From its founding, Americans have argued over whether we are supposed to be a Republic or a direct Democracy. Thus, the names of the two main political parties, Republicans and Democrats.
But many of those arguments are built on a premise that both sides agree on – that we should be a meritocracy. If a democracy is ruled by the people, and Republicanism is rule by the people’s representatives (also known as a “democratic Republic” or “indirect democracy”), then Meritocracy is rule by those who have earned it by their merit.
It’s the presumption that our side deserves to rule because we’ve shown the competence to do so (“Our candidate delivered on his promises”), while the other side is framed as incompetent (“They failed to deliver”) and doesn’t merit the right to rule.
(Adapted from my new book, De-Sizing the Church: How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What’s Next, Chapter 4: (Pre)Made in America, available now. Look for my interview with Winn Collier, author of A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson, Translator of The Message, on The Church Lobby podcast, April 18.)
The Eugene Petersen Exception
You don’t need to read very far into current church leadership literature to see how meritocracy has taken root.
Books, blogs, conferences, and podcasts that champion a business-like approach to church meritocracy attract far more readers, listeners, and attenders than those that emphasize being a simple pastoral presence.
One exception to that rule is Eugene Petersen who addressed this issue many times. As one of the most widely read and respected pastors of his generation, he became very skeptical about the meritocratic approach to pastoral ministry.
His biographer, Winn Collier, recounted an episode in which Petersen’s pastoral supervisor “handed Eugene an overstuffed red three-ring binder filled with instructions on everything one could possibly think of related to forming a new church.”
Whatever problem Eugene might face as a pastor, he need only run his finger down the index and find appropriate instructions . . . But Eugene noticed how little God had to do with any of it. He sensed something elemental had shifted—from God, the Cross, the Resurrection, and the living Spirit, to finding out what people wanted. And then giving it to them. Petersen explained, “The ink on my ordination papers wasn’t even dry before I was being told by experts, so-called, in the field of church that my main task was to run a church after the manner of my brother and sister Christians who run service stations, grocery stores, corporations, banks, hospitals, and financial services.”
Winn Collier, A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson, Translator of The Message
Overcoming Our Size Obsession
This is the unintended, but unavoidable result of obsessing over numerical growth at the cost of everything else.
The American landscape has simply given that obsession a new look and feel. And it happened so quickly and with so much else to divert our attention that we haven’t taken the time to slow down, step back, and properly assess what it’s doing to us, our churches, and our witness to the world.
Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer address this issue in A Church Called Tov, “Something radical has seeped into the church in the last fifty years. The American meritocracy has reshaped pastors and churches, and a new culture has taken root, based on achievement and accomplishment rather than holiness and Christlikeness.”
There’s a lot about meritocracy that is good and healthy. Receiving a promotion at work because you’re better at your job, rather than because you share the last name of the boss, is good. But meritocracy has its downsides, especially in the church, where everything we receive from God is based not on merit but on grace, and everything we do for each other is supposed to be based on grace as well.
In such a climate, the role of the pastor has become completely redefined in many quarters, based far more on the business and meritocracy model than on Scripture. McKnight and Barringer write:
Churches today have been so greatly influenced by meritocracy, by the achievement and accomplishment culture of the business world that they now define pastor with business-culture terms instead of biblical terms. In business terms, a pastor is a “leader,” and leader is defined by the meritocratic system of American culture. But when pastors are defined primarily as leaders—or entrepreneurs or visionaries—they’ve already ceased to be pastors in any biblical sense.
Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer, A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture that Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing
Take a tour through the most popular pastoral and church growth materials and you’ll see that this is not an exaggeration. The entire process emphasizes performance over character. And that’s what we get.
Jesus’ Church Is Bigger
While there is much evidence that the Great Awakenings were indeed a revival of the heart and spirit for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, there were also many abuses of power and a great deal of emotional manipulation.
You get far more money from people by courting controversy and fighting enemies (real or imagined) than you do by staying with the slow, unspectacular work of hands-on pastoral care.
This trend continues today in anger blogs, conspiracy theory videos, Twitter feuds, Facebook memes, and whatever new form of electronic communication has become popular by the time you read this.
Those who chase clicks and likes in the twenty-first century are the electronic children of those who printed pamphlets to chase money and power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
When these elements of America’s relatively young history, entrepreneurial approach to economics, unspeakably vast geography, freedom of religion, people-led government, and meritocracy came together they gave the world something it had never seen before, and that every nation, government, and people have been affected by ever since: the entrepreneurial church.
According to Skye Jethani in his book, Immeasurable, “ministry in the United States is modeled primarily on capitalism, with pastors functioning as a church’s sales force, and evangelism as its marketing strategy. . . . The First Amendment prohibited state sanctioned religion. Therefore, faith, like the buying of material goods, became a matter of personal choice.”
Of course, the church that Jesus came to establish was here long before the Americas were even dreamed of, and it will exist in eternity long after America and all the other world systems have ceased to be. But we’d be foolish not to take a serious look at how this nation that George Washington called the “great experiment” has affected every area of life and has impacted every part of the world in ways both positive and negative.
(Adapted from my new book, De-Sizing the Church: How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What’s Next, Chapter 4: (Pre)Made in America, available now. Look for my interview with Winn Collier, author of A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson, Translator of The Message, on The Church Lobby podcast, April 18.)
