Scarcity and Church Life: The Death and Life of Denominations
Scarcity Will Not Be Put Off Forever, No Matter How Large the Cooperative Program
This is part of the continuing series typically for paid subscribers on how scarcity affects the moral life. This week, we begin looking at the ways scarcity affects how denominations behave and ask if scarcity is how we have denominations at all.
Some Brief Housekeeping
Last week, I posted a poll to ask what folks want to read for the next book club, and though it was very close, we have a winner: Thomas a’ Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ!1
This is a true classic, and looking forward to reading it with everyone. The date is September 18th, 2023, and I’ll be sending out details to paid subscribers later.
The Origin Story of Denominations: A Brief Argument
For some time now, we’ve been teasing out the dynamics of scarcity, which begin with a question of how the abundance of God squares with the experience in the world of there not being enough of nearly anything: time, food, money, energy. From there, we began to ask questions of how misevaluations of need propel us into dangerous places within this scarce environment.
There is plenty to read and comment on with respect to how scarcity forms humans more generally, but from here on out, I’m going to be focusing primarily on the dynamics of scarcity as they pertain to the gathered Christian life, beginning with the most macro of those conversations: denominations.
For those readers who consider themselves non-denominational, bad news: you’re not immune from the dynamics that I’m about to describe, insofar as basically every church is caught up in denominational dynamics even if they’re not formally a part of a denomination. Network forms of association may rely less on decision-making bodies or hierarchy, but the core here—the need to find partners to navigate a scarce world—holds whether you are officially part of a denomination or not.
One standard story of denominations is one of theological specificity: each denomination is said to offer something the others don’t. Following the divide of the Western Christian world into broadly Protestants and Catholics, Protestants began to subdivide fairly routinely over issues both doctrinal and ethical2. Over time, due to tensions between political entities within which these groups lived, and due to wide open markets of non-Christian countries, this story of denominations carried on unabated. This history accelerated through the next few centuries in two different ways: 1) increasingly fine-tuned denominational structures, parsed along the lines of various ethical and doctrinal debates, and 2) the abandoning of denominations altogether for networks of churches or completely standalone churches.
This is an oversimplification of the complex standard story, but I think, a fair rendering of it: denominations were born and then morphed according to the need for clarity and union with other like minds, for theologically articulated reasons.3 Practical reasons for organization are acknowledged—with Baptists, the reason is always missions— but as a secondary consideration.
What I want to suggest is that this story is wrong, for the following reason: if churches emerge in a world intertwined with scarcity, then there is no outside to this, no pure theological reason which then come undone, but theological reasons which are always grappling with what it means to be a church in a scarce world.
Now, whether we recognize that dynamic is a different question.
The standard story I’ve sketched above assumes that scarcity plays no role in how churches are organized. Either a church will join with others for theological reasons, or enact faithfulness differently and stake their own claims as independent churches of one stripe of another.4 Within that pursuit of faithfulness, according to this story, denominations happen for two reasons: either you are compelled for the sake of evangelistic reasons to join with others, or out of purely theological convictions, or denominations occur because of more practical reasons to meet common goals.
But even the second version assumes that denominations emerge practically because of efficiency—and that individual churches are perfectly capable of pursuing these goals alone. Even the practical reasons, in other words, treat cooperation as a good to maximize efficiency rather than a necessity. If what I’m suggesting is correct—that scarcity never leaves us—then denominations do not form for efficiency reasons but that denominations are born as a way to avoid scarcity: they are unable to go it alone and seek out partners to do so.
Bigger churches, in this alternate story, go solo not solely out of faithfulness but because they can: it’s a luxury. But denominations and networks are the norm precisely because going solo is less frequently an option for navigating a scarce world.
If, as I’ve suggested in this series, scarcity names a condition of creation which permeates materiality, it would follow that church isn’t immune from this. And thus, it’s important to be honest about the role scarcity plays in the most vaunted theological unions.
In my last book, I teased this out with respect to Bonhoeffer’s motif of isolation—that in a world under sin, we should expect that there will be disjunctures between people that we try to overcome in various kinds of ways. Scarcity, I think, is the other side of this: the sense that there is not enough encourages competition, which fuels isolation, and our separation and estrangement from one another fuels our scrapping over what goods there are.
Church denominations, grapple with scarcity in a macro kind of way: they offer people a relief from their church being an island in the midst of a great sea. To the degree that denominations form in this way, as a way of bringing together their resources within a scarce world, they envision other denominations as competitors for space in the world. Say what we will about receptive ecumenism: all of the talk about “patiently receiving the gifts of another group of Christians” gets tested mightily when budgets are declining.
What I am offering here is not a materialist account, as opposed to a theological one, but rather a theological account of how denominations operate which acknowledges that the reasons of scarcity are part of how we engage with God.
Throughout Scripture, the people’s hunger and their disorientation is always present as they teach their children or pray: we pray for daily bread because we live in this scarce world and look for God to lead us through it. That we tell ourselves a different story about how churches organize than this is to try to purify our theology of being creatures.
Two Pictures of Denominational Scarcity
This gives us a very different picture of our denomination of functions. A denomination operates not toward being able to do something more efficiently, but to be able to do something at all. Churches enter into theological conversations of doctrine, not because they could live out what it means to be the kingdom of God alone, but because they know they can only do it together. They emerge out of need, not disinterested affinity or to create a new kind of theological in-group.
To use my own people as an example here, Baptist churches formed associations, almost immediately. Baptist churches began in England independent of one another, but very quickly joined common cause within the first decade. Centers of gravity, emerged, confessions were written, and resources, began to be shared. They did so in part because of affinity, but also out of a recognition that none of these fledgling congregations could survive over against the Anglicans by themselves. A similar story can be told, and other denominational contacts, and not just where a smaller group emerges in the shadow of a larger one.
All of these dynamics—and the role that scarcity plays in the formation and lives of denominations—comes to the fore, like it or not, when the denomination begins to fracture. Over the last twenty years, there are any number of examples we could look to in which the property of denomination has been at the heart of legal disputes when a denomination fights, regardless of whether it is intra-Catholic disputes, Episcopal ones over the departure of congregations to other Anglican bodies, or Presbyterian divides.
I point to the property disputes in particular because the fight over who owns the real estate is where the dynamics of scarcity come into view, and reveal whether or not we have been aware of scarcity’s specter. It is one thing for a group of persons to leave an idea or a set of intellectual commitments, but another thing entirely when buildings come into play, and this is not, I think, always because we are greedy or materialistic.
For in these property fights, what is at stake is not merely ownership of a legacy, but ownership of the possibility of a materially productive future and with it future faithfulness. To lose the building is not just to lose a place, or even to lose a place where people were married and died, but to lose one possibility of future faithfulness. To be sure, God does not need this building or that, but people do. Our need for material signs is not some kind of weakness, but consistent with the kind of creatures we are: creatures who need visible signs of invisible things, whether of God’s grace or of how our own histories tie together. Scarcity is fought not in the abstract, but like all spiritual struggles, through the material.
There are few things sadder than driving through town and seeing boarded up church buildings, knowing what good and what sadness had transpired there, and knowing that whatever stories were left unfinished will forever remain so. To lose a place is to lose not just to lose the site of one’s memories, but to lose the connection which your future has with your past: a new future may very well be good, but it will always bear the disjuncture with the past within it. They are the signs of judgment that a scarce world frequently wins, despite denominational boards and cooperative programs and land-sharing arrangements.
If denominations were more aware of the role scarcity plays in their formation, I think these questions over buildings would take a different approach: disagreements over doctrine and modes of faithfulness will persist but because we live in a scarce world, there is a mode of charity which should accompany even this. There would be more building sharing among churches as a regular theological consideration, not just an accommodation to budgets, for example. When the PCA and PCUSA divide over sexuality, for example, the formerly United-and-now-shared building becomes both a provision against scarcity and a sign of judgment : there is common provision in the desert, but we will not live our vocation unless we live it together, like it or not. Our living together is not a luxury.
The other way for collections of churches to contend with scarcity is, of course, is to acknowledge it directly, and to live into this scarcity, recognizing that living faithfully means not apologizing for being creatures:
There is no need for me to write to you about this service to the Lord’s people. 2 For I know your eagerness to help, and I have been boasting about it to the Macedonians, telling them that since last year you in Achaia were ready to give; and your enthusiasm has stirred most of them to action. 3 But I am sending the brothers in order that our boasting about you in this matter should not prove hollow, but that you may be ready, as I said you would be. 4 For if any Macedonians come with me and find you unprepared, we—not to say anything about you—would be ashamed of having been so confident. 5 So I thought it necessary to urge the brothers to visit you in advance and finish the arrangements for the generous gift you had promised. Then it will be ready as a generous gift, not as one grudgingly given (2 Corinthians 8:1-5).
Apart from their common connection through Paul, there is little indication that in a world which prioritized locality, there would be any good reason to share resources between Macedonia and Corinth, especially against the backdrop of a famine.
But rather than bolstering their own goods over against a competing body far away, the Corinthians were encouraged to look scarcity in the face and embrace it: we help one another in this way is what it looks like to be faithful in a scarce world.
Having sketched roughly the ways in which denominations do not answer the question of scarcity, it seems likely to me that while denominations may continue until the end of time. There was a time when I hoped for denominations to offer some kind of vision of temporal signs of unity, united in themselves as a foretaste of being united with one another. Increasingly, though, I think that whatever denominational bodies there are will have to recognize that their reasons for existing are driven as much by need to stave off scarce times as they are driven by desire to manifest Christ’s unity in corporate form.
These two reasons are not competitive: we frequently do things for half-baked reasons that God turns to good. We frequently start joining in the feasts of the Corinthians because of the social benefit it provides, only to find that God has used that to actually make us generous in the process. It is my hope that the same might be true here: denominations emerge out of real practical need, only to find that God does something which moves through and beyond the practical in the process.
I picked this version because it’s more recent, with a good introduction, and tons of used cheap copies.
The history here is far too weird and varigated to encapsulate in one book. Episcopalians split off from Anglicans in part because the Episcopal Church was in the U.S. and the Anglicans were in England, and that gets dicey after the American Revolution. And then, within the Episcopalians, things split again over gay marriage and other prayer book questions. Methodists split from the Anglicans for similar reasons, though the Methodists began as a renewal movement within the Church of England. Don’t get me started with the Baptists.
I say this not as a judgment but just as a descriptive statement. No one will say that the NEA or various charismatic networks or Acts 29 began out of a theological vision for unity but out of practical need. Now, this may very well be a Protestant problem, but I’m not so quick to label it as such: within Catholicism and Orthodoxy, these affinity organizations take on shaping power to the degree that it becomes difficult to say—other than the Mass—what various wings of Catholics might have in common. But another time, perhaps.
The Churches of Christ, in whose university I take up residence, is of this story: independent churches who have no logical connection to one another apart from a common heritage.