Early in my time as lead pastor of a congregation I served for more than thirty years, I happened on a comment from Eugene Peterson, almost always a wise commentator on the role of the pastor. Peterson mentioned that he was an avid reader of the poetry of Wendell Berry and that wherever Berry mentioned farm or farming he simply substituted church and pastoring. At Peterson’s suggestion, I began to read Berry’s poetry with the congregation in mind, and I found it helpful and wise.
Wendell Berry, himself a farmer as well as a poet and essayist, insists throughout his writing that a farmer must respect the land—the properties of the soil. In one of his poems—as I recall, not having access to my Wendell Berry’s, one of his “Mad Farmer” poems—Berry says that the true measure of the farmer is not this year’s crop but the quality of the soil that the farmer leaves behind. A bumper crop can be produced by a variety of means. One can, for example, dump on a load of chemical fertilizer on the land, but doing so will one day exhaust the soil.
The same is true for the church. One can grow a church large by the equivalent of dumping on it chemical fertilizer. Slick well-produced music, sermons that entertain more than enlighten, facilities that shout success can get people out and fill the chairs, but the spiritual soil will eventually be exhausted, as the sad stories of Anaheim’s Crystal Cathedral and Seattle’s Mars Hill illustrate. Especially as I grew closer to retirement, I told myself over and over again: tend to the soil. I hope that I did and that the spiritual soil in that congregation is still deep and productive.
The point perhaps is that some things become clearer by analogy. Farming can teach one about pastoring. Farms and congregations both require respect for what sustains them, for the soil, whether that soil is of the earth or of the souls of people. Recently, I ran across another analogy. Where I don’t remember, but someone suggested in something I read that a little book by Julian Johnson with the unprepossessing title, “Who Needs Classical Music?” (Oxford University Press 2002), might by analogy have some important things to say about church.
This is not farfetched. Johnson himself proposes the analogy between religion and classical music in his Introduction:
Classical music today occupies a position similar to that of religion in other ways. For a majority of people, it derives from an earlier age, very different from our own, and survives as an anachronism. While its apparent lack of modernity puts many people off, it is occasionally welcomed for the touch of solemnity and historical gravity it brings to big public occasions. It is tolerated so long as it presents itself as a wholly private matter—“a matter of faith”—but given little space if it begins to preach or make binding claims upon others.
The view of religion Johnson presents in this paragraph is sadly that of British academia, to which Johnson belongs. It doesn’t quite fit the American situation, but the proposed analogy between classical music and church has much to recommend it. Johnson goes on to say in the same paragraph in his Introduction: “Classical music, like religion, thus survives in contemporary society shorn of the claims with which it was earlier identified.” Words from 2 Timothy 3:5 come to mind: “In the last days . . . people . . . will have the form of religion while denying its power.”
Like religion—increasingly so in our time—classical music has hanging over it an odor of decline—of cultural irrelevance. Attend concerts, and the audience will be mostly old people, as is often true also of churches. But that’s not the whole story. There is another sense in which classical music is everywhere. It’s in commercials, movies, and cartoons. You can stream it, buy it on CDs, and get it on satellite radio. Some performers break through like Yuja Wang, showing a lot of leg, playing the five Rachmaninoff piano standards in a single evening at Carnegie Hall. In stilettos, no less. But as Johnson points out, the commodification of classical music comes at the expense of, well, classical music.
To hear the opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth here or the “Ode to Joy” from the Ninth there is not to hear the Fifth or the Ninth. It’s to grab what is marketable and memorable in short clips, but the symphonies themselves require what we are seldom willing to give: time and concentration. These works have a sequence, a language, a grammar that emerges across the whole symphony. As I pointed out in my last blog piece, this is the mistake that the Bradley Cooper movie, Maestro, makes. The exuberant end of the Mahler Second Symphony has no meaning apart from the despair and doubt that precedes it. And the Bernstein Mass has to be seen as an all-American commentary on the Mahler. Classical music is everywhere and nowhere.
Which is true also of church and faith. Religion is everywhere, but mostly it’s being used for purposes other than the purposes for which it exists. Notoriously in the political arena, Christianity has come to be used in support of white supremacy. It’s become a trope for a throwback to an earlier era. For someone to call themselves “Evangelical” does not any longer mean that they actually go to church or have any but the most rudimentary idea of what Christianity teaches. It means that they see the world as if they were an embattled white minority, that everywhere they detect conspiracies robbing them of their rights, and that their faith requires them to vote for the likes of Donald Trump.
But that’s not the whole of it. Christianity has become commodified, sold in clever books (what would Jesus say?), in commodified music (what would Jesus sing?), and in churches that pander to the views and predilections of those who want only affirmation (what would Jesus wear?). The faith is everywhere and nowhere.
Like classical music—like any art—the Christian faith resists what Johnson calls “immediacy.” What is immediately accessible in music or art or faith is what everyone already thinks and likes. It doesn’t stretch us. It’s pretty over against profound. Art requires us to look and look again, to be challenged by new ways to see the world. I recall going to the Art Institute in Chicago, wandering around among the great abstract canvasses housed there, and hours later when we emerged back into the city seeing it differently: seeing not only the buildings but the spaces between the buildings, seeing as if for the first time.
Faith is like that. It speaks of things beyond knowing. That is why the Bible is so difficult. It resists initial readings. It resists any kind of “immediacy.” And when in sermons we make it immediate—ten rules for being a good husband, say, or how to manage money so you too can live in a big house like the pastor—we use the Bible merely to serve what we already think and desire. But if we wait, allowing the text to defeat our initial readings, we will begin to see what otherwise we would not see, and when we emerge from the church, the world will look different.
Johnson says that if we are to approach art we must learn to be “open, receptive, patient, humble, and non-literal” (page 125). The same is true of the Bible and of faith generally. If we require church to reinforce what we already think, we will never hear what the Bible has to teach us. We will fail, moreover, to “encounter”—Johnson’s word—the voice, the presence, of the One who calls to us in the words of the Bible and in the liturgy. We will be stuck on the surface of things, and we will not only get God wrong; we will get ourselves wrong.
The Christian faith has a grammar. That grammar underlies the ancient Christian liturgy, the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, and such formative statements as the Nicene Creed. To learn the grammar requires patience and reflection. To learn it well requires what we are loathe to give: time and concentration.
Johnson suggests that “Perhaps the most important cultural choice we face today is that between distraction and contemplation” (122). Much of religion is distraction. And if distraction is what you seek, there are better distractions than most church services. What’s rare in our culture is contemplation: the long slow grammar of the faith playing itself out in scripture and liturgy. It’s worth noting that contemplation is the ancient Christian word for the proper reading of the Bible: theoria. There are no shortcuts to contemplation.
A final comment. Johnson argues that cultural choices are ultimately ethical choices. To choose the immediate and cheap is to choose against the human. I would add, it’s also to choose against the divine. The brilliant and noisy world in which we live with our phones and screens rarely allows us time and space to contemplate who we are and to what we are called. In such a world, is it not crucially important that the church above all be a place where time slows, where what is old matters, where an ancient grammar speaks into us the transformation of our souls?
To paraphrase Johnson’s title, Who needs this kind of church? I do. I suspect that you do, too.
Clay