A brother by the name of Christian Smith—never heard of him until I stumbled upon a couple of his articles—has written an interesting article entitled, Tub Drains, Planets, and Mountain Bikes. Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite (or spoil your lunch):
Medieval astronomers worked with a paradigm of the universe that assumed that the sun and the planets revolved around the earth. Even the Bible, they claimed, said so—a fact not incidental to our concerns. This paradigm informed the assumptions they made, the questions they asked, and the data they believed was relevant.
The earth-centered paradigm worked adequately. But over time, pesky anomalies arose, and making the paradigm account for them required devising an ever increasingly complex system. Eventually, an iconoclast named Copernicus proposed a new, simpler paradigm of the universe, arguing that the planets, including the earth, actually revolved around the sun. That was a radical shift of thinking, an entirely different frame of reference that drastically reordered reality itself.
At first, most astronomers resisted Copernicus' suggestion. They had careers invested in the old paradigm. Eventually, however, astronomers adopted the new view. And all of the old astronomical calculations, formulas, and tables began gathering dust—that's what happens with paradigm shifts.
What Copernicus did to medieval astronomy, grassroots Christians need to do to the traditional church paradigm today. Nothing less than a paradigm shift is the precondition for the people of God ever becoming what we know the people of God should be.
The old church paradigm seems to increasingly obstruct, rather than facilitate, the expression of the kingdom of God in our world. It is stale, cumbersome, outmoded. Trying to salvage it by tinkering with it simply will not work. Attempts to adjust or resuscitate the old paradigm will be no more successful in fixing the traditional church's problems than…the medieval astronomer's attempts to make their paradigm simply explain what it should have but couldn't.
There is little use scratching around for answers to the problems facing the so-called traditional church. The traditional church itself is the problem. The central features of traditional church—the professional clergy role, the laity role, the pinched definition of ministry, the church building, the a-relational mentality, the formal programs, the bureaucracy-impose inherent limitations on ever becoming what the people of God really should and can be.
With luck, you get a traditional church heading in the right direction, chugging like a train up the mountain of renovation. But like a Little Engine That Couldn't, eventually the hill gets too steep and the wheels begin to spin in place. The pastor feels threatened. The congregation becomes resistant. The bishop gets nervous. The mortgage on the building demands payment. The old-timers never did it that way. The newcomers just want Sunday school for their children. Whatever. So the train never quite makes it over the mountain of transformation. It either stays where it halted and the passengers claim victory, or it backs down to the point where it began.
[Note: Christian Smith (M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University) is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, Director of the Center for the Sociology of Religion, and Principal Investigator of the National Study of Youth and Religion. Since writing the above article many years ago, he has become an Anglican and now believes that "historical tradition is essential" (in a personal e-mail dated 16 July 2007). Many of his early ideas were compiled into a book, Going to the Root: Nine Proposals for Radical Church Renewal, now out of print. Posted with his permission.]
