My Dad worked for decades as a foreman in a Birmingham, Alabama steel mill. With the modern rise of the Industrial Revolution the factory became increasingly vital to society. Factories from small to mammoth in size employed a significant percentage of the population. Factories became a great place to work. They provided security for their workers. They did not require too much, just an honest day’s work for the most part. One need not take risks, think too much, or go against the grain to be an effective factory worker.
In his book Tribes, Seth Godin decribes the two reasons factories became so vital:
The first is pretty obvious: factories are efficient. Starting a factory and filling it with factory workers is a good way to make a profit.
By ‘factory,’ I don’t necessarily mean a place with heavy machinery, greasy floors, and a din. I mean any organization that cranks out a product or a service, does it with measurable output, and tries to reduce cost as it goes. I mean any job where your boss tells you what to do and how to do it.”
The second reason we have factories has nothing to do with efficiency and a lot to do with human nature. Part of us wants stability. We want the absence of responsibility that a factory job can give us. The idea of‘I’m doing what you told me to’ is very compelling, especially if the alternative is foraging for food or begging on the streets.”
This is not all bad. For many, working in factories has been a noble profession. But two things have changed. First, factories employ less people today thus creating the need for more intentional workers in the work force. Second, the mindset of the factory, where life is set up into neat categories—work time, home time, vacation time, overtime, etc—has crept into churches. The idea of Christianity as an advancing movement became lost in the security of weekly services. The institutionalism of the world of the factory became the mindset in many churches, with age graded Sunday school, set times for services, standardized worship orders, hymnals, and rituals. As time passed, less risk was expected, less pondering of theological truths, to the point that even one’s spiritual life could be determined and utilized by virtue of spiritual gift inventories and classes designed to create disciples.
Discipleship increasingly focused on information transfer rather than life transformation. The gospel continued to be preached, but became ever more bottled up in attractional events while helpful and often effective tended to create the unintended consequence of focusing all the work for the Lord in the factory…I mean, the church. Or at least the church building. The “edifice complex,” referring to the increased focus on church buildings and the activity in them more than living the gospel in society, has grown with the increasing institutionalism of the church today. We too often measure a successful Christian by what they do in a church building (and how often). This matters. We should be gathering together as the people of God. But we should be measuring the sending capacity of our churches more than the seating capacity of our buildings. That is the stuff of movements.
The factory mindset was simply another way the church of the Lord Jesus shifted from being a movement to be advanced to an institution to be maintained. We witness this in the past: Constantine’s influence to institutionalize the church with the state led to a dark period (hence the term Dark Ages) where the movement of advancing the gospel continued not through the established church but through marginal expressions outside the “mainstream.” Later, John Wesley and friends would see a movement birthed out of the ritualized and routinized Anglican church. Wesley had himself as a young Anglican priest in training that he did not know whether a person could be converted outside a church building. But after being forced out of the established church and her buildings, Wesley let a movement that spread rapidly at first via preaching in the fields to any who would join that growing movement.
So whether the established Anglican communion of the 18th century or the church-as-factory model of today, movements have a way of challenging such a staus quo. After all, as Godin points out, no one today aspires to be a factory worker as a child. Instead, he insists people are looking for those “ who challenge the status quo, who get out in front of their tribes, who create movements.”
Leaders of gospel-centered movements understand the difference between timeless truth and the application of truth in changing culture. They see the difference between a biblical precept and personal preference. Peter clearly proclaimed Jesus as the Messiah to Jews in Acts 4:8-13. Paul proclaimed Jesus as the unknown God sought by philosophers at Mars Hill in Acts 17. Same message, different application. In the same way, leaders of gospel-centered movements today make much of an unchanging message while understanding well the culture in which we live. After all,
-A C major chord is the same whether on itunes, on a CD, or on the piano in your living room;
-We use language to communicate, whether via a keyboard and the internet or face to face, or whether in English or Chinese;
-We all have some sense of right and wrong regardless of religious heritage.
For believers, recognizing the need to change does not mean we have to change the message. Heresies are born out of the desire to innovate without this awareness. Cults have been born which in the name of religious fervor actually hindered the gospel. But for the gospel to advance, it must be lived and taught in a manner that those in a given culture can see it in its wonder.
What place does the gospel have in your life? Do you awaken daily with the thought that you get to advance a movement of God through the gospel, or does that thought cross your mind at all? What might you do today that would help you to focus more on the gospel?
Note: this article was taken from my free ebook ADVANCE: Gospel-Centered Movements Change the World and is available for free at alvinreid.com/ebooks.
To get a big-picture idea of how the gospel affects all of life see
Alvin Reid, Evangelism Handbook: Biblical, Spiritual, Intentional, Missional. Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2009.
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