Like other children of clergy, I spent an inordinate amount of time at church, at church functions, with church people talking about church business. I was privy to my father's many stomachaches (even, once, an impressive bout with colitis that left him writhing on the floor in pain) brought on by impossible board meetings and threatened church splits over issues as hotly controversial as whether we should, in fact, repair and pad the 150-year-old pews, many of which were cracked lengthwise and which therefore had the nasty habit of pinching people's rear ends just as they rose to their feet to sing a hymn or recite a response. I folded bulletins and then picked them up after services, crumpled, scribbled upon, and sticky with chewing gum. I listened to very strange stories, ate many Jell-O salads, helped clean and fill the baptismal tank, and feigned gratitude for handmade Christmas presents so bizarre that to this day I'd be hard-pressed to identify what, exactly, they were.
But for all the awkwardness—and, sometimes, the plain old-fashioned sinfulness—church was my life, and it was, almost without exception, the sort of life described beautifully in Chris Smith and John Pattison's Slow Church. My father is and always has been a pastor in small churches, churches that have little in the way of the polished professionalism of so many large evangelical churches. But they have, without exception, been churches of terroir (no, not terror, though they've had their moments)—churches that have the "taste of the place," the flavor of their immediate contexts, reflecting not the trends and fashions of national conferences, magazines, and Christian retail shops but rather the community that's actually around them.
That's no small achievement. As Smith and Pattison describe, American churches, like so many other aspects of American society, have been "McDonaldized," given over to principles of efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control such that a suburban megachurch in the Midwest may not feel in any way distinctive from a similar church in the Southeast. The specific shapes that this takes—"plug-and-play ministries, target marketing, celebrity pastors, tightly scripted worship perfomance, corporate branding … , church growth formulas that can be applied without deference to local context"—promise speedy growth and success that comes at a cost that the authors want Christians to consider. "You can't franchise the Kingdom of God," they remind us.
But you don't have to be an assiduous follower of trends to notice that we are in a cultural moment in which significant resistance to the homogenizing, commodifying, instantly gratifying ways of mass culture is gaining ground. Among the scores of food blogs out there, few detail how one might whip up a dessert from boxed and bottled ingredients in five minutes or less; they're all about "reclaiming" the lost arts of making pastry from scratch. Mason jars for canning homemade jam are cool again. I have been to parties where to express preference for a national brand over a local small-batch label would be social suicide. People in their twenties and thirties pursue hobbies that are aggressively unhurried: brewing, baking from scratch, knitting, embroidery.
For many folks there is a conscious rejection of "the cult of speed" and efficiency in these small and sometimes symbolic acts. As Smith and Pattison recount, all manner of "slow" movements—Slow Money, Slow Parenting, Slow Gardening—have been inspired the Slow Food movement, which got its start at a protest of the opening of a McDonald's near Rome's historic Spanish Steps. Slow movements, they explain, aim at something more than the mere opposite of "fast." They are about fostering deeper, more meaningful connections between people and places, and the pursuits and passions that are significant to them, inviting us to resist the automatic and mindless response, to be skeptical of slick marketing, instant results, and anything that claims to be one-size-fits-all. They aim toward greater thoughtfulness in a world—and in this case, a church—too often marked by unthinking consumption.
Pattison and Smith are laypeople, neither clergy nor academic ecclesiologists. They are amateurs in the sense that the late Robert Farrar Capon used the word—lovers of the church. And as Capon wrote in his modern classic, The Supper of the Lamb, "Amateur and nonprofessional are not synonyms. The world … needs all the lovers—amateurs—it can get …. There, then, is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace."
That is the task to which Slow Church sets itself: "the full reconciliation of all creation," although not via copying the strategies of successful megachurches but through "cultivating together the resurrection life of Christ."
The authors, I hasten to clarify, are not unduly critical of church models that differ from their own (they are, in fact, from different church traditions). It seems that Slow Church values can be and are present in contexts as diverse as Christendom itself. Indeed the whole point of Slow Church is that individual communities of worship will be and should be diverse. If there is a sine qua non of Slow Church, it is perhaps that churches should not be sharply demarcated from the communities in which they are formed: they should be sites of worship, of fellowship, of work, of play.
Lest the reader take Slow Church—with its emphasis on rootedness, local economies, local food, and so forth—as a spiritual excuse to become "hipper than thou," Pattison and Smith urge acceptance and embrace of the actual people and place God brings. (I was reminded of Nadia Bolz-Weber's dismay at the influx of uncool middle-class people in khakis in the midst of her grungy, gritty urban congregation.) Among the churches I visited as a child were several dying congregations in New York City neighborhoods that had, to use the commonly employed euphemism, "changed," meaning that Caucasians had largely moved away and now commuted to the shrinking church that no longer reflected the neighborhood. When members were reluctant to stay in their neighborhoods and welcome whomever God brought, regardless of race and socioeconomic factors, the churches invariably withered. But one of those congregations we visited when I was a kid managed to open their doors wide, embrace the people who were actually there, and flourish.
The final chapter of Slow Church envisions, quite biblically and appropriately, church as a shared meal; a "dinner table conversation as a way of being the church." Questions that arise during the course of planning a meal—What will we eat? Who will do which tasks? Where will we buy the food and who is invited to the table?—reflect many of the same questions raised throughout the book about the way communities of worship think about and implement their way of being in the world. They are questions worth lingering over, even for those who are content with their current ways of being a part of the church, for they invite everyone to a deeper enjoyment of and engagement with the often-strange experience that is church.
Life has taken me far from the churches of my childhood, and yet there are pockets of people, here and there throughout New York, mostly, who remember when my teenage mother showed up at their church, a Jewish girl with a Gospel of John in her hand in need of a church family, which they gave her. They remember my father in his motorcycle jackets, gold chains, and John Travolta hair, too cool for Bible study but longing to know more about the God he was grudgingly but irresistibly drawn toward. They remember my baby-faced parents' wedding, the dedication of their baby, and my father's improbable call to ordained ministry. They are the people who slipped us cash when we were out of groceries and held us up when my father nearly died of a then-mysterious disease. Lovingly, faithfully, they were and are my family. They showed up at my wedding and in their strong Queens and Brooklyn accents praised God's faithfulness to the two lost teenagers my parents once were. They are imperfect saints, and they are, even now, my slow church.
Rachel Marie Stone is the author of Eat with Joy: Redeeming God's Gift of Food, published last year by InterVarsity Press.
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