, representation, authority, generation, and responsibility are not ideas. They are Words of God given flesh. But once a people loses the ability to speak these words, the male pastorate becomes a relic, a non sequitur, and a black eye all at once.
“Scripture says so” remains true in theory. But succeeding generations will reasonably ask why Scripture makes this distinction if every other distinction between male and female authority has shamed away, made contingent, replaced with functional interchangeability and asking the question made morally suspicious on principle.
The exception becomes intolerable. The function demands its due.
The pattern is evident:
Women increasingly perform work associated with spiritual oversight.
The distinction between assistance and governance blurs.
Theological language adapts to mollify existing practice.
Arguments become increasingly technical because the underlying anthropology is no longer available to the words.
Ordination itself is less a revolution than a recognition.
Doctrine Catches Up
Luther is safely dead.
Martin Luther was difficult. Spectacularly difficult. He could be excessive, insulting, stubborn, inflammatory, reckless, brilliant, courageous, funny, infuriating, wrong, magnificent, and he was always impossible to control.
Lutherans have spent five centuries commemorating all of these attributes. That is easy because he is dead. When he died, even his worst traits became remarkably manageable.
He can no longer interrupt meetings. He cannot write an embarrassing post on Facebook tonight. He cannot antagonize a donor. He cannot challenge the judgment of an administrator who is vested. He cannot develop an inconvenient following that asks the wrong questions.
The bronze statue isn’t the man. The man was a twenty-eight-year-old nobody who refused to stop saying something irritating, partially wrong, badly timed, and profoundly important enough to need to write a second book on the same topic years later.
Potency and Pathology
Difficult men should be indulged. Quite the opposite. Young men need rebuke.
That’s why they need fathers. That’s what fathers do. Mothers may rebuke. They may puff up and bluster and even yell. But mothers are not made for it, just as fathers are not made to suckle, yet each of us can hold a bottle.
Arrogance is sin. Recklessness destroys people. Ambition is monstrous without discipline.
Intelligence produces vanity. Strength without restraint is brutality. But Christianity possesses a category larger than either indulgence or expulsion when faced with such young men: discipleship.
Peter needed rebuke. Paul needed years. James and John wanted fire called down from heaven. Jesus Christ did not affirm their immaturity. Nor did he discard their potency.
He disciplined it.
The Hearts of the Sons
The Church does not merely need to “make room” for dangerous young men, as though they require another diversity initiative or a special worship style. Christianity must remember how to make saints out of them. This can only be done by older men who are themselves strong enough not to be frightened by mistakes, by folly and by sin.
A father can say both, “You are wrong,” and, “You are mine,” and be believed because, by nature, that is what he is. A manager will have considerably more difficulty.
A people survives by receiving immature humans and forming them into mature ones. But when the immune system confuses potency with pathology, correction becomes exclusion.
Prudence becomes conformity. Forgiveness ceases to restore reputation. Management replaces fatherhood. Self-preservation selects against renewal.
And accumulated capital ends up being about all that you’ve got left
The buildings remain. The machinery moves. But the kind of men capable of inheriting it are fewer and further in between.
Then the old trees fall.
And nobody remembers how to grow another forest.
