How History Helps Leaders
“We need to become a New Testament church!” My predecessor recounted the numerous times he heard that statement during his tenure. I like the response he consistently gave, “Which New Testament church do you want to become? Corinth with all its issues? Philippi with its infighting? A church in Galatia with a quick turn away from the gospel?” A quick survey through the book of Acts finds cultural and theological tensions introducing change into the fledgling movement. The early church grappled with its internal and external issues, and so has every generation since. A naïve, or at worst an arrogant, assumption concludes that one expression of the church is the true, unchanged, New Testament church.
Historian D. W. Bebbington details one era of the church’s changing expression in Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, a book classified under the history of Christianity in Europe. Bebbington’s premise asserts a church movement “altered enormously over time in response to the changing assumptions of Western civilization.”[1] The author begins by articulating the defining traits of evangelicals emerging in the 1730s. Those traits, what some term as Bebbington’s “quadrilateral,”[2] include “conversionism,” a belief in lives transformed by the gospel; “biblicism,” a high regard for the Bible; “activism,” real-life applications of the gospel; and “crucicentrism,” stressing the sacrificial atonement by Jesus on the cross.[3] While those traits existed during the two hundred and fifty years of the author’s span of the study, they transformed in emphasis and expression across that era.
Bebbington’s book divides three distinct movement phases within the broad category of Evangelicals. The first phase pays significant attention to Wesleyan Methodism, heavily influenced by the Enlightenment and rationality. A second phase emerged during the nineteenth century marked by “heightened supernaturalism” giving centrality to subjective spiritual experience. The third phase took place in the twentieth century and was shaped by Modernist Expressionism, including skepticism about objective reality. No single factor alone created the shifts to new stages. Bebbington elucidates a complex interplay of multiple influences. As a principle, movements emerge and shift due to multifaceted dynamics.
If I could ask Dr. Bebbington a question, I would ask: “During the timeframe in question, what exerted the most influence – the church upon the culture or the culture upon the church?” The author details cultural stimuli like the Reformation, Enlightenment, Romanticism and Modernism. Theological tensions, especially surrounding the doctrine of assurance, also led to a strategy toward activism to gain confidence in one’s salvation. Dr. Jason Clark notes that the connection between economic factors and the desire for assurance led to those dynamics becoming “intrinsic to each other.”[4] Bebbington refers to Evangelicalism during the influence of the Enlightenment and its emphasis on biblicism as “an expression reflecting the age of reason.”[5] He goes on to state, “at least for a while, Evangelicals had remoulded British society in their own image.”[6] He cites influence in both directions. His premise may tip his hand toward the external factors initiating shifts that resulted in ministry relevance to the culture in response.
A question I pose when preparing sermon material asks, “so what?” What difference does this make? While there are numerous benefits to studying history in the church, I will relate just one here. Heraclitus famously said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.” Changing the metaphor, no person steps into the same church twice. The church always exists in the complex currents of the age. No matter the type of church, it comes from a particular history, exists in its present form, and moves toward some future. Bebbington states, “Nothing could be further from the truth than the common image of Evangelicalism being ever the same.”[7]
In this time of disruption, change forced its way upon the church in the West. For some, change signals abandonment of faith “once for all delivered to all the saints” (Jude :3 ESV). I believe that planned or forced change unsettles many due to a human tendency to make sacred what God used to transform someone. The lurching changes produced by the pandemic can raise a sense of foreboding about the present and the future. “Is it really the church when it is online and not in-person?” “What’s next?!” Works like Bebbington’s give a leader in this age a tool to share the ever-changing nature of the church over its two-century existence. “Sure, change happens faster than ever, but the church has always been changing.”
For the leader herself or himself, Bebbington’s book gives a context to their work that history preceded them and a future will follow them. Every leader is leading that organization somewhere within a specific cultural context. May history help leaders in this cultural moment to experience the assessment made of King David in Acts 13:36, “For David, when he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep….” Dr. Bebbington helps leaders today to understand how leaders of past thought, believed and acted in their generation. May that help prepare leaders for a moment like this one.
[1] D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1989), 19.
[2] John Turner, “What Is Evangelicalism,” Anxious Bench https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2012/06/what-is-evangelicalism/ accessed February 2, 2022.
[3] Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 3.
[4] Jason Paul Clark, “Evangelicalism and Capitalism: A Reparative Account and Diagnosis of Pathogeneses in the Relationship” (diss., George Fox University, 2018), 62, https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/gfes/132.
[5] Bebbington, 53.
[6] Ibid., 150.
[7] Ibid., 271.
About the Author
Roy Gruber
Husband, father, pastor, student, and sojourner in Babylon8 responses to “How History Helps Leaders”
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Nice post Roy: I like the quote from Heraclitus and how it applies to our churches. The church I attend is in flux, growing finally after a period of years of struggle. The older members commented to me how much the church has changed. The same is true with our culture and it is always in flux. It reminds me how we must always keep our walk with Christ fresh, strong, current. That is the one constant; everything else is changing. This strengthens my reliance and faith in Christ, what about you?
Troy, more than ever in life of faith, culture changes so quickly and it has led me to be more focused on eternal things that don’t change.
Great post. I love your opening line. I too hear that question often, just his past week actually.
Also, this is a great question to pond: “During the timeframe in question, what exerted the most influence – the church upon the culture or the culture upon the church?”
Sad as it may be, it sounds inevitable that at some point we will be influenced and not be the influencers. We certainly see this in Scripture, as I see it in my own life.
Roy,
I really appreciate how you tied the differences of the various New Testament churches with the Evangelical Movement. I think your question about culture’s influence on Evangelism or Evangelism’s influence on the culture is particularly insightful and important. What are your thoughts on this? How would knowing the source of influence impact how you lead?
Denise, I believe, for the most part, that culture influences the church initially and then the church reacts and seeks to stay relevant to the change around it. Perhaps that is due to the consumeristic nature so prevalent in American culture??
I will take a stab at your question to the author. The answer is both and.
The church has always been influenced by the greater culture, and the culture has always been affected by the church. Just in the New Testament alone, we see the symbiotic relationship of church and culture; the tremendous Gentile inclusion, the expansion of the mission into Europe, the changing of the church polity to march the governmental structure of Rome.
In the period of 312-325 AD, under Constantine, we see how the faith influenced the culture shift of the Empire, while the Empire gave shape to how the church structure was formed, who served as the head of the church, and how the church buildings themselves were erected or transformed from public to faith-centered buildings.
Roy, thank you for your thoughtful and thought-provoking post. I really appreciate, like others, the connections you made between NT church realities, Bebbington and Clark’s writings about this mutual influence between church and culture, and current pandemic influences on the church. I’m curious, you mention questions the pandemic is raising about potential changes in church life. What glimpses do you have of how the gift of the church has influenced USA culture (or Ogden, UT culture) during this pandemic time? Two years isn’t, in some ways, a very long time for cultural influence to be seen, yet, I would still value your perceptions.
That could be a long conversation, but I’ll give you my short answer: COVID accelerated trends already underway, i.e. less people attending in person, the rise of online, different giving patterns, etc. To use an old analogy, COVID moved the “needle” on the record quickly on issues unfolding more slowly. I don’t think life in church ministry will return to what it was pre-COVID. We will need to adapt to the new reality.