Exit, Voice & Loyalty: Emerging Church in 2008
10 Jan 2008
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is the idea and work of Albert O. Hirschman who explores the interplay between two essential options in organizational decline, being ‘exit and voice’.
Not only was this book written in 1969 (the year I was born), I can’t believe I’d never heard of it until recently and it is now on my list of most important books to recommend.
If you do some digging around, you’ll find it’s a key text still in print today, for anyone trying to understand the nature of belonging, and how people stay and leave organisations in decline. It lends itself to providing an understanding of what happens in a consumer culture with Christians and Church association/relationships.
It’s a short (126 pages) and relatively easy read, and I’ll try to get my notes in a readable form asap. But here’s one application I made from the end of the book, that explores (I think maybe) some of what you might see happening in emerging church in 2008
‘Revolution Eats it’s Children’
That phrase is a qoute from page 95, which explores how revolutionaries pay the price, take risks and and open up a gap between current reality and the possibility of a new reality.
Yet what happens is they are unable to brdige that gap, and make concrete the revolution they hoped for. The children of their revolution move into that gap, and they then feel the need to attack/critique those children, whilst moving further and opening new gaps of idealism.
So in terms of church I think we see this as early adopters and idealists for alternative realities, who then begin to critique the late adopters, who are perceived to have moved marginally into the gaps they have created. The children own the revolution and talk about and do things with it in their own way, and push against the parents.
So in terms of church, perhaps we see the revolutionary who looks for another revolution, and then deems the previous revolution to now be meaningless. So Emerging Church becomes passe, meaningless to early adopters, as they seek to extend the gap, and assert they were doing this before ‘Emerging Church” or ‘real emerging church’ is happening somewhere that the middle and late adpoters don’t know about (but the revolutionaries still do).
The revolution they wanted has not happened, as with all revolutions. I don’t think this process is all bad or pejorative, and is one small angle on a complex process, of the nature of revolution/change.
We need early adopters who take risks and open spaces, otherwise we’d never enter into them. We also need middle and late adopters who make some of thos ideas a reality and concrete.
This is the nature of ‘counter reformation’, where the exiting revolutionary can end up talking about a group, that no longers resembles the identity that it had when they exited and gave voice against it.
So in 2008, I think you’ll see more people distancing themselves from emerging church, who were early adopters, and yet more people than ever interested in it and asking about it, and finding it now ’safe’ to engage in it.
And of course what was revolution can quickly become institution, probably quicker than ever. It’s a cycle, that moves us all forwards, be we early, middle or late adopters.
Tagged: Albert O. Hirschman, Books, Emerging-Church, Exit Voice Loyalty, Resources
5 comments
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Comment by Jason Coker
3.19 pm on 10 Jan 2008
Sounds like a fascinating book, I’ll definitely check it out.
I don’t really know anything about this subject, but I would imagine in any developing revolution there’s also a serious tension between earlier pioneers who tend to be more idealistic and later adopters who tend to be more pragmatic. The pragmatic folks will do what they percieve to be effective and adapt accordingly, something which tends to drive the highly idealistic people nutty since those adaptation, to them, often appear to be compromises. Finger pointing ensues.
Of course there’s no standard creed or statement for the emerging church, so it will be interesting to see how this dynamic plays out in little pockets here and there.
Comment by steven hamilton
3.40 pm on 10 Jan 2008
i like how this drives me back to one of your critiques of some ‘emerging ones’…the whole idea (ideal?) of ‘wish-fullfillment church’…an idea you articulated in a very prophetic way…
those early adopters can be inspiring yet tragic figures (like che-guevarra or el jefe castro?) that find themselves trapped (tragically so) in their own pre-determined idealism mostly because the wish never gets fully filled, right? hmmm, following the revolutionary communism methphor…it seems the pragmatic Chinese have been better (?) middle and late adopters of revolution, becoming more-and-more pragmatic…yet the older generation points the finger at them as compromising (see jason (coker)’s comments above…
it indeed will be interesting to see the dynamic play out…but what (should) disturb me more is that unlike communism (which was not my revolution), this will be happening in my family…and how does that have any bearing and responsibility upon me as related to the revolutionaries?
Comment by Jonathan Brink
11.14 pm on 10 Jan 2008
Jason, you’d probably enjoy Nation of Rebels by Heath and Potter. All revolutionary, cool, or trendy ideas eventually get co-opted in a consumeristic society.
Comment by Paul
7.28 pm on 11 Jan 2008
it’s a great point bro – I think it was Andrew Walker who pointed out to me that housechurch has been great for the parents but the kids of these housechurchers hate it – makes me wonder what that means for us in the vineyard?
Comment by jprapp
9.39 pm on 11 Jan 2008
Jason – what a great riff from an “old” book. I want to check it out.
I feel extremely ignorant and blind to any more hopeful scenario than the scenario painted in your summary of revolutions that eat their own children. While my own children-eating-bias is in favor of empirical and statistical studies to confirm, clarify, or refute theoretical-theological works (yeah, yeah, I’m not done with the modern age), partly because I’m impatient with theory-laden-theological works that boil down to dueling assertions (say-anything) and to favorite anecdotes as proof-of-thesis, I feel that the book you noted makes a case for what I feel in my gut about the weird, perhaps inevitable Procrustean bed into which we force our children, and then kill them, if our bed doesn’t fit them. It’s weird, really, that Gideon is commanded to tear down his own father’s high places as Gideon’s first act of fidelity. Good old pops may have considered himself a revolutionary.
I had an experience recently that reflected on your liturgy thread, and on this thread too.
I went about my work, enjoying your response about how God sometimes shows up in Power in your services, and at other times, the Spirit does not show up as dramatically and noticeably, during the laying on of hands. Your response was on my mind when this testimony came to me. I must be careful about how I write on this experience, careful about detail, because I’m posting in my real name, and because one part of the work that I do is giving free legal services to poor people referred to me by local attorneys or referred by a half-dozen local pastors in established, conventional churches. I need to keep confidence. And not inflame or hurt trust by engaging in side shows. At the same time, I have a limited freedom to write about real-life cases in public conversation. Well, in this recent case (and here I need to be careful), some members of a specific local Pentecostal church, an established denomination that I like, told me a story about how the whole congregation was in a deep and powerful state of open worship, including open expressions of various spiritual gifts, and the whole congregation felt a unified accord and a common feeling of worship and freedom, and, several people spoke out loud and pleaded with leaders on the platform not to stop this season of free and open worship, and especially not to stop it by starting the formal program of worship (the liturgy); but, it came time for the program, and the leadership stopped the open worship anyway, deployed the liturgical order of service, and, the entire congregation fell flat, empty, lost, and some in the congregation mourned out loud, because of the felt-death of spontaneous worship, killed by liturgy.
My purpose is not to second guess the accuracy or validity of this claim, but to report the final analysis offered by a few members of this church. In discussions after this event, many folk in the congregation wanted this local church to go back to its original, revolutionary roots of allowing free worship.
Beats me. Really beats me how to solve for all of this. I don’t know. In the natural sciences, emergent systems can tend toward dramatic catastrophe or toward near-idle equilibrium, until pressure is applied. What concerns me is that in systems, including social systems (economies, political venues, churches) emerging into chaotic states of high pressure (revolutionary states free from “ordered” natural liturgies), small errors can have catastrophic effects. Small errors can kill our children by exploding them into catastrophe: reigns of terror. On the other hand, in ordered states (ice, or orderly economies), small errors have trivial effects. We can kill our children with a frozen hell of fixed forms.
How to sustain a revolution with sufficient chaotic freedom, but without making small errors tending toward catastrophe? .
It’s not a playground laboratory for the faint of heart.
A verse for the thread on bible-study jumps to mind – see Lazarus dead in the tomb, a victim child, eaten alive by an ossified and stalled revolution … Jesus saying, “this sickness is not unto death… come forth [out of the tomb of church]!” … resurrections by Grace for children eaten, or buried alive …
Jim
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