The idea is to take an existing church and alter it so that it can be lean, effective, and build owned space. The goals are to make the institutional church cheaper, more agile, and more effective, whilst making the Christian community more resilient in the face of hostility and change.

Strategic Thinking for the Negative World
The church needs to change. I find this hard to accept. I am a rusted-on, curmudgeonly, conservative, traditional Presbyterian. I do not want to change anything. I’m the kind of Presbyterian that thinks Charles Hodge was a bit loose. But even Christians like me, perhaps especially Christians like me, need to face the fact that the church in the post-Christian West needs to rethink how it does things.
This is not a Rob Bell-style call for a watered-down faith nor Brian McLaren-style attempt to cloak liberalism in emergent church “orthodoxy.” You won’t catch me wandering off the reservation on doctrine or even ecclesiology. As I said, I am a curmudgeonly, traditional Presbyterian.
I am talking about how we organize our institutions. We need to rethink at a strategic level how we operate, how we spend money, how we invest in the future of our institutions, and how we create resilient Christian communities. The world of the twentieth century is passing away and the institutional arrangements that have undergirded the church will need to alter in the face of this.
My motives are not theological — hence my distance from Bell, McLaren, and even people like Mike Frost and Alan Hirsch. They imagined an ecclesial revolution from the perspective of either theological liberalism or a sort of Anabaptist primitivism. They were driven by ideals. The emerging and emergent church types believed change was theologically necessary. I do not agree with this.
I believe that change is necessary because of practical and political reality. It may turn out that some of the ideas I outline below will have some positive spin-offs for discipleship and community, some that people like Frost and Hirsch would welcome. Indeed, some of the ideas are needed for that reason, but this is not theologically necessary, nor are my prescriptions driven by high ideals. They are driven by that thing that every anabaptist primitivist despises: lucre.
The Future
I am no prophet. Even worse, I’m a cessationist. But I know that the future won’t look a lot like the past. Here are a few predictions, hopefully, founded upon reasonable suppositions, that undergird my analysis and constructive suggestions:

The world as a whole is going to get poorer and more dangerous. To see why this is, read Peter Zeihan’s The End of the World is Just the Beginning. We might differ with some of the details in this book, but the basis of Zeihan’s analysis is demographics, and demographics, as they say, is destiny. Demographics concerning the number of workers, tax-payers, potential soldiers, retirees, and people drawing on their pension funds, are set for the next 20 years. So, too, is the number of deaths. Demographic decline is set to swallow the better part of the world. The economic decline will follow fast. And geopolitical and military chaos will ensue. Which will lead to trade chaos. Which will lead to more economic and military chaos. And so on. Add to this the reality that the United States world police force is going to withdraw from protecting the globalist economic trade order with its navy, and it is hard not to be pessimistic. Other outcomes are possible; e.g. during the Black Death, people and communities increased in wealth. But something akin to the scenario Zeihan outlines should be one we plan for.
Churches will decline in numbers and wealth, mainly because of the demographic shift. Boomers are dying. They built, funded, and shaped the cultures of, the Western church. Boomers are the reason the church is the way it is in an aesthetic sense (bad CCM anyone?), but they are also the reason we have so many privately-funded parachurch organizations and Christian education institutions. They are the reason why churches can afford multiple ministry staff. They were rich, they are rich, and they are … going to take that wealth to the grave. It will be gone before we know it, all of the greyheads that currently make up 50% or more of our churches will disappear, and even if they were all replaced numerically, there is almost no way that their wealth will be replaced. We have peaked, and it is downhill from here.
Persecution will increase. This should be obvious, given what the scriptures say about the normal mode of operation for the church. We have had it sweet for a long time, but in the West, that is coming to an end. Even if we recede into a form of out-of-favourism, where no one hates us but everyone ignores us, things will be hard. But if it ends up worse, if we are outlawed, if our schools are outlawed, if we lose tax exemptions for churches, if we are actively ostracised from society, then this will impact churches’ operations at an institutional level and also place a lot of pressure on laypeople.

These are the main reasons the Christian church needs to rethink the way it does things. I firmly believe in God’s sovereignty. The Lord reigns, and earth ought to rejoice (Ps. 97:1). Nothing that God plans is thwarted, and there is no event, whether personal or world-historical, that is beyond God’s control (Job 42:2, Matt. 10:29–31). In other words, there is nothing about any of this is out of God’s control, and Christians should not worry.
But we should plan and we should be strategic. And note an important distinctive of what I am doing here: note the lack of theology. My reasoning is pragmatic. We will almost certainly have fewer people, less money, and therefore far fewer resources taken as a whole. Even if we don’t get squeezed by civil governments for more taxes or get the rug pulled some other way, we will have less money. Those darker possibilities need to be prepared for, too. But the even best-case scenario is not a good one, and the plausible scenarios are even worse.
In short, we need to consider changing. The church needs to change to survive and thrive. To use Nassim Taleb’s concept, we need to make our churches antifragile in a world that will despise us and possibly hate us.
Key Ideas for the Church in a Dangerous World
What should we do? How should we respond to this possible, perhaps plausible future? This is where things get uncomfortable. For a Presbyterian who is wedded to traditional denominational structures, theological colleges, and other such niceties of Protestant Christendom, this is hard. However, these prejudices are also a strength, because I am going to posit some models which could work even in traditional denominational structures.
I believe in the Presbyterian polity. You might believe in episcopacy, or something different. You might not really care about church polity. Let me again emphasize that the ideas below are not meant to make you think of (once again) Mike Frost and Anabaptist primitivism. They should make you think of keeping the ecclesial scaffolding you already have but changing the building inside the scaffolding.
To properly understand my prescriptions and ideas, on top of the basic assumptions about the future outlined above, there are two ideas that readers should grasp.

Ecclesial institutions will need to be lean.
The church, in its organic form, will need owned space.

Put another way, the institutional church will ideally operate with less real estate, whilst the organic church needs more. This may seem contradictory, but there is reason behind this.
An Institutional Church that is Lean
In the first instance, the institutional church is, at this point, a big target for people who hate Christ and his Church. And it has a big target on its back — property. Property makes the church more vulnerable. The church is more vulnerable to being inflexible, to be unwilling to adjust to the environment around her when she is laden with sanctuaries, seminaries, and office buildings. These are blessings when things are going well. These could be blessings when things are not going well.
But my sense is this will not be the case moving forward. They are a target. People who hate God and what Christians stand for can get at us via our property through legal avenues. Who is going to be targeting the church? Well, the same people who are chasing us now. Activists from left-wing groups, but possibly governments as well. This woke revolution is not just going to blow over. This is one reason to make the institutional church leaner.
But there is another one: mission. Buildings can be a vehicle for mission, certainly. But into the next age of the church in the West, I believe they will be a barrier to mission. They will create big legal and financial headaches for an institution that is under siege, and they will burden the church’s mission.
The church in the developing world offers a model. Where there is a high level of difficulty in establishing a local church ministry, churches grow and multiply when the church is lean. Churches grow and multiply when they use a model that is focused on homes and is, in turn, replicable. It is low on staff, low on overheads, and big on house churches with local pastoral leadership. It is a house church which, when it gets too big, plants a further house church with a new leader.
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Written by Ben C. Dunson |
Friday, July 21, 2023
Four unique ways in which Proverbs provides wisdom for political rule: 1) the way in which good government–contrary to the liberal dream of moral neutrality–is wise government, 2) the nature of true social justice, 3) the nature of a virtuous, healthy nation and what is necessary to maintain it, and 4) the necessary moral competency of rulers at all levels of government.

Yoram Hazony has risen to prominence as a political philosopher and commentator. My first encounter with him, however, was through his book God and Politics in Esther, which is a fascinating reading of the biblical book of Esther. Most Christian interpretations of Esther (that I am familiar with anyway) would see the central theme of the book as God’s hidden providence: God’s name does not appear, and yet the circumstances that lead to Esther’s triumph over the enemies of God’s people are nothing short of miraculous.
Hazony, however, takes a very different approach. He contends that Esther seems
to bypass issues of theology and religious observance to cope with the more burning issue of the actual physical survival of the Jews. For this reason, the book of Esther deals first and foremost with the problem of a Jewish politics in exile: how the Jews, deprived of every sovereign institution of power, may nevertheless participate in, and in the last resort make use of, the authority of an alien government to ensure their own vital interests, and in this case their lives. Esther offers its readers a choice between two antithetical conditions – the one being a nightmare of impotence . . . and the other, in which Mordechai the Jew rises to a position of great power with the ability to act in defense of the Jews . . . The nature of this utterly political choice – and how it is to be made in practice – is the principal concern and teaching of the book of Esther. (p. 3)
I think the hidden providence of God is a more important theme in Esther than Hazony does. However, his approach to the book sparked my interest and got me wondering what it might look like to study other books of the Bible to see what could be gleaned from them regarding political action.
In this article, I will focus on Proverbs. I do this because Proverbs often explicitly addresses what we would today call politics: many of its aphorisms are unambiguously about what governing officials should be like and how they must rule. In doing so it addresses politics at its most basic and fundamental level.
This may initially strike readers as a strange thing to say. More often than not Proverbs is read by Christians as a series of isolated wisdom statements meant to illuminate the path of their own personal piety. The book is read, in other words, individualistically.
The opening verses of the book (1:1–2), however, point us in a very different direction:
The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel: To know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight, to receive instruction in wise dealing, in righteousness, justice, and equity . . . .
Two things stand out: Proverbs is written by a political officer (the king) and is about much more than personal piety: it is about wise governance, righteousness, justice, and equity. These are the fundamental issues of government, thus, of politics. This is not to say that Proverbs isn’t relevant for one’s personal spirituality; it certainly is, but its opening framing points in a different direction, the direction of political order.
This focus is consistent throughout the book (a few examples will suffice):
Proverbs 16:12: “It is an abomination to kings to do evil, for the throne is established by righteousness.”
Proverbs 25:2: “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.”
Proverbs 29:12: “If a ruler listens to falsehood, all his officials will be wicked.”
These are the central realities of statecraft: how kings are to rule and the consequences that follow if they rule either well or badly.
In this article I will focus on four unique ways in which Proverbs provides wisdom for political rule: 1) the way in which good government–contrary to the liberal dream of moral neutrality–is wise government, 2) the nature of true social justice, 3) the nature of a virtuous, healthy nation and what is necessary to maintain it, and 4) the necessary moral competency of rulers at all levels of government.
Good Government is Wise Government
John Stuart Mill famously built his theory of liberal political order on the notion that the state should stay out of the business of arbitrating competing moral visions: “Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest” (On Liberty [Hackett, 1978], p. 12). What “gains the most” for mankind should be the sole business of the state, ensuring that no moral or religious system be imposed on anyone who does not adhere to it personally. Many, if not most, people living in democratic states today would agree, or at least claim to agree. “At the heart of liberty,” Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The state, we are told, is to stay out of moral matters. Those are for the individual to decide in whatever way the zer/ze/zim decides. I’m under no illusion that tolerant liberals are indeed as tolerant as they claim to be (“bake the cake, bigot”), but governmental tolerance of any and every morality is what most claim they support.
Proverbs will have none of that. Good government, Proverbs 8:15–16, says, is founded on true wisdom: “By me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just; by me princes rule, and nobles, all who govern justly.” There is no such thing as a morally neutral government. A ruler either rules wisely, which will lead to just laws, or he rules unwisely, which leads to the flourishing of wickedness and injustice.
Rulers, Proverbs 20:8 tells us, are obligated to rule in favor of what is just and true: “A king who sits on the throne of judgment winnows all evil with his eyes.” The apostle Paul agrees (Romans 13:4): “For [the governing authority] is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” “A wise king winnows the wicked and drives the wheel over them” (Proverbs 20:26). The civil magistrate who would fain neutrality regarding good and evil is the epitome of foolishness and wickedness. A ruler is to bring down the wicked. The opposite is not blessed neutrality, but societal devastation and destruction: “Like a roaring lion or a charging bear is a wicked ruler over a poor people.
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Scripture is clear that the order of the home begins with the stability that comes from a man finding a wife and becoming a father. Men must take responsibility for choosing a wife. “He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord (Proverbs 18:22 ESV).” Next, a father must lead in the discipleship of his children. “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it. (Proverbs 22:6 ESV).”

My first football season was in 8th grade at Skelly Middle School. I wasn’t very good. I was smaller than most of the players, but if we were winning in the fourth quarter, the coach would say, “Walker, you’re up!” and put me in the game for the final three plays. I played safety primarily, because it didn’t require learning defensive schemes. All I was required to do was run and tackle the guy with the football. Unfortunately, our team wasn’t very good either, so I saw limited playing time. This, however, never stopped my dad from coming to every game possible to watch me play.
My dad mainly walked to my games. He couldn’t read, so he couldn’t take the driver’s test. Therefore, he didn’t have his driver’s license. Since my mom was usually at work, he would get dressed for work and come to watch me play football. After the game, we spent time talking about the plays I participated in, and he coached me on how I could get better.
It was a special treat when both mom and dad could be there. However, I’ll never forget those walks home after the game, just me and my dad. We would let everyone leave the park and then make our way home. Looking back on it now, I realize how much I took those experiences for granted.
My father was far from perfect. However, he did his best to be there for me. He still is available to me today. Every child should be so fortunate to have the joy of this experience in their own life. Sadly, for a growing number of children, they never will.
Dads Matter
A growing number of children will experience life apart from their father. Most will never know what it’s like to have their father walk them home after a football game.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported the following in 2012,
“With the increasing number of premarital births and a continuing high divorce rate, the proportion of children living with just one parent rose from 9.1% in 1960 to 20.7% in 2012. Currently, 55.1% of all black children, 31.1% of all Hispanic children, and 20.7% of all white children are living in single-parent homes.”[1]
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