From Persecution to Preference

How the Church went from necessary support amid persecution to optional and preferential

One of my best friends served as the pastor of a young adult ministry in Portland for a few years. He shared a story with me that was hilarious in the moment. But, with years of serving as a pastor myself, it is a haunting expression of a deep-seated disease in our modern expression of the Church.

There was a young man who visited the young adult Wednesday night gathering. After the service, this young man shared with my friend his “observations”. He said, “I’ve gone to a lot of young adult ministries in the area. This was good! I’d rate it as a solid eight out of ten. The sermon was good. I wasn’t a huge fan of the worship. This other church I’ve gone to has better worship. There’s more people there, too. But I like checking out other young adult ministries. I don’t think I’ll come back, though. No offense.”

For those who have served in local church ministry, how many times have you heard something similar? Maybe not as direct, but nevertheless, we’ve heard comments like,

“I’m looking for a church with a small group ministry for my age.”

“I’m looking for a church where the pastor preaches like Steven Furtick (or John Mark Comer).”

“I like the options of multiple service times.”

What do we call this? And how did we get here two thousand years after the birth of the church in a hostile setting?

What are we Talking About?

This post is inspired by a couple of books I’ve read recently: The Triumph of Christianity by Rodney Stark and The Many Altars of Modernity by Peter Berger. In reading these books, I gained clarity on what had befuddled me about the Christian Church context in which we find ourselves. What I am talking about is this: how did the Church go from a community of highly committed individuals who will sacrifice for the betterment of the community (Acts 4:32-37) amid a hostile environment, to a (more often than not) gathering of consumers of religious goods and services with a plethora of options. In essence, what took the church from necessary due to persecution to optional and decided upon based on preference?

Now, it goes without saying that the early church was not perfect. St. Paul would attest to that. There was some preference-based church commitment back then. “I belong to Paul,” “I belong to Apollos,” “I belong to Cephas,” “I belong to Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:12). Nevertheless, there are significant shifts in Western history that drastically altered how we relate to church, leading us to a preference-based commitment. It is within this context of preference that pastoral ministry calls Christians to the cross. A tall task, to say the least.

Persecution

The early church experienced great persecution in the first couple of centuries (though, the attacks on Christians were intermittent depending on who the emperor was and his particular agenda). It was not until the Edict of Milan in 313 A.D. that religious tolerance became the norm in the Roman world. However, persecution paradoxically brought great growth to the expansion of Jesus communities. Stories of martyrdom spread like wildfire. This commitment to the death by Christians brought, according to Stark, credibility to this new movement.¹

But then Emporer Constantine enters the story.

Power

Constantine ascended to power, had his famous (or infamous) conversation, and established Christianity as the religion of the empire. Opinions differ whether his conversion was authentic or not, and whether his conversion was a good for the Church or not. Whatever one believes regarding these two questions, we can agree, nevertheless, that this massively reshaped the trajectory of Western history and civilization. Though this is an oversimplification of history, we can attest to the fact that this cracked open the door to the Church ascending to political power and influence in Europe that it had not yet seen. And this attainment of power was held until, ironically enough, the Reformation and the door to the Enlightenment that it thrust open.

This perceived blessing of power had downsides. According to Stark, because of the intertwined relationship between church and state, the missional impulse was compromised for church leaders in Europe. Many clergy were lazy.²

Up until the Enlightenment, with a shift in understanding where knowledge was sourced—shifting from the powers of the church and state, to the rational capacity of the individual—the institutional Church operated with favorable winds in the sails. But when the Western world morphed from a pre-modern world (again, knowledge is sourced in the outside institutions) to modernity (knowledge is accessible to the individual via rationality), the winds changed.

Pluralism

With the advent of modernity, the societal reference for the transcendent was placed on the back burner.³ What was prioritized was what could be “known” in the here and now. It is in this environment of modernity that pluralism becomes the air we breathe. Peter Berger makes a distinction between pluralism as a philosophy (no objective truth) and pluralism as a lived reality, which involves coexisting with those who possess differing beliefs about the transcendent.⁴ What we are talking about here is the lived experience of pluralism. When there is no shared referent for the truth about the transcendent, there is freedom to choose what and how one worships. Therefore, as the title of his book suggests, modernity does not decrease religiosity, as Berger previously assumed, but creates the context for “many altars” of religiosity.

Along with modernity came the centering of the market in society. The market operates based on the needs and wants of consumers. This has transformed society, as Karl Polanyi documents in his tome The Great Transformation. This transformation has affected the Church. What we have seen, particularly with the church growth movement, is the appropriation of market principles in order to grow a congregation. Therefore, the pastor asks, “What does the customer want?” and then provides the religious goods and services.⁵

With this paradigm shift in religiosity, personal preference takes center stage.

Preference

When there is a plurality of options in a hyper-individualistic society, the determining factor of one’s commitment to a church is more often than not based on preference. In his book on preaching, which I wrote about recently, John W. Wright highlights this dilemma.

Commitment to the church, therefore, arises from the individual needs that the church meets. [...] Personal needs lie at the center of the church’s life in the assimilative church. Congregations face tremendous pressures to have their own needs met and to reach out to meet the needs of others for recruitment purposes. A congregation must compete with other churches in its vicinity to maintain membership and attract new members. If unending demands do not exhaust the institution and its personnel, the market pressures themselves can undermine the ongoing vitality of the church.⁶

Meeting consumeristic preferences is an alluring treadmill to jump on. But it is ministerial enslavement to “the market pressures”.

But what is the alternative to the treadmill?

What Now?

The other option is risky. And it may not result in outward pastoral “success”. It could, but that would require a significant move of God against the cultural grain of prioritizing preference. Here are a few thoughts on what this will entail.

1. Disappointing Discipleship

Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky famously define leadership as disappointing people at a rate they can handle. In a consumerist culture, disappointing people is an overlooked pastoral task. This does not mean intentionally being a jerk. But it does mean being self-differentiated enough to lead people toward the vision of being a Christ-reflecting community, and not toward meeting congregational preferences. Yes, of course, there are times to meet needs. Providing a safe and good children’s ministry may be one of them. We don’t want to put unnecessary obstacles for people entering into life with Jesus within the context of the embodied community. But we must be clear that the role of the pastor is to lead people toward Jesus, not preference.

2. Awaken to the Sickness

We swim in the cultural waters of individualism and consumerism with a plurality of options for our faith and community of worship. Therefore, it is no wonder we make our church community decisions based on preference. But a key pastoral task is diagnosing the sickness that inhibits spiritual growth into the likeness of Jesus. If a doctor does not honestly tell a patient their risk of heart disease and, therefore, charges the patient to maintain a healthy lifestyle of diet and exercise, that patient will continue living and eating in a way that will lead to a premature death. Similarly, if people are not aware of the cultural waters they swim—an environment that does not promote a healthy soul growing in love and peace—then they will continue to swim unaware in dirty water.

3. Tell a Better Story

But we must not stay with diagnosing the sickness. There is good news! There is a better way to live life. There is a better story to inhabit.⁷ People are far more willing to lay personal preference at the altar if there is a more compelling vision of life beyond personal preference.

4. Call to the Cross (Where we “don’t want to go”)

I am struck that the end of Peter’s earthly life did not involve a moment of autonomy. If I were predicting the story, ultimate self-agency, independence, and privilege is what I would have assumed. He was with Jesus during his earthly ministry, was a pillar of the early church leadership, and preached to crowds about the good news of Jesus. And yet, his life was not a trajectory of “up and to the right.” The end of his life was not privilege, preference, and autonomy. As Jesus said, “Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.”⁸

The cruciform life is the life we call people to. This is a hard “sell” amid a plurality of options that do not call to the cross. Nevertheless, pastoral work involves leading by example, laying our preferences down in order to pick up our cross and follow the voice of the Good Shepherd. For when Jesus is our treasure and our hearts’ desire, our preference shifts from self to Christ. We receive what we want after all.

1. Rondey Stark, The Triumphy of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2011), 151.

2. Ibid., 255-265, 303-304, 354-355.

3. Charles Talyor calls this the “immenant frame” in his book A Secular Age.

4. Peter L. Berger, The Many Altars of Modernity: Towards a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age (Boston, MA; Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter, 2014), 1.

5. See these two Substack posts I wrote about this market-driven church ethos: 1. The Cultural Story War and the Place of the Pastor, 2. The Market-Driven Church.

6. John W. Wright, Telling God’s Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 134.

7. Again, see my last post about preaching as story-telling.

8. John 21:18, NIV.