» Snyder Updates Major Trends 4-7

The second installment from Howard Snyder on his Major Trends.

4. From institutional tradition to kingdom theology.

I am encouraged with the increasing emphasis on the kingdom of God, broadly understood, and on “holistic” and “transformational” mission and the missio Dei theme among Evangelicals. There is still little understanding that a “holistic” kingdom theology must include creation care, but I see progress here.

The most encouraging thing in this area is that much of the church outside the U.S. has a more holistic kingdom theology and sense of mission than does the U.S. church (especially Evangelicals and Fundamentalists), and this likely will have a reflexive impact on North America Christians.

I don’t expect that Christian organizations will ever escape the problems and cycles of institutionalism (re: your comment), but still believe that more flexible and organic models of organizational being and operation will become more influential, for the reasons I spelled out in EarthCurrents.

5. From clergy/laity to community of ministers.

Throughout much of the world church, as I see it, considerable progress has been made here. The priesthood of believers, ministry of all believers, diversities of ministries and gifts are much more accepted today (in most places) than twenty years ago. The “second Reformation” needed here (restoring the ministry to the people of God, as the Reformation attempted to restore the Word to the people of God), has not yet fully happened, but on a scale of ten, I think much of the church has moved from, say, a 1 or 2 to a 5 or 6. Still a long way to go—in practice and probably even more in theology.

6. From male leadership to male-female partnership.

It is probably unwise to generalize globally and transdenominationally(!!), but overall I do see this trend continuing. Women are fairly prominent in leadership in more or less underground churches in China and Viet Nam and there are many women pastors (at least among some groups) in the Philippines, Cambodia, and Thailand, I understand.

In the U.S., seminaries are seeing increasing numbers of women enrolled. I haven’t seen recent statistics on this, so don’t know what the current trend line is, but the increasingly higher proportion of women at Asbury, where I teach, is striking. Many of these are on an ordination track in the United Methodist Church or other denominations.

In the U.S., there has been something of an awakening (a new movement?) regarding women in ministry in the churches coming out of the 19th-C. holiness movement. Groups such as the Church of the Nazarene and Free Methodists (my denomination) initially had many women in pastoral leadership, but that faded many decades ago with institutionalization and movement-decline. Now some of these groups are seeing a gradual increase in women in pastoral roles.

You comment, “Strangely women are prominent in leadership roles at the beginning and end of the movement lifecycle. In the pioneering phase it’s all hands on deck regardless of gender or social standing. In the decline and death phase men are less attracted to leadership roles in an institution that has loss status.” Well put. Women have almost always been in the majority in the church but are given freedom to exercise major leadership roles most notably in the early movement stages. This is understandable but the decline in female leadership represents a spiritual and theological failure in the church—theological because theologies of authority, ordination, and male headship get introduced which are foreign to the New Testament.

Special note should be made here of the Salvation Army. Though its military structure may be problematic to some, the provision of having women be officers in the army (the legacy largely of Catherine Booth) has meant that women have had and continue to have prominent leadership roles in the Army. This says something about the importance of structure with regard to women’s roles.

7. From secularization to religious relativism.

Yes, I agree: “It’s questionable whether ‘secularization’ was ever a reality outside of the wishful thinking of certain academic and theological circles. The problem is not that people don’t believe. It’s that they will believe anything.” I think the significant development here over the past twenty years is the recognition of the importance of religion (whichever it is—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, shamanism, economism, varieties of “New Age,” or whatever).

Yet major influential sectors of U.S. society, and also some sectors in predominantly Islamic countries and in India, are aggressively secular in the sense that they oppose theocracy or attempts to give any religion privileged status within the political structure. We see this struggle being fought out right now in the U.S., Turkey, India, and to some degree in other places. We don’t know where this will lead, but I do expect to see a growing reform movement within Islam—in part in reaction to radical terrorist Islamic groups—toward more religious toleration and pluralism (paralleling to some degree what happened in Europe and the U.S. in the18th Century).

So I think religious pluralism and also religious relativism (which is something different) will continue and become increasingly prominent globally. This trend is fed by global entertainment, advertising, marketing and “branding,” and consumerism. This is a major (maybe the major) challenge for authentic Christianity.

I also concur with those who say that materialistic consumerism, and the forces of global capitalism behind it with the commodification of everything, including culture itself, is the new religion which it is now heretical to question. And I don’t see the church (at least in most places) being very effective in challenging this. In the U.S. most of the church has capitulated to a consumerist, celebrity-oriented, entertainment culture, and this same dynamic will be the main challenge, I think, in places like South Korea, Brazil, and the large cities of China.

Clearly the church, if it is to remain faithful, will have to figure out how to exist counterculturally in a world of TV and instant global video communications.

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