The Dumbing of the Church

I wrote a blog recently and was excoriated by one reader for using words like “excoriate” when I write. Noting that my blog is about things theological, he suggested that God was really quite simple and, therefore, simple words would do just fine when talking about God. He suggested that I lose the polysyllabic morphemes (sorry, I just couldn’t help myself) and replace them with single syllable words on a 5^th grade reading level. Of course, some of us read Shakespeare in the 5^th grade, so that’s no help.

I’ve been hearing this more and more lately, both from laity and clergy. It seems that even when dealing with a subject as complex as the Divine, the motto is KISS – “keep it simple, stupid.” It is symptomatic, I think, of a more serious contemporary ecclesiastical (there I go again!) trend; namely, the “dumbing of the church.”

Of course, the disposition to “dumb down” is not confined to things theological. Dan Gookin made a fortune with his books “For Dummies” series. It feeds both our desire to have a simple solution to complex issues and our latent suspicion that things really aren’t as complex as the so-called “experts” make them out to be. Who was it that said, “Every profession is a conspiracy against the layman”?

In the church, the propensity towards the dumbing down of theology has been encouraged, I think, by three concurrent phenomena. The first is the consumer church movement (sometimes called “seeker sensitive church”) that insists on packaging the Gospel so as to market it as widely as possible. Under the guise of “getting people saved,” a wedge is driven between evangelism and discipleship with the result being that what “God had joined together” has now been “torn asunder.”

An even more troubling trend is the abdication by the clergy of their role of the church’s chief teacher (see my blog The Demise of the Didaskalos). The average pastor today hasn’t the time, energy, expertise, or inclination to take their role as the church’s teacher seriously.

The third is the contemporary movement, well-meaning to be sure, of transferring the “ownership” of the church from the clergy to the laity. Baptist educator Findley Edge, in his 1971 book titled The Greening of the Church, issued a clarion call for the clergy to step aside and give the leadership of the church to the laity. Edge argued that every great reformation began with the laity, not the clergy (who tend, he argues, to be defenders of the status quo).

Of course, he’s right. It was Martin Luther who said that the Scriptures were, in his words, allgemeinverständlich, understandable to all. It was for that reason that Luther translated the Scriptures into German, so that the laity could read them and study them for themselves. But Luther also insisted that while it was important for the scholar to trust the layman with the Scriptures, it is also important for the layman to trust the scholar with the Scriptures. Not everyone reads Greek; but someone has to! If no one read Greek, there would be no English Bible to read. Scholar and layman have to trust each other with the Word of God.

Quite simply put: clergy ought to know more about the Scriptures than laypeople do, just as a physician should know more about medicine than the patient does. Clergy have a responsibility and a calling to be experts in the study of the Scripture and to teach their congregations what they (the congregants) do not know. Laity, in turn, have the responsibility to learn, to study, to grow, and to mature as disciples of Jesus Christ.

Will Willimon in his excellent book, Pastor, suggests that the proper model for the pastor ought to be managers of the team rather than the team’s star player. I understand his point, that pastors have the responsibility to mature their churches rather than using them as platforms for their own performance, and agree. But I prefer another model: the pastor as guide. Pastors lead people to a place they know because they’ve already been there. A guide isn’t necessarily smarter than the persons he’s guiding, but he should have more information with which to work.