Collapse: How Churches Will Decide to Fail or Succeed

Several years ago I came across the research and writing of Jared Diamond.  Diamond, sociologist/anthropologist professor at Stanford University, wrote the book Collapse: How Societies will Decide to Fail or Succeed that has stuck with me ever sense.  I find myself frequently thinking about the correlation and lessons between organizational leadership and the examples of civilizations that ceased to exist discussed by Diamond.  Diamond specifically identifies seven or eight civilizations that at one time had a great deal of success and strong potential to continue regeneration but for internal factors collapsed.  

The story of the Norse Viking people who settled Greenland is especially interesting to me as I think about the church landscape and ecosystem in the United States.  Side note, this essay is relevant for other organizations besides churches and denominations.

The Norse Vikings that were banished from Iceland settled the eastern and western most southern tip of Greenland around 980 A.D.  In Greenland, they found their own Promise Land full of plush green grass, plenty of water, a fishery that could sustain settlement for generations, and trade routes with northern Europe that created a sustainable gross domestic product or economy.  So why did the Norse civilization cease to exist in the early 1400s after centuries of very prosperous living?  In short, they were not overtaken by any external military or invading country, instead over time, they mismanaged their natural resources and forgot they were in Greenland and not northern Europe. 

Diamond identifies several complex ecological and sociological factors that contributed to their collapse, but there are three factors in particular that should be on the dashboard of every organizational leader to avoid a similar outcome of the Norse Vikings in Greenland. 

First, the Norse people arrived to Greenland with a well-entrenched sense of European culture.  Put differently, they were deeply committed to transforming their new settlement to mirror the culture, customs, and status of their much wealthier and well-resourced northern European friends.  Over time, the Norse people constructed a very impressive cathedral at Gardar with massive church bells, beautiful stained-glass windows, bronze candlesticks, Communion wine, linen, silk, silver, churchmen’s robes, and jewelry to adorn their church, with its three-ton sandstone building blocks and eighty-foot bell tower. In the end, the Norse starved to death. 

Second, the Norse people refused to learn survival lessons from the Inuit people that were their neighbors.  They had a low regard for the Inuit ways and customs viewing them as natives instead of a resource.  In reality, long before the Vikings settled Greenland and long after their collapse, the Inuit people continued to survive well.  Unlike the indigenous Inuits that understood how to hunt and harvest whales to burn oil for heat during the brutal winters, the Norse decided to burn their own timber.  Over time, the local deforestation would render them without the timber needed to build boats necessary to sail to other locations for resources.  Also, the Norse apparently had a too sophisticated palate that they preferred beef to fish.   The status of being a farming community with cows was great in northern Europe but not so much in Greenland.  Because of the climate in Greenland, once the grass was removed and the soil exposed, it became increasingly difficult to regenerate grass.  Grass is important for grazing animals.  Also, since the Norse did not master more efficient techniques of energy, they built their homes with large sections of sod as their insulation.  As the American southwest would learn during the dust-bowl years of the 1930s and 40s, when dirt is turned over too frequently for the sake of getting the quick fix of a wheat harvest, the soil no longer has the natural covering (grass) that keeps the dirt grounded.  The windstorms that swept over the plains literally picked up the ground and created apocalyptic dust storms.  Similarly, the artic conditions in Greenland damaged the exposed soil rendering it useless to regrow grass needed to keep a grazing livestock alive.  To add insult to injury, the Norse people starved to death with a fishery that would have sustained them for many more centuries.  Archeologist discovered embarrassingly few amounts of fish bones in the trash of the Norse people.  Diamond and others conclude that the Norse people just didn’t like fish. 

Third, the Norse people were more concerned with living the fancy life of their European trade friends that they became dependent on very bad habits overusing their resources for the purpose of keeping their trade relationships intact.  For example, during the summer months when they should have been hunting and harvesting new timber not their own, they were too busy hunting Walrus to quench the European desire for ivory.  Also, they didn’t fully utilize the Walrus for survival purposes discarding the blubber that could have been heated down for oil for heat and cooking.  In short, they wanted badly to live like their catholic friends in Europe, but the problem is they didn’t have the resources to sustain their standard of living.  It has always been the case that importing fine goods is always more expensive than learning to desire the goods in ones own backyard.  In this case, the bad habits of mismanaging their own capital became a generational expectation for living.  This is most evident in the Norse civilization in their own descriptions of their cathedrals.  In essence, the way they did church was a microcosm of the way they did life.  Church was more about looking and functioning like church in Europe at all cost.

Contemporary Applications:

IMHP, every person interested in organizational leadership needs to work through Diamond’s Collapse.  Similar to the Norse Vikings, we are seeing more church and denominational failings every year in our country.  While there are certainly a lot of external social factors working against a sustainable model of maintaining the way we used to do “Church,” there are plenty of internal “self-inflicted” wounds that will more than likely be the cause for the collapse.  Using Diamond’s story of the Norse Vikings as an analogy, churches and organizations need to call a timeout and do an organizational triage and ask a few fundamental questions:

 

-Are we attempting to maintain a particular custom, culture, or standard of living that is not consistent with our resources?  In other words, are we spending way more than we are making necessary for stability?  Are we over committed to being “beef” eaters instead of having a willingness to consider “fish” in our religious diets, vis-a-vis our historical commitments to our church customs that make us distinct but have become irrelevant, our church culture that is no longer sustainable because the vast majority of people are disinterested in maintaining a political brand or bureaucracy, or just the temptation of keeping up with the “Jones'” in our building campaigns and extravagancies?  Are we starving to death because of commitment to a religious lifestyle that was never endorsed in the New Testament anyway?  

-Are we unwilling to learn from others out of pride or brand loyalty?  I recognize the dangers of syncretism when it comes to faith matters.  I am not suggesting that every church needs to blend with the next church that seems to be doing it better or more effectively.  There has to be some theological/doctrinal guideposts to protect against syncretism.  But, there are plenty of ways our churches can learn from communities that are different in brand, custom, and even theology.  In order for this to happen, there first has to be a conduit for communication.  I suspect history is full of examples of segments of people refusing to openly share and respect other segments of people because of superficial differences.  The lesson from the Norse's unwillingness to connect with the Inuit natives is pride comes before the fall.  Unfortunately, the institution that seems to breed more pride and ego are churches in this country.  Of course, we are somewhat innocuous in the way we posture in our pride.  It occurs in our church membership numbers, budgets “Our weekly collection is____________,” and programs.  While all of these are not necessarily negative, when they become the source of identity ego they take the focus off of Jesus and ministry and on ego-driven status. 

-Have we developed some bad habits over time that have become part of our organizational DNA?  The challenge of conducting a self-triage in this area is that it is almost impossible to accomplish without the help of feedback from outsiders.  Are we willing to listen to people that visit our churches but then decide not to stay? Do we even ask them why they left? Or, are we scared that we might hear that we have some blind spots that need immediate attention?  I suspect there are hundreds of churches right now that are asking themselves the same sets of questions: “Why are we not growing?” “Why are we constantly chasing the bank note?” “Why do thousands of people drive by our church, and yet, we continue to look at the same 65-100 people every week?” “Why are we not experiencing spiritual growth in our congregations?”  These questions are not exhaustive, but they help illustrate the trajectory that leads to a final closing of the doors.

Conclusion:

I do not pretend to understand all of the social and religious complexities that lead to collapse; however, I do think Diamond makes a strong case that more often than not churches are engrossed in game planning against that “other” church down the road that they ignore their own internal strategies of being a healthy church/organization.  While the church down the road may be bigger, nicer, and more attractive, the message of Collapse is they are probably not your biggest threat.  You are your biggest threat (My tone is really nice in making that statement. 😊)

There is one particular aspect of the way we do church in this country that I see has shifted from previous decades.  The millennial generation are not interested in building campaigns for several reasons.  They are not as heavily resourced as the Boomers and Greatest Generation, they are not going to church much anyway to validate a multi-year bond purchase for a new building, and they much rather see their money and church budgets go to help people and not for a country club membership. 

My conspiracy theory is there is an organization that already has the building capital in every city in every state in our country that, if they decide to, could close thousands of churches in a single week.  I am waiting for Chick-fil-A to decide to open their places of business on Sunday for early morning faith conversations.  They can continue to be “closed” on Sundays for business, but creating a meeting place for those interested to share faith and some nuggets seems more like what church will look like in the future.  Chick-fil-A is a metaphor for the shifting that has been long underway in our country as it relates to faith matters.  For a lot reasons, people today are looking for a meeting place that is low-church and high-relationship.  Discard all the work and effort put into the Sunday morning program and aesthetics, and focus more on creating casual meeting spots that lead to meaningful conversations about Jesus that are resistant to gender and generational gapping.  Something happens when people in small groups share healthy food and life.  In the midst of food and life sharing, sermons will occur organically.  Sad for the full-time preacher, but your days may be numbered in the capacity of commercial Christianity.  People today can find great sermons, sorry, but much better than what you are delivering anyway on Sunday morning, on their devices.  Lots of them, and you know what? They are listening to way more than one a week. 

I tithe a lot to my local Chick-fil-A’s because they provide manna for our family.  Every morning I get my yogurt parfait, I see groups of people in Bible studies.  This is a foreshadowing of what may be coming.  I suspect they are providing more than just physical manna as well. I already have the slogan: "Reed Mor Bible"

     

Should gender matter in administering the Lord's Supper on Sunday?

If you attend a church (Protestant) that has a weekly observance of the communion sacrament (referred to as the Lord's Supper for the remainder of this essay), does your church require that only men are eligible to “serve on the table?”  I realize that immediately for some reading this, the language already sounds weird.  Hang with the essay to get my bigger point on this issue.  This essay is more practical than theological, but it certainly has theological undertones.  

The practice of observing the Lord’s Supper goes all the way back to the first century church.  The significance of the Lord’s Supper is theologically connected to the Old Testament Passover feast.  Jesus, drawing on the theological connection between the bread and the wine of the Passover meal from Exodus, instructs His disciples to continue the observance with newly assigned symbolism.  The bread is now the body of Jesus, and the wine is now His blood that will be poured out on the cross in a few short days.  Not central to this essay, some scholars suggest that Jesus actually instituted the Lord’s Supper during a pre-Passover meal that traditionally took place on Thursday prior to the Friday evening Passover meal.  It works better literarily if it was Friday evening’s Passover meal because it better connects Jesus’s foreshadowing of His own imminent execution and the narrative connection to the Exodus story in the Old Testament from which the Passover feast originates. 

But nonetheless, the point is Jesus is sharing a meal with his disciples and takes the opportunity to use the power of metaphor to make a deeply spiritual connection that He is indeed the slain Passover lamb that will take away the sins of the world.  Over time, the early church would continue to observe this meal-sacrament on every first day of the week (see 1 Corinthians 11). 

While this essay is not intended to get bogged down in Church history, it is important to understand some of the background music with the sacraments as it relates to gender dominance and the administration of the sacraments.  For a lot of reasons, some having to do with the evolution of the early church and her forms and practices that would not be codified until well after the first century, men held the dominant roles connected with the sacraments after about 300 A.D. when the Roman emperor Constantine Christianized the west.  

From this point, the Church became an extension of governmental powers and structures.  As a result, the Catholic Church functioned as a superpower in the lives of all people.  It will not be until the Reformation that this power entity would be challenged and eventually re-cast and re-organized around a different set of theological doctrines and practices.  For centuries, the Catholic Church only empowered men to administer church sacraments.  It helps that during most of these centuries, women were denied a lot of social and religious access to power positions anyway.  As a result, some two-thousand years later, there are thousands of churches that administer the Lord’s Supper (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or even quarterly) that only allow men to function in whichever capacity needed to facilitate the sacrament. 

Now to my observation this morning in church, I attend a church that is part of a larger tribe that administers the Lord’s Supper weekly.  This particular church has its roots all the way back to pre-civil war era in our city.  For those many years, men were only allowed to pass the trays (which is essentially the serving part) and pray or speak prior to each emblem being served.  This gender “no-fly” zone is part of a bigger narrative around gender roles in church.  This same church has recently come to their own conclusions that it is time to join many other similar churches in our tribe that have lifted the “no-fly” zone on some gender roles.  In fact, we attended a prominent church in Dallas that allows women to pass the trays, and I suspect, when they first made that concession it was, and is for some, still controversial. 

As I think about the ways men have preserved and created power relationships over women throughout history, not just in churches, I am reminded that it doesn’t take very long in our society for men to create rules and regulations that are fraternal in nature and almost always operate in tandem relationship with a male created subservient category for women. One contemporary example is the social and cultural milieu on many public college university campuses.  President Jimmy Carter, in his recent book, identifies the male/female caste systems between fraternities and sororities that lead to very troubling trafficking. There isn’t the room or the effort in this essay to discuss many of these social constructions that have lasted well-over a millennia, but for the sake of the Lord’s Supper, I am more convinced for non-theological reasons that men should be the only ones that serve this particular sacrament.

Before you unplug, let me explain.  I think men should be the only ones to serve in this particular sacrament in our churches because it is one of the only ways that men can weekly take up the metaphorical towel and water basin and serve our ladies in our churches.  It is ironic that the very dinner in which Jesus instituted the Supper (and yes, I realize that there are probably only two mainstream evangelical denominations that would argue that Jesus is not instituting in this instance in as much as he was instituting foot washing when he modeled that act of humility), it is probably a woman who is preparing the meal and is probably serving the meal.  And, yet, somehow through a well-established set of cultural norms and religious forms and functions, women are denied social, and sadly, theological upward mobility.  I should pause and give a voice to many ladies I know that say, “I could care less about passing a tray during a service.” Or, “I think men should serve in those roles anyway because I believe God ordered men to hold positions of authority over women based on order of creation.”  

I realize this is not the intended practice or language of churches that have opened up gender access to their Lord’s Supper practices.  But isn’t that what we are really doing consciously or not?  Forget that there are zero scriptural references to make a solid theological argument for both the way we currently conduct the Lord’s Supper (not in a meal setting as practiced and modeled in the first century church of Corinth or meal setting Jesus has with his disciples) and the gender prohibitions that have lasted this long.  I have read and heard the logic around gender roles on this issue that I am currently not too interested in getting back on board this circular train.  I get that women were not given authority in the first century for whichever reason you believe (God ordained or cultural), but something that is intended to be a meal that connects the spiritual meaning to Jesus’s imminent execution and the ways we believers are able to continue to commune with Him spiritually, has been relegated to yet another “office” reserved for only people with rightly designated anatomy.  For a more recent rendering of this type of biblical proof texting, see court case Fremont Christian School v. The United States Appellate Court over the issue of providing health benefits to women in 1986.  In this case, the Assembly of God's K-12 Christian school only offered to pay health insurance to men at their school because they believed that the Bible legislated that since men were to be the head of the household, then they would only pay for insurance for heads of households. Keep in mind, 95% of teachers in this country are women.  As a result, they lost because their practices were deemed discriminatory.  I would have to search  long and hard to find a person in my networks that would disagree with the Ninth Circuit's ruling.

And now, we men have convinced ourselves that we are ready to give this role over to ladies.  I chuckle a bit when I hear that this act of empowering ladies by letting them stand on an aisle and pass a pewter plate with the unleavened bread that they probably made (if your church still uses that kind of bread) and cups they probably filled (if your church uses more than one cup, and I sure hope they use more than one cup these days) somehow is a way of saying that the kingdom of God is not about segmenting or devaluing based on gender.  Again, I hear the well-articulated arguments for this modest access, but I am not buying it.  In this case, and this case only for the purpose of this essay, I am saying men we need to pick up the slack and serve our ladies.  And our service does not need to be something that we establish as a gender Ace card we play undergirding our religious power monopoly.  Instead, we simply let those who partake of the sacrament know that we are doing this for multiple reasons: reminder of Christ’s death and resurrection, our new life in Christ, and as a reminder that God has called us to love our wives as Christ loved the Church. 

I suspect if your church is anything like the ones I have attended, the ladies are the real servant-leaders.  While they don’t get the titles, pay, places in the board rooms for the elder and deacon meetings (And you know what? They don’t serve for those reasons anyway.), they do the heavy lifting of many of the elements in our churches that keep us growing.  For that reason alone, men stand up and pass the plate as a modest gesture and message to our ladies that in a world and history that has and continues to expect service from women, we wish to serve you in this particular means of grace in our churches.  Churches if you have come to your own conclusions that it is time to ask the ladies to pass the plate, be careful that overtime you don’t relegate the entire task to all of the ladies in your community of faith.  Some of the most meaningful things that we do in our churches that facilitate relationship and community are the things our ladies are already doing.  Let's not pile on with yet another thing that we men will deal away if given the opportunity.

Please resist the temptation of proof texting on why you think the Bible teaches that women cannot hold authority over men, and that women ought to remain silent in our churches.  I am only commenting on one particular act of service in our churches that has its roots in a very intimate conversation between Jesus and His disciples.  From this, we have somehow flipped it into an office of which access is only granted through anatomical makeup.  This entire reasoning seems disjoined in 2015.  Confession, our church is large enough that I never have to stand up and pass the plate.  To be candid, I sometimes think that churches keep their gender fly-zones intact because they realize that they have waves of men that if they didn't have this simple task of passing a plate, they would disengage all together.  Maybe call it what it is, "We have churches that would much rather sit idle and let the ladies take care of the work." I don't specialize in forecasting, but I tend to suspect that we are a generation away from a lot of the "no-fly" zones from going away.  And then we will be left with the same set of questions that confronted the first century Christians.  How do we live out the story of Jesus in our lives so that the world knows we are called to a particular kind of holy living that emits a particular grace filled aroma that is pleasing to our Heavenly Father.  There is little room for jockeying for social positions of power when we strap on the cloth and take up the water basin to serve.