The Post-Church Church: The Shift from Program and Place to People and Practice

By Peter Sung

These last few years represent the wildfire years for the culture and for the church, not so that the church may die but so that the church may repent and live again. If you only consider the usual metrics as surveys do, it can look like the church, and maybe even Christianity itself, is declining in America, but is it? With clarity, humility, and love for the church, Peter holds out hope and brings keen analysis of trends and our cultural moment that rings true and points toward a much-needed paradigm shift--a call for the church to be essential in its theology, humble in its practice of power, relational in its focus, and trusting of a supernatural God, who is able to do abundantly to bring about a postfire superbloom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889432784

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The Post-Church Church: The Shift from Program and Place to People and Practice

Peter Sung

ISBN 979-8-88943-277-7 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88943-278-4 (digital)

Copyright © 2023 by Peter Sung

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Wildfire in the Church

Decline

The Five Effects of the Pandemic

Wildfire in Society

Trump, Floyd, and the Pandemic

Diversification and Redistribution: The Unifying Theory

Recommended Shifts for the Church

Renegotiations

Essential

Relational

Humble

Supernatural

Conclusion

About the Author

Acknowledgments

The trail provides is a phrase my wife picked up from hikers on the PCT and captures the way I've felt over these last three years. And as often is the case, provision came by way of people with timely words, generous attitudes, and unsolicited votes of confidence. It is a profoundly humbling and indebting exercise to recall the faces of the specific humans who showed up on the trail. Many thanks to Eugene, Joe (and HRN), Julius, Greg, Monica, Angie, Mike, and most of all, Susie. Truly, hope shows up when people who care show up.

Introduction

I remember, at eight years of age, shuffling into a Presbyterian church van at JFK airport on a hot, sweaty day in August of 1981. That's how Korean immigrants arrived back in the eighties, it turns out. As part of your planning, you secured a Korean church in the States to whisk you away into your new way of life.

The two main objectives for risking it all were to make money and to launch your kids into the American education system. But one did not simply immigrate and attain the American dream. For that, you needed the help of a subculture, an ecosystem, a kind of fertile soil, or fortified petri dish that gave you ready access to the resources you needed: community, social standing, safety nets, sometimes money, and a spirituality that binds it all together—in other words, a bit of home. It's no wonder money, education, power, and religion got all mixed up, but more on that later. At that time, the church provided a way to meet Maslow's hierarchy of needs, everything from physical needs and resources to love and belonging, self-esteem, and ultimately, self-actualization.

The church was how you survived.

Back then, the American life was not an easy one, to be sure. I had my fair share of trauma and injustice and misfortune, and I was adjacent to even more all around me, including those that involved my own family and loved ones. But that's not what this book is about. This book is about what I fell in love with: the church. Every single one of my friends and all of my family members thanked the immigrant church and then proceeded to launch out into their own versions of the immigrant's American dream. But I fell in love with the church itself and stayed.

I am starting with my own story because it's important to me that you know, ultimately, that I am not a critic of the church but a lover, trying to tell the story of the American church—where it's been and where I think it's headed. I might have been a cultural outsider when I arrived, but as far as the American church is concerned, I have most definitely been on the inside. This is the story of God's Spirit having its way through human events in order to bring her further along the intended trajectory. We might be bearing witness to something important, urgent, and unique, and my aim is to shed light and connect some dots and, most importantly, to find hope in the midst of a disorienting season for the church.

Getting inside

A senior in college, with over fifty premed credits completed and all but ready to take the medical college admission test (MCAT), I made a hard turn and applied to grad school to become a preacher. When I called my mother right before coming home for Christmas to let her in on my new intentions, she told me that I was her son no longer and warned me not to come home.

She was my mother, so I was used to the dramatic flair, but it did sting more than I had anticipated. I drove twelve hours from Ann Arbor to Queens, New York, straight to my newly married older sister's apartment. Apparently, my sister and mother had been talking. And after a night of feeling somewhat homeless, my sister nudged me to go home. Still feeling wary, I made a plan to sneak in when I was sure everyone would be asleep. At 2:00 a.m., I tiptoed downstairs to my basement room and turned on the lights. Like a scene from a Japanese horror movie, an older Asian woman, with long, black hair and wearing loose pajamas, was sitting on my bed. Ignoring my look of horror and shock, she launched into her rehearsed speech: Peter, I've been praying and fasting for two days, and I heard from God. You're going to be a famous preacher. Sit down! Tell me, which grad school do you want to go to, Harvard or Yale? Conflation of success and spirituality aside, I had my mother's blessing, and off I went.

Learning on the run

Even before I started formal training or education, I got right to it and started a church, then another, then another, then another, then another, and then another. If you're counting, that's six. I became a serial planter. Looking back now, I think I was trying to get it right. I had my list of ingredients, and I made adjustments along the way. In short, I wanted a church that I felt I could bring my non-Christian friends to without fear of embarrassment or shame, a place they would instead respect, trust, and turn to. This meant that the church would be at least these four things:

One, I wanted an honest, transparent, humble, confessional, vulnerable culture from the institution and from the people. Growing up, the facade, the hypocrisy, the lies—the act—to my young, idealistic sensibilities, seemed like the exact opposite of what the church was supposed to be. For example, the church I grew up in showcased a large, wall-sized envelope filing system right on the main entrance to the sanctuary. Every member had one of these cardstock envelopes where they placed their offerings, and each and every worship service, the most recent results of giving were read out loud into the microphone: the names of the members, the amounts they had given, and the category of giving, be it general tithes, thanksgiving offering, or petition offering. Even at my young age, I was keenly aware that Asian shame, social pressure, and good old-fashioned competition were in play, and not just genuine spirituality.

Two, I wanted the brain to be integral with the believing. I saw no competition or dichotomy between science and faith. In fact, I constantly noticed consilience across various disciplines, reinforcing truth and reminding me that God is truly the God of the universe. I longed for Christians to embrace science as a category and understand God to be the author of science, that to believe in divine creation is to believe that he created evolution too!

Three, I wanted the church to be a public-facing, missional movement, and not the social club of Americana that lacked self-awareness and persisted, willfully ignorant of its true purpose. The resource stewardship and allocation just did not adequately match the sales pitch. Was giving money to the church really an act of worship if most of the money was