Five Brief Theses on Technocratic Culture and Church Life
Brief Lessons from Illich on Goodness, Freedom, and Apostolicity
As I make my way through some of Ivan Illich’s work, and particularly his Deschooling Society, I wanted to stop here, to offer some connections between Illich’s work and one of the primary things I care about: the shape of Christian community. I spent most of yesterday in San Angelo, visiting with churches and ministers in the area, and one of the things which struck me is the ways in which old forms are having to come to life under changing conditions: churches renting out space to daycares, a minister scrapping much existing programming to focus on cultivating small, intentional groups of discipleship, campus ministry reaching out across denominational lines to forge new partnerships.
Churches face innumerable challenges, and with those challenges, a temptation to become managerial entities, just in order to survive. With Illich, the reasons for so acutely being aware of the technocratic mind (or as I called it in the podcast from Tuesday, the managerial mind), is not that tools or technologies are bad, but that tools and technologies both do things to their users, and signify something about the kinds of cultures they emerge out of. It’s not, in other words, a choice between using the Internet or not, but as I wrote about Justin E.H. Smith’s book, a wisdom of what an Internet is for.
In other words, a church can survive through employing a technocratic model, but the costs are unbearable.
I have in mind a few more posts mining Illich’s work before the semester starts in force, but first, five brief theses applying what we’ve seen so far to church cultures in particular:
The technocratic mindset is opposed to a convivial one when it comes to church life, but this does not map onto anarchy versus organized.
**
What Illich has in mind is not “everyone doing what seems right in their own mind”1, but rather, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. The convivial allows for free exchange of our work and sharing of our lives. BUT: emphasizing that freedom is not the same as anarchy. Within debates over church life, this gets mapped onto the anarchy versus order dynamic, and this is a mistake. The opposite of technocratic—the managed church—is not the anarchic church in which there is no order, but rather a freed church, in which gifts can be given freely all around, with the assumption that people have been freed and equipped to give those gifts.
What it means for a church to be apostolic—to be in the line of the apostles—is not that it follows seamlessly from the orders and structures of earliest Christianity, but that it is a church which is being shaped in the apostolic way, that churches are being shepherded truthfully, into virtue and formation, with the past giving its gifts to the present, and the present giving its gifts in homage to the past and in hope for the future.
Thus, avoiding the technocratic world is not simply a matter of de-teching churches: it is a matter of agency and freedom for goodness.
**
When Illich writes about tools and technology, it is not that he wishes communities to dig with their hands, but rather to share the tools, and to teach people to equally be able to use the tools that all might contribute. Alongside this is a concern for whether the tools make us their masters, or cause us to be mastered by aims of productivity and unlimited work.
Some of the conversations around church and tech miss this vital point: the tools we use must be shared and sharable, and must not overtake the ordinary forms of life. Can a church make use of media to engage its neighbors? To a degree, but better to make limited use of these things in order to invite them to be common sharers. Use email to invite people, but as a way to enter into face-to-face communities. Use video to livestream if you need to, but as a way to draw people out of their screens and into a community where they learn the “tools” of the Christian life, and share those freely.
Accordingly, a church is only as free as its members’ ability to contribute to one another.
**
In making this point, I do not mean that a church is maximally free if its people are maximally doing things: this would be to assume that what we are as people is productivity machines. What I mean here is that people are being freed to give what they are to others.
If a church rests its success on how well its tools are generating numerical data points—eyeballs watching, engaged people clicking, etc.—it is not freeing its people, but enslaving them to the technocractic mind. Naming “freedom” here with Illich is that a community has become “convivial”, joyfully freed, so that it doesn’t need the “tools” of media to relate to one another, but is able to do so in a way in which there is equipping and formation in all levels. This in turn opens up a wildness in terms of the Spirit’s gifting, and in what new things might be born up out of Christ’s body. To deny that this body comes out of somewhere is to forget (Thesis #1) that its freedom is one which emerges out of a material world, with pasts and limits that are intrinsic to being creatures, and so the gifts of the Spirit renew and free the church for the giving and exchange of the goods God gives.
The agency of a church to contribute to the collective good is not endless, but that it is not the same as saying that it operates with a scarcity mindset.
**
The freedom so envisioned here is one which is not naïve about limited budgets or declining membership in many cases. We are kidding ourselves, I think, if we think that the problem or possibility of churches is that they steer national conversations: many of the inordinate preoccupations with Christian Nationalism come from the assumption that churches are unlimited in their reach. Christianity, when detached from communities and turned into a weaponized ideology, can become any number of pathologies, and I don’t want to deny that. But the agency of the freed church is not endless, for good or for ill.
But this is not to say that churches operate out of a scarcity mindset: the point of conviviality is that there is always education and formation taking place, and with that, new tools and goods are always coming to the surface. The gifts which a church have will be scaled according to the community, but that is only to say that its gifts are endlessly new and grounded in material cultures which it shares with its neighbors.
The technocracy problem for churches is less a matter of churches employing technologies that employing technologies that only a few can access.
**
There are two directions this problem takes. The first, the obvious one, is that churches may assume a level of technocratic engagement that is not accessible to all its members: that everyone can Zoom, or that everyone has a smart phone.
But the more subtle one comes in what Illich names according to the way that tools and schooling relate: that to be really gifted in a thing is to be credentialed, that one’s gifts are deigned valid by the bureaucracies of institutions alone. To rest a church’s future on the credentials of a minister alone is to say that there are some tools which are only accessible to those who have had the resources and time to go to seminary.
To be clear: I believe in the value of trained ministers, and churches should invest in that training. But the point of credentialing ministers is not that they are credentialed, but that it is a sign to the congregation that the ones who are helping to lead them have themselves been led, and that they know how to offer tools well to the congregation as a whole. The education of the congregation is one which can and should emerge from a variety of sources and forms: some formal instruction, and some “on-the-job” training. The training of the minister is not to validate the church’s existence, but enable the church to become a hospitable cultures for learning the arts of ministry. To return to thesis #1, being an “apostolic” church assumes an indebtedness to the past, and this involves the awareness of the past which a seminary education entails. But this alone does not make a church apostolic: being an apostolic church is a matter of inhabiting an ongoing form of church which gives and receives, which (to use Illich’s language) is engaging in convivial education characterized by giving, faithfully experimenting without the expectation that these will be productive or efficient experiments, and welcoming and exchanging gifts across the community.
Someone recently described this to me as the DNA of Baptists, and while I not only take this to be historically and genealogically wrong, I do take it to be the popular sentiment of many Baptists. It is also a tendency within Baptist life that I think will be fatal if left to its own devices.