Two Elephants in the Room: Evolving Christianity and Leadership

By John Bodycomb

With familiar candour and colour, John Bodycomb excoriates church leadership for evading, and layering over with
platitudes, two huge questions:

• What future for organised religion in Western societies? 

and (in light of this)
• What future for the so-called ‘religious professional’?

Fift

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spectrum Publications
• Release date: Oct 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9780867860597

John Bodycomb

John Bodycomb is a retired minister of the Uniting Church in Australia. He received his initial theological education at the Congregational College of Victoria and was ordained in the Congregational tradition. He did postgraduate work at Boston University School of Theology and the Melbourne College of Divinity. He served as minister in congregations in Victoria, South Australia, USA and New Zealand. In South Australia he served as Director of Youth Ministry and Christian Education. He has been a speaker on religious programs on radio and is a published author. He was the first dean of the new Uniting Church Theological Hall in Melbourne, where he served for ten years, teaching sociology and preaching. For eight years until his retirement he was full-time chaplain with the University of Melbourne. Since retirement he has continued preaching, teaching and consulting. He is an authority on the processes of church growth and decline and is active in inter-faith relations and issues of justice and human rights. His study interests include Jesus research and the dialogue between theology and science.

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PREFACE

Drafting Two Elephants in the winter of 2014, I wrote What makes a man of 83 decide on his early morning walk that he may have one more book in him – waiting to be written? On the face of it, such a notion can sound like delusion if not dementia, or at the very least, like self-display!

I am willing to consider such allegations, all of which could have a basis in fact. However, something else was driving this exercise. It is ‘elephants in the room’ – pachyderms in the parlour! Despite its frequently good quality, too much of today’s writing in religious matters looks to be evasive of uncomfortable truths. Official rhetoric from ecclesiastical boffins and boards is often larded with fallacies, fantasies and fibs, in a concerted effort to avoid upsetting anyone.

Hence the choice of title: Two Elephants in the Room. One of these pesky pachyderms is the future of organised religion in Western society. The other is the future of religious professionals; ‘god-botherers’ as they are affectionately known in some quarters. In a word, will Western society continue to need clergy and if so, why? What will they be doing?

It was actually the latter issue that was haunting me at the time. There has been much written on the future of organised religion, but a good deal less on what I call ‘RELPROS’ – religious professionals. Along with the shaking of the foundations (to pinch Paul Tillich’s book title), from the 1950s onward came the spooking of the functionaries as they began facing questions hitherto under the rug.

My contemporaries and I, in college/seminary during the early 50s, were aware of these and tussled with them as best we could. That they were not about to go away was clearly apparent to us when tortured colleagues began to spill the beans. At a clergy conference in 1957, walking along that mountain road lit by a crescent moon, a man much senior to me said, John, what are you planning to say about the resurrection on Easter Day? I can’t believe that stuff.

Over more than sixty years there have been thousands of one-on-one chats with religious professionals of every Christian persuasion where problems with structures of belief have come to the fore. This is, in fact, the single major cause of ‘relpros’ unravelling. Why, then, is it not more readily aired? Six reasons:

• The enormity of the issues generates ‘avoidance’ mechanisms

• The desire to stay within one’s network precludes disclosures

• Most need to locate causes of problems outside themselves

• The notion of ‘apostasy’ can have heavy moral connotations

• To concede unbelief says personal and professional life have been grounded on mistaken premises

• Belief and identity are so closely intertwined that collapse of one can make collapse of the other imminent

(John Bodycomb. Why RELPROS Unravel)

The truth of the matter is that few if any occupations have a bigger casualty rate than religious professionals. We have scant information of an exact nature on Australia, exit from the forms of paid ministry being often camouflaged under a term like ‘otherwise employed’. But we do have graphic data from what is arguably still the most ‘religious’ of Western nations – USA.

Tanner et al, in ‘Forced Termination of American Clergy’, find exit at some point in the work of ministry to be around 25 percent in a number of US denominations. The figure is highest in Assemblies of God, at 41 percent. They also point out that in any given year 20,000 ministers in the US leave their profession permanently! The quarter who leave have a mix of psychologically deleterious effects, and may carry some bruising to their subsequent employment.

(Marcus Tanner et al. Forced Termination of American Clergy)

Had it been thought that the 1968 landmark research of Jud and Mills in the US might give the system a good shake, this looks to be unlikely.

(Gerald Jud & Edgar Mills. ‘Ex-Pastors: why men leave the parish ministry’)

Our own Norman Blaikie, a decade or so later, was writing about the widespread discomfiture of religious professionals, but he scarcely raised an eyebrow in the halls of theological education.

(Norman Blaikie. ‘The Plight of the Australian Clergy’)

That, of course, was my own experience over a decade working in theological education. Hence my fear that we were programming men and women for failure – according to a model that belonged to another era.

It was this issue that underlay Two Elephants in the first instance, but then I realised that it was fatuous to pursue this without setting it squarely in the context of what was happening to organised religion in Western societies. Defining the profession of ‘ministry’ according to a set of unquestioned assumptions based on our traditional theology of ‘Church, Ministry & Sacraments’, plus a mix of doctrines about ‘Ordination’, could no longer be defended.

It has been a wild ride, and I am deeply indebted to many. As always I have had some wonderful critics ready to speak the truth in love! Most especially I would thank my dear wife Lorraine Parkinson for her encouragement, candid comments and wise suggestions. I thank also my good friend Peter Rohr, manager of Spectrum Publications, for risking his reputation and that of the firm once again!

JOHN BODYCOMB – August 2018

INTRODUCTION

BUSY DOING NOTHING

In the movie A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Bing Crosby sings with William Bendix and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, We’re busy doing nothing, working the whole day through, trying to find lots of things not to do … We are quite adept at this in the church, which includes nonsensical research projects that yield nonsensical results and nonsensical reports. These days it is hardly surprising that so many should be sceptical about so-called research.

Do you ever have one of those maddening ‘phone calls at meal time that start, Allo. Is that John? Who is calling? This is International Surveys Limited. You’re selling something. Oh, no, John. This is a genuine offer. Of what? A once-in-a-lifetime offer to specially chosen people like you. May I just ask you a few questions? CLUNK! (That is the sound of my phone being slammed down on its mounting)

Calls like this, which are either market research or more often straight-out selling, get survey research a bad name. But some is genuine, and it gets someone a university degree or even publication in some journal, while adding virtually nothing to the pool of human knowledge. Never mind; someone looks busy!

During my initial education for ministry, several summers went on factory labouring work, to accumulate funds for the ensuing year. One day in a food processing plant, while I was idly waiting for a stalled machine to re-start, the shop steward raced up to me and barked, Boss has his eye on you. For krissake (or something like that) grab a broom and start sweeping. I looked around, fortunately found one and set about obeying orders. It mattered not that the floor was almost clean and that having swept a small amount of dirt one way, I then turned around and swept it back. Had to look busy, you see.

Reflecting on that experience 64 years later, I’m reminded of my wife’s poster of a kitten – walking back and forth on a computer keyboard. The caption is If you don’t know what you’re doing, look busy. She suggests this axiom is sometimes exemplified in churches. In fact, I have an ‘icon’ of the phenomenon in a little handcrafted wooden device that sits atop my filing cabinet. When the handle is turned, pieces move alternately back and forth in fitting grooves. It is called a Do Nothing machine. Looks impressive!

In 2014 the Uniting Church’s ‘VicTas’ Synod announced the high-sounding Major Strategic Review, and circulated a questionnaire I would have failed outright when I taught sociology. But this created the illusion that something of worth was happening.

I have an unpublished paper in the computer titled Asking the Wrong Questions. Its uncomplicated thesis is that asking the wrong questions guarantees finding the wrong answers! Naturally, what follows on this is the administering of wrong prescriptions. We need to be asking the right questions. This is what I try to do in the pages that follow. These have been foreshadowed in the Preface, and need not be repeated here.

But there is …

A HUGE QUESTION COMMONLY AVOIDED

What must be mentioned in this introduction, without which to continue would be fruitless, is the single biggest question that confronts adherents of all ‘theistic’ religions and, almost equally, the general public in Western societies – whether or not they have any affinity with organised religion. So, what is this question? It is this: In a world where we know we are seven million miles away in space from where we were this time last week, and in a universe nearly fourteen billion years old, what ever do we think we mean by the formula ‘G-O-D’?

I was rudely awakened to this forty years ago by my colleague the late Professor Robert Anderson, with whom I was discussing how Jesus had been turned into a deity by the movement that survived him. I had said to Robert that the whispers I heard from candid pewsitters were pointing toward the likely collapse of classical ‘christology’. Oh, nonsense, John! came back sharply. That’s inevitable and that discussion is over. The real question is what ever we think we mean by ‘God’!

Trying to look busy these past two thousand years, Christianity’s manufacturers and distributors of godtalk have delivered a bedazzling conglomerate of beautiful nonsense that few but they and their acolytes have been able to understand. Churches duly lurched unsteadily into the 20th century (not to mention the 21st!) repeating pre-Copernican, mediaeval claptrap about God.

Their nonsense somehow survived the scientific knowledge given us in the 20th century, and continues enshrined in the hymns, prayers and pulpit pronouncements of men and women who should know better. The Bible says it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of a living God. It is also a terrible thing to be delivering nonsense on the subject of whatever this ‘transcendent’ Something is.

It would be some thirty years years since I first (and guardedly) used the somewhat facetious term ‘cetacean shutterbugs’. I am less guarded these days, as the reader will quickly sense. Such is the privilege (or trap) of getting old. My intent was to show how overrated both ‘godtalk’ (theology) and its manufacturers and distributors were. It was a plea for humility in our declarations about the Divine, commonly issued with such confidence and pomp!

I used the metaphor of a whale spotting cruise in the Southern Ocean, out to photograph blue whales. At 140 tonnes and more, the blue whale is the largest animal ever, and my fanciful tour party of wealthy whale-spotters had an air of competition about it. When one of these breathtaking creatures surfaced in clear view, all our photographers were clicking away feverishly, duly comparing results and arguing about whose images best captured this leviathan of the deep. Each claimed a better success rate.

In my use of this whale-spotting metaphor, I made the point (hardly necessary), that little static, two-dimensional snaps in no way could ever be said to have captured this huge, dynamic, ever-moving phenomenon. Besides, all of these cetacean shutterbugs brought to the exercise different perspectives, different equipment, different skills. In like manner, it seemed to me that presuming to capture in the word pictures of godtalk (theology) this Ineffable Mystery of whom we dare to speak was a somewhat similar exercise.

Around this time I had been given, by a university student I had helped, a copy of the brilliant work ‘Old Turtle’, written by Douglas Wood and illustrated by Cheng-Khee Chee. An exquisite yarn equally suited to adults and children, it begins with all the components in creation arguing about God. Not surprisingly, they all make