Practices for the Refounding of God’s People by Alan Roxburgh & Martin Robinson

Author:Alan Roxburgh & Martin Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Church Publishing
Published: 2018-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Diagram 2

Voluntarism

Voluntarists presume that human actions change the world. Transformation comes from movements of people who act together to effect some change. Their conviction can be recognized in the myriad of calls to action based on the view that within every individual are the sources for world transformation. This can be as crass as the advice or actions of self-growth gurus, or as elevated as the vision of Obama’s “Yes we can!” For voluntarism, when we truly act out of our inner selves, world transformation occurs. It is captured in the slogan: “You are the solution!”

Structuralism12

Structuralism is the opposite belief. It sees the sources of change rooted in the objective structures and systems that shape human actions but are not directly under the control of human action. It is this underlying conviction of structuralism that drives so many of the attempts across all kinds of church systems to change or reorganize their structures. The power of structuralism as an overarching narrative in modernity is illustrated by the innumerable attempts of leaders to restructure their systems in the belief that that will bring about some desired cultural change. Any social change is the result of complex interactions across a myriad of social, hereditary, and natural forces that simply can’t be managed. Human agency is not the primary factor in social change; rather, systemic structures built into the ways human societies live and interact are the sources. Structured forces act independently of human subjects. On balance, the root causes of change lie outside the influence of people. Fundamental change is dependent on a randomness that cannot be managed or controlled by human actions.

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In reference to diagram 2, we can make two observations. First, there are lots of admixtures between voluntarism and structuralism. What is presented here are the sides of White’s axis without discussion of the multiple variants. Second, within modernity’s wager both the voluntarist and the structuralist positions function within the materialist13 belief that all change is generated from within the natural plane. Explanations for change from within the upper two quadrants are considered, more or less, as illusions in that they tend toward nonmaterial explanations for change by referencing some kind of spiritual or supernatural source. This particular use of the term materialism is quite a limited one. The word has a far wider meaning. Much about materialism travels well within the Christian narrative. Christianity is a materialist faith. Christians confess that this is God’s creation. God made the material world, declaring it all very good. God made us fully embodied beings that can only know and experience life as material beings. In this sense, Christians are materialists.

We are not materialists if it means only the natural world can explain itself. In the act of creation and in the Incarnation, God participates in this material world. Indeed, God can only be known within this materiality. The modern use of the word spiritual has produced an antimaterialist bias in many of the Euro-tribal churches. Spiritual has come to mean nonmaterial, which was never the meaning of the word prior to the modern era.

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