Suburban Legends

0 comments | Aug 18, 09:13 AM | best-of-earl | by Earl Creps

With the help of many friends, countless email newsletters, and a small forest of RSS feeds, I try to develop a general sensitivity to what’s happening out there in the fields of culture, religion, leadership, and communication.

But we all live in the midst of an endless information explosion that can be just as obscuring as it is enlightening. As a result, our own biases can lead us to gather the information that suits them, forming what I would call suburban legends that seem like truism, as obvious as gravity, social networking sites, and the next reality tv show.

And then the unthinkable happens. Someone actually does field research on the subject, and all my illusions are blown out of the water, or at least challenged. Below I’ve listed a few of the contrarian findings that I’ve come across lately. Of course, none of them is meant to be conclusive, since research is an ongoing enterprise by nature, but all of them jolted me a bit, like Jim Carrey sailing into the wall in the Truman Show.

1. Culture war:
Suburban legend: America is starkly divided between blue state, Kerry-voting, Volvo driving, Barbara Streisand liberals and red state, Bush-loving, NASCAR-watching red neck conservatives.
Contrarian finding: The Pew Foundation (tops in my book) survey finds that, sure, there are lots of differences, but that good old American pragmatism tends to trump them all, producing a much more unified nation than the NPR vs. FOX news dichotomy would suggest. http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=150

2. Eroding denominational loyalty:
Suburban legend: Church membership is declining all over the US because almost everyone views denominations as dinosaurs, big bureaucracies that served another age well, but a re hopelessly out of touch with grass roots reality today. This trend parallels a growing distrust of big organizations in general.
Contrarian finding: The Faith Communities Today study finds that, while denominations have a lot of challenges, their identities and loyalty to them is higher than we might think.
http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/quick_question22.html
OK, so that’s not such a big deal, until you consider this quote from Ellison Research’s survey of ministers on the same issue: “Pentecostal and charismatic ministers are the ones most likely to see things the same way their own denomination does; 82% say their theology is pretty much in line with their denomination’s. Fourteen percent feel their denomination is too conservative, and 4% say it is too theologically liberal.” http://www.ellisonresearch.com/ERPS%20II/Release%205%20Denominational.htm

3. Megachurches:
Suburban legend: Blind to their slavish devotion to modernity, really big churches have WalMartized American religion, creating shallow believers more interested in watching video clips on Sunday morning than worshipping God, and besides, they’re all from small churches anyway.
Contrarian finding: Scott Thumma has done one of the only comprehensive and scholarly studies of US megachurches ever attempted. His findings really upset the applecart on a lot of megachurches stereotypes. This survey is the source of all the articles on “megachurch myths” that showed up earlier this year on the net and in hard copy publications. I know Scott. He’s the real deal.
http://hirr.hartsem.edu/org/megastoday2005_summaryreport.html

4. Strategic planning:
Suburban legend: You plan your work and work your plan to succeed. That’s the American way, and it’s the right way and the only way. The larger the organization the more vital the long-term strategic plan.
Contrarian finding: Elliot Mintzberg’s, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning argues that
the planning process, while important, can put the organization in a straightjacket, reducing innovation, dumbing down leadership, and inhibiting risk-taking. So that three-ring binder on the CEO’s shelf, summarized in handy wallet cards for all the employees who will never make it to a corner office, may just be your worst enemy.

5. Postmoderns don’t measure:
Suburban legend: Measurement is an artifact of modernity and plagues the church in the form of quantifying attendance, “souls saved,” and other forms of benchmarking that twist the faith into something that looks more like our metrics than like the story in the Bible. Postmodern faith offers the cure for this “disease” by deemphasizing quantification in favor of community.
Contrarian finding: Bryan Murley’s intriguing blog, Emerging Church Research on 8 July 2006 http://emergingchurch.bryanmurley.com/?p=29 features “the top 50 weblogs as ranked by technorati in terms of ‘influence,’ i.e., people linking to the weblog.” Bryan says, “I’m doing a study of emerging church weblogs. I’m going to be gathering a whole year’s worth of posts from 50 top EC weblogs for analysis. And then I’m going to be doing some in-depth interviews.” Who says postmoderns don’t measure.

In one sense, these findings are just novelties. But they also have profound implications for what I do, part of which is trying to explain to people my age what’s going on out there. If I take a reductionist approach, melting everything down and pouring it into simple molds like lists of bullet points or anecdotes, I risk dumbing down everyone by conveying the idea that our context, church, and world, are a lot simpler than they really are. This is comforting, but misleading.

On the other hand, if I tease out every nuance, I run the risk of making my talks so complicated and academic that one day I’ll look up and be like one of those people on C-SPAN giving a speech to no one.

One of my friends on this issue has been Rubik’s cube, which I use to talk about cultural diversity. If only icons were easier to come by.