Andy Root and Ministry in a Secular Age part three

Andy explores all these themes further in Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age. I really enjoyed this book I enjoyed how he threads the story of young Karl Barth when he was a pastor straight out of seminary working in a working class parish in Switzerland. In his struggles with post WWI Europe, having rejected the pietism of his father, and been let down by liberal theology in the dace of the industrial killing of WWI and the economic collapse that followed, Root tells of how Karl Barth found faith in God, hearing the invitation to let God be God. You can read a longer summery here. Into this story he weaves the story of a real church that failed in its attempts to innovate and be more relevant and closed after last pastor left. He then wonders what might have happened if they had stayed open. He uses these two stories to explore all the themes described above. It is not a how to book but offers a theological framework to understand both how the church in the immanent frame has become a self-sufficient organisation focused on our own survival and growth. Using Barth’s early work, he invites us instead to be a community that waits for and encounters the living God. To be a place where the Living God is placed back at the centre of the story of the church and where we learn to wait hopefully in an active posture of being open to the presence of God who will be God. In doing so he invites us to become a place of resonance – a community where people encounter God and find genuine life

But what does this all mean for evangelism? In Evangelism in an Age of Despair: Hope beyond the Failed Promise of Happiness Andy again weaves a fictional story, and the story of people like French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and philosopher. He offers a theological and cultural reflection on the roots of modern pursuit of happiness which has led to our society today overcome by sadness, anxiety, and the illusion that happiness is life’s ultimate purpose. In this context of sadness and despair  Andy wonders if rather than evangelism being a mechanism to save the church, get new members and the resources we need to survive, evangelism is following Jesus into the sadness. He reframes evangelism not as persuasion or spiritual salesmanship, but as sharing in others’ sorrow and offering consolation through Christ’s presence. In developing his theology of consolation, he says that in the sadness we help others and ourselves meet the living and loving transcendent God.

In his last book, A Pilgrimage Into Letting Go: Helping Parents and Pastors Embrace the Uncontrollable, co-written with his wife Kara K. Root, Andy and Kara use a family pilgrimage along Cuthbert’s Way in the Borderlands of Scotland and England in 2023 to explore our need to be in control both as parents and as church leaders. As parents we seek to manage the outcomes for our children, and as church leaders we face the anxiety of decline through control, double down on strategies, innovation, and management. They then return to Hartmut Rosa’s work describing modern society as driven by acceleration (faster technology, work, communication), which often produces alienation—a feeling that the world is silent or unresponsive. For Rosa the opposite of alienation is resonance – which he describes as a vital, meaningful relationship between a person and the world. When resonance happens, you feel touched by something and able to respond to it—there is a kind of living “back-and-forth” between you and the world. The four key characteristics of resonance are:

1.        Being affected - Something in the world reaches you emotionally or existentially—a person, a piece of music, nature, an idea, or a moment.

2.        Self-efficacy / response - You respond actively. You speak, act, feel, think, or create in reply.

3.        Mutual transformation - Both you and your relation to the world change through the interaction.

4.        Uncontrollability

Resonance cannot be forced or made to happen. You can create conditions for it, but you can’t command it.

I love this book. I have read/listened to it twice. I might read it again. I love the way it is written, the story it tells, and the invitation that faithful parenting and pastoral leadership happen not through controlling people or outcomes but through walking alongside others in trust, humility, and openness to God’s uncontrollable grace.

A final comment. One of the big themes in these books is Pilgrimage. As a church community in this secular age, we are like pilgrims in the past. This is made very clear in the last book, but it is a theme in earlier books. Last week I was listening to one of the latest St Georges College (Jerusalem) Conversations. In it Rev Dr Rodney Aist, Course Director at St Georges College, and expert and interpreter of “pilgrimage” talked about his latest book on walking one of the traditional medieval devotional pilgrims’ routes around Jerusalem. In the conversation he describes pilgrimage as being involuntarily pushed out of home. I think that is why Andy keeps using this image. We are no longer home. We are being pushed out of what was home. The temptation is to try to take control of our situation and to use the ways of this new land to save the church. It is to place ourselves at the centre of the story and to exclude God. Instead, Andy offers these books to help us understand the world we are in and how this secular age 3 has shaped our understanding of faith, of what it means to be church and how we are to pastor or lead in this time. That is not unusual. That has happened at every point through the history of the church. The difference was that in most of those ages God remained part of the story. So instead of trying to relentlessly innovate and to control our own destiny, maybe we are invited to let go of control, to place God at the centre of the Church’s story, and to be faithful, trusting God amid uncontrollability.

You can listen to the podcast with Andy here.