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Tea Party Economist - Beating the State: Third Century Christianity in the Third World Today
Remnant Review
"A spectre is haunting Communism. It is the spectre of churches without buildings."
If there were a Christian Karl Marx today, his Manifesto of Third World Christianity could begin with these words.
In 1973, in his last years, Mao's persecution had reduced the number of Protestants in China to something in the range of 3 million people. The estimate today is 120 million. No one knows. This is a good thing. If the state cannot count them, it cannot persecute them.
Chinese Protestants have adopted a strategy used in the late Roman Empire. They are worshiping in homes and secret buildings. They stay on the move. In short: the churches do not have 9-digit zip codes.
The same strategy was used under the Soviet Empire before it collapsed in late 1991.
The same strategy has worked in the tribal states of the post-European empire world in sub-Sahara Africa.
The same system is working in Latin America, to the dismay of the bureaucrats.
This has received little attention in the West, because this strategy relies on invisibility. The West's intellectuals suffer from a myth of modernism: "If bureaucrats cannot count something, it cannot be important. It it cannot be computerized, it cannot be socially relevant." Call it the NSA's blind spot. Call it the IRS's nightmare.
The strategy is simple to describe: no permanent real estate. There are no permanent church buildings.
If you can't find it, you cannot tax it. If you cannot find it, you cannot regulate it. If you cannot find it, you cannot subsidize it. If you cannot tax it or regulate it or subsidize it, the state cannot suppress it. It's simple. And it is working, just as it worked from Nero to Diocletian.
There is a book that touches on this peripherally: Philip Jenkins' The Next Christendom (Oxford University Press). It has received little attention from the humanists or the Christians in the West. They do not think it is important, because anything that cannot be taxed, regulated, or subsidized is too far outside the comprehension of ether Western bureaucrats or Western Christians.
Chistendom means Christian civilization. The home church movement launches the church in a hostile environment. Eventually, it comes out of the shadows. Eventually, it becomes respectable. Eventually, it can afford church buildings. This is the moment of truth. Can it possess influence without possessing political power? Political power seems to be the nemesis of the church. Yet churches must speak to issues like infanticide, which they did in the Roman Empire. How can any institution speak truth to power, yet not become corrupted by power? This has been the conundrum facing the church for almost two millennia.
UNDER THE STATE'S RADAR
I begin with four principles of institutional survival.
1. Growth is not automatic.
2. Attrition is universal.
3. Growth must be greater than attrition for extension to occur.
4. Growth requires a plan.
These apply to every institution. To understand what is happening today in Black Africa, China, Latin America, and certain parts of India, consider the task facing a church planter.
This problem faced church leaders in Communist China in 1973. But, less well known, it also faced an obscure fundamentalist foreign missionary in India in 1991. He had just been thrown out of India by the government. Why? Because it was a way for the Indian government to quietly protest George H. W. Bush's Gulf War. The decision had nothing to do with religious persecution. It was politically motivated. Anyway, this is the explanation given by the victim, David Watson.
I had not heard of him until about three years ago, when I stumbled across the video of the speech that he gave to a hard-core group in a Texas church. His presentation begins at 13 minutes. You have never heard anything like this: Watson Video.
Watson enjoys flying below the radar. He is a hard man to find.
He has revolutionized Protestant foreign missions. Protestant foreign missions began in the 1740s. The Moravians were the pioneers. John Wesley imitated them. So, the field is fairly new. Only in the late 1700s did a Baptist missionary travel to India. Only in the late 1860s did Protestant missionaries reach China.
Watson in 1989 went to northeast India, known as the graveyard of missionaries. His family was expelled in 1991. He left, beaten. He did not want to go back. But he went back in 1992. Over the next 15 years, his six-person team started home churches that in turn multiplied. When he left India in 2007, the total number was 80,000 churches. Not converts -- churches.
Those who have adopted his strategy have started 200,000 churches, as of 2009. The number is larger today. On average, each church had about 60 people. This was 12 million people in 2009. I know of no system of evangelism for any idea in history that spread this fast.
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Why was this relevant? Because it costs virtually nothing to launch one of these ministries, apart from financing one missionary. This program then becomes self-funded in the recipient country.
There are no subsidies, either from Western churches or Third World governments. With no subsidies, the churches cannot easily be traced.
No matter what you believe about God, man, law, sanctions, and the future, this video is astounding. Here was a self-admitted failure who went back into the field. It is the story of a beaten man who achieved an historic breakthrough. These stories are always worth considering.
Only one thing can stop the process in its tracks, once it gets started: a church building. As soon as a building goes up, the multiplication stops.
His system is not imitated by denominational foreign missions organizations. Instead, they send out American missionaries at $60,000 a year, who in an entire career start maybe two congregations. It costs about two million dollars to achieve this. It also costs the salaries of the missions bureaucrats in the United States.
The foreign missions organizations will therefore not adopt Watson's system. Why not? Because it does not preach the defining, narrowly focused theological point of the missions bureaucracy. So, this defining denominational-theological point remains right where it is: locked up in the denomination. The entire denomination's membership is maybe 3% of the people Watson and his imitators have persuaded since 1992. Maybe less.
Here is the key: the process is reproducible. They have the statistics for Africa and Latin America.
This is a distinctively non-Western program. It self-consciously resists spreading the message in terms of Western categories. It is generic Christianity.
This is like a wedge. It is not the end of the process. It is only the beginning. This is lowest-common-denominator Christianity. In Pareto's terminology, this is the bottom 80%. It is the starting point.
TO START A CHURCH IN ASIA
Consider the challenge of India. There are about 1.2 billion people in India. There is no way to generate capital sufficient to build enough churches to evangelize India in a generation. The same holds true for China. It has to be done with a house church system. There is no other way.
The tremendous advantage that the Communists gave to Protestants in China is that there was either persecution of the church under Mao or the Three-Self movement, which is a government-approved church, whose members meet in buildings that can be monitored by the Communist hierarchy.
This led to the creation of house churches. All over China, Protestants create house churches. Sometimes the government arrests the pastor, but he is replaced immediately from inside the congregation. We don't know how many Protestants there are in China today, but a common estimate is 120 million. In 1973, there were probably fewer than 3 million. We know now what happened. All of this came as a result of the fact that the Communists either tried to stamp out Protestantism, or else they tried to control it by confining it in buildings, where the government could monitor what was going on. This has led to the largest, fastest evangelism explosion in the history of the church.
In terms of percentages, 120 million is 10% of the Chinese population. But Protestant evangelists were in China from the 1860s, and there was not much growth until the serious persecutions began in the aftermath of the cultural revolution of the mid-1960s.
Mao drove all the Western missionaries and pastors out of China in the early 1950s. That was the making of the Protestant church in China. That exodus freed the Chinese church from the legacy of seminary-trained pastors, church buildings, and large congregations.
We're seeing the greatest evangelism movement in the history of the world, yet we're not seeing it. We're not seeing it, because it has no buildings, no seminary-trained pastors, and no hierarchical organizations ... yet. There are only local organizations, and they multiply under persecution. They don't have any money, but they don't need any money, so they multiply.
PENTECOSTAL EVANGELISM
A variant of this system of evangelism among the outcasts began in Los Angeles in 1906, about two weeks before the San Francisco earthquake. It is known as Pentecostalism. It was a movement of the lower classes initially. It got little publicity in a religious world run by mainline denominations, which were moving rapidly to the social gospel and modernism. These people were off the American Establishment's radar. They had no seminaries. They did not even have tiny denominational colleges.
Today, the estimates of the number of Pentecostals worldwide is in the range of 250 million. It could be 500 million. This has taken place in one century.
In America, they have church buildings. They have a more visible structure. But in sub-Sahara Africa and Latin America, they have little social standing. They have minimal support from North America. Their churches begin in homes and storefronts, just as they did in the United States a century ago. They are dominant in zip codes that Charles Murray has described as "Fishtown" in his 2012 book, Coming Apart. They are a force of healing where the social fabric is coming apart.
They used techniques developed by John Wesley in the 1750s. They targeted people at the bottom. Like the Methodists in the eighteenth-century England, they do not stay on the bottom for long. The change in their behavior lets them move up: sobriety, hard work, and thrift have very definite personal and social effects.
Pentecostals had no theological seminaries. So, they could not be easily captured. Besides, no one in the Establishment wanted to capture them. Wesley understood this in 1750.
Yet by 1900, the Methodist Church was the most theologically liberal trinitarian denomination in the United States. They had colleges. Their leaders were trained in seminaries. They were respectable. There is something about respectability that undercuts Christian evangelism. It lures power-seekers to infiltrate the seats of influence within the organization. Money, respectability, and influence are like a flame to moths. The moths just cannot seem to stay away.
The process of infiltration begins with church buildings and zip codes. It ends up with seminaries. Then growth ceases.
ACCREDITED THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES
Seminary education was cheap fifty years ago, when I attended one. Today, Protestant seminary students can get federally insured loans. The seminaries have gotten onto the state's gravy train. The price of seminary education is now sometimes comparable to a private graduate school. The graduates must enter the job market fast. They have debts to pay. The job market must be conventional. It must pay good salaries.
To make the home church model work, a church has to abandon the concept of the theological seminary. In order to multiply fast enough to make a difference, a denomination cannot possibly require ministers to attend a seminary. This model was invented in 1808, after Harvard started moving openly to Unitarianism. It tacked three more years on top of four years at Harvard. The Congregationalists invented it. It seemed like such a great way to restrict the supply of pastors that the Presbyterians copied it three years later.
Think "guild." Think: "limiting supply." Think: "higher salaries."
What was the result? The Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, and the Congregationalists were never able to plant many churches West of the Allegheny Mountains. That was because they required college degrees and seminary degrees, which are limited to an elite. The graduates wanted high salaries for all their academic work. This led to standard churches east of the Alleghenies: buildings and congregations large enough to pay the pastors.
Meanwhile, west of the Alleghenies, the Baptists and Methodists used a completely different model. Laymen did the preaching. They adopted what became known as circuit riding. John Wesley had created this model in the 1740s. One missionary could be a pastor to half a dozen congregations, once every six weeks. Laymen ran them in between. Between 1801, when the Second Great Awakening began in Kentucky, until about 1820, the Baptists and Methodists started so many churches, that by the time the Presbyterians and Congregationalists crossed the Alleghenies, everybody had heard the message. West of the Alleghenies, the Methodists and the Baptists prevailed. This was an ecclesiastical manifestation of fundamental economic law: the lower the price, the greater the quantity demanded.
The East Coast denominations moved west decades later. Their harvest fields were in Baptist and Methodist fields. They grew when discontented Baptists and Methodists went looking for more rigorous theology and people with higher incomes and better educations.
These days, the Pentecostals do the preliminary harvesting work. The Methodists went liberal a century ago, and the Baptists no longer emphasize evangelism to the degree that they once did. German sociologist and religion expert Max Weber had a phrase for this a century ago: "The routinization of charisma." It seems to be a law of ecclesiology.
Pentecostalism outside the United States is the least routinized movement of all. It has cut to almost nothing the two largest expenses of starting a church: real estate costs and pastoral salaries. Pentecostalism in the Third World can start a church with practically no money. There is no way on the face of the earth that Western Christianity that is not Pentecostal, or that refuses to adopt a Pentecostal model, can compete with Pentecostals. It costs too much.
A theological seminary for the 21st century has an available model: the Khan Academy. There is a core curriculum. There is a core assumption about the way the world works. But the delivery system is completely decentralized. There is no system of enforcement. There are only online tests. The tests are administered locally, probably by parents. Authority lies with the parents, not with Khan Academy.
All of the professors at theological seminaries today should make videos, PDFs, tests, and reading lists of everything they teach. They should post it all online for free. Then they should either resign or else persuade their denominations to pay them to devote their time only to a graduate program in theology. But the denominations will not do this, as the professors know. The donors donate for only one reason: to produce men eligible academically to become pastors. Protestant denominations really don't care about advancing their theology, which they view as divisive, not to mention expensive.
The professors are not going to quit. They want lifetime employment. But the brick-and-mortar seminaries are no longer needed. The world is going to ignore them. (It already does.) The world will pass them by. (It already has.) They will train a handful of evangelists annually, and meanwhile a guy like David Watson went out and designed a system that produced 80,000 congregations in a little over a decade. Then, his work finished, he resigned.
There is no way that 7 billion people (soon to be 9 billion) can be evangelized in one generation by means of at least one seminary-trained pastor per congregation, seminary education, church buildings, and one acre of parking for every 300 people. It cannot happen. It is statistically impossible.
This is why Pentecostal Christianity has converted something in the range of 250 million people in about a century. World Christian evangelism today is mostly Pentecostalism, because Pentecostalism outside the United States does not care about the following: seminary education, church buildings, large congregations, and pastors who do nothing except get paid to pastor. Their only demographically serious rivals are those non-Charismatics who have adopted Watson's model.
This model began in the homes and catacombs of the Roman Empire. Slowly, the churches gained influence. They began taking responsibility for the poor and the outcasts. This gained them respectability. The Roman state fought this. It made it illegal for anyone to pick up abandoned babies and rear them. Abandoning babies was a common practice in ancient Rome. The Christians broke this law.
The Roman empire eventually collapsed. The church became the leader of what came to be called Christendom: Christian civilization. But power tends to corrupt, and absolute power -- asserted by the state -- corrupts absolutely.
ZIP CODES AND EVANGELISM EXPENSES
Let us assume that you want to start a church. You may be the pastor of an existing church, and you want to spin off a local congregation. This is extremely rare. Most pastors want their congregations to get bigger.
Maybe you are a young man. You have been trained to be a minister, and you don't want to be an assistant pastor in some struggling church, or even in a mega-church. You want to start from the ground up. What working model do you have?
There are two fundamental barriers to the expansion of the church. These are the two most important limits on starting almost any organization that is based on face-to-face contact. The first problem is the cost of real estate. The second problem is the inherent limitation of management ability.
What is the biggest problem facing somebody who wants to start a church? There is no question what it is: real estate costs a lot in cities. Real estate is incredibly expensive. Think about what it costs to start a church in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, or almost any other American city. Now think about London, Paris, Madrid, or Shanghai. How he will afford the real estate?
The real estate for a church generates money only one day a week. Basically, it only generates money for one hour a week. It is in competition with a business that might want the property, and the business operates at least 40 hours a week. If the business is international, it operates 24 x 7. How is a church going to compete in terms of what it can offer to buy a piece of real estate, if the competition is operating a business? This is why you do not have churches popping up around the country. This, more than any other factor, is why urbanization goes secular.
You can rent a funeral home. It won't work. The atmosphere is death. "Let the dead bury the dead." The dry bones model does not work.
You can rent an old movie theater. What killed it? First, theater complexes (centralized); then, Blockbuster (decentralized); then, Netflix (more decentralized).
You can rent an empty mini-mall. What killed it? Walmart (centralized); then Amazon (decentralized).
You can rent a public school in some states. This is a popular way to get started.
David Watson in India solved the real estate problem very simply: he adopted a home church model. The evangelist is the head of his household. He invites people into his home. The limit on the size of the congregation is therefore the size of his home. If he has a small home, he cannot run a large church. If he has a larger home, he can run a somewhat larger church. But none of the churches can get very large, because nobody owns a home that large. Anyway, none of the people who respond to the invitation has that large home.
The second problem that Watson's model solves is the management problem. When a man runs out of space in his home, he has to train somebody else to start a congregation in their own home. So, there is emphasis on multiplication. There is no way that there won't be a problem if the church is successful. The church is going to run out of space. So, before the pastor runs out of management ability, the church runs out of space. Everything is geared to multiplication, because everybody knows he is going to run out of space.
What I have described here does not afflict an organization that is exclusively digital. But churches cannot be exclusively digital. They have to be face-to-face organizations. They have to be fellowships. Facebook is not a fellowship.
DECENTRALIZATION
If we believe that decentralization is the wave of the future, then decentralization is the wave of the evangelical future. We already know this, because it costs too much money to build a church in Los Angeles. There is no way that building-based churches can grow with the population. There is only one possibility: home churches. But the ecclesiastical structures that have prevailed ever since Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire have adopted the structure of the Roman Empire. It is a top-down structure. It is a bureaucratic structure.
No organization can be completely autonomous and expect to survive. There has to be continuity over time. You have to design ways of settling disputes outside a local organization. Otherwise, church splits will be continual. But even this leads to two churches competing, which can lead to church growth. But there has to be an appeals court system -- for congregations and for civil governments. But the ecclesiastical appeals court should only be an appeals court. It should enforce certain standards for local congregations, and then it should enforce those standards only by specific cases that come up the chain of appeal. Anything more than this results in a top-down bureaucracy. We saw this with liberal Christianity, beginning around 1900, and peaking in 1960. Ever since that time, the more decentralized models have replaced the mainline denominations, which are shrinking.
Everything is being decentralized. Education is being decentralized by means of the web: Khan Academy. Production is being decentralized by means of smaller industrial units that are heavily computerized: specialized steel mills. Soon, 3-D printing is going to replace many of those models. Virtually everything except the state is moving in the direction of decentralization. But there is another exception: denominations. Churches have maintained the Western model, and the Western model is bureaucratic. The Western model is centralized. The Western model gets money into the top of the hierarchy, and in the hierarchy hands out the money for evangelism.
There is a big exception to this model: foreign missions. Independent missionary societies have been successful. Denominational boards of foreign missions have not. Why not? Because the money has always come from women, and women don't give money to denominational boards of missions. They give money to specific young men and young women who go out as teams to evangelize pagans. Women have controlled foreign missions' spending in Protestant churches for 200 years, and they have never bought into the centralized model. Women are much too personal. They want to meet the young men and young women who are going out, and they want to hear reports from them. They do not send money to a centralized missions organization run by the denomination. That has been the testimony of 200 years of Protestant evangelism, and it is not going to change.
Now what we need is evangelism that is at least 80% funded by indigenous populations. They are the only ones who can afford the manpower to evangelize the enormous numbers of people who must be evangelized in order to deal with today's 7 billion people, with 2 billion more to come. There is no other way.
What about education? The Internet is the future. Denominations will educate formally. Pastors and evangelists will serve as mentors to apprentices. The training will be practical. It will not be based primarily on the ability to write term papers.
Organizationally, you get both the one and the many. You get the one, meaning centralization, by means of denominational videos, and all the other training that can be put on the web. You get the many through so many local congregations that no centralized, top-down system can work. This is true in every area of life: economics, politics, and churches.
There are multiple denominations. There is lots of competition for ideas and projects.
What makes the difference in churches is face-to-face communications. It is little people, starting little home churches, bringing people into their homes, who will make the difference.
The mega-churches can be coordination centers for home churches. They can function as cathedrals did a millennium ago. Once a month, local church members can attend special functions. If things go well, these should be run all day long.
If every church member invited a friend to church next week, and every invitation were accepted, there would be no room in the parking lot. The real estate of the modern church announces: "Visitors not welcome." The structures have been designed on this basis: "Evangelism does not work. Get used to it." We have gotten used to it.
Decentralization is the Amazon/UPS model. Do not copy the local department store downtown. It is going bankrupt. The Amazon/UPS model is the wave of the future in terms of capitalism, and it is also the wave of the future in terms of education. Therefore, it is the wave of the future in terms of evangelism.
The denominations don't believe this, any more than the Council on Foreign Relations believes it with respect to civil government. It doesn't matter what they believe, because it is already here. The models have been adopted in China and India, and to a lesser extent in Africa and Latin America. The model is not Western bureaucratic Christianity. Doubt me? Read Jenkins' book. This is the future, and it is already taking place. Yet the denominations and seminaries ignore it. They are not preparing to reap the harvest in Pentecostal fields.
The new models are decentralized. They are made affordable by means of the World Wide Web and existing patterns of real estate. This is the model of the future, and any institution that does not adopt it is going to be overwhelmed. It cannot maintain its present influence. Old organizations must either adapt now, on the assumption that this is the model, or they will be blindsided by reality. They will be superseded. There will be an end run around all of them. They don't want to believe it, but it doesn't matter; it is taking place now. The Pentecostal model is the model for Protestant Christianity. In the same way that Amazon is the model for retail purchases, so is the Pentecostal model.
The model is the Khan Academy.
In the same way that the printing press made possible the Protestant Reformation, so has the Internet made possible the next phase of world Christianity. If Islam wants to keep up, it will have to adopt this model. If the denominations in the West want to keep up, they will have to adopt this model. If public education wants to keep up, it will have to adopt this model. This is the wave of the future, and it is being driven by Moore's law, Pareto's law, and the World Wide Web. You either ride this wave, or else you get hammered by a pile-driver. (I grew up in Manhattan Beach, California. If you rode the wrong wave, with or without a surfboard, you ended up hitting the sand really hard.)
The Roman Catholic Church in the United States today ordains 500 priests a year. Not all of them go into the local parish priesthood. This is for a denomination of about 78 million people. It is obvious that this cannot go on, but the hierarchy won't respond to it. The statistical reality of what is taking place does not change the hierarchy's working model. What matters is tradition. So, the Church is going to be replaced or reformed later. I single out the Roman Catholics only because they, statistically speaking, have visibly reached the end of the institutional road. Non-Pentecostal Protestants are in the same situation, but because they are decentralized institutionally, they have different ways of not achieving success. There is a division of labor in failure. The Protestants are very good at this today. It hides the problem.
CONCLUSION
Every institutional system has its built-in problems. If theologians want to have an impact in the future, they must start dealing with how the problems created by home churches, the World Wide Web, an absence of church buildings, and no physical seminaries will be dealt with in the future. This is the future. It is time to deal with these problems now. It is time now to start working on models that will enable these home churches to be brought into a wider communication system. But one thing is sure: the existing Western models are finished. They cannot survive, other than as marginal institutions serving the needs of a tiny minority of those people who call themselves Christians.
My view is that home churches will continue to spring up around the world. There will then be competition from denominations to recruit these local churches into their respective folds. Individual local churches will eventually discover that they are too isolated to have much effect socially. They will need continuity to gain leverage. They will move from "save souls" to "heal societies." This requires money, influence, and education. It eventually requires buildings.
Sam Walton used this strategy. He built his stores where Sears and Montgomery Ward were not available. He went to cheap zip codes, beyond the reach of local zoning commissions. Then, when he had enough stores to have buying strength, he insisted on discounts from wholesalers. Then he began moving into cities. He began moving into zip codes where the money was. Not zip codes where the big-money people lived -- zip codes where there were lots of middle-class people looking for bargains.
Mao used the same strategy: first take the countryside, then take the cities.
Today, Christianity can take the cities with a zip code strategy: residential, not commercial. Abandoned strip malls, not Park Avenue.
The key to this strategy is the World Wide Web.
At some point, the respectable evangelicals will catch on. They will return to Wesley's strategy of 1750. They will adopt the equivalent of circuit riding. It will not be one pastor on horseback every six weeks in six small churches, but rather one pastor every week on 500 big screen TVs that are hooked into a YouTube channel. Denominations and seminaries will then begin to produce online Sunday school materials and other digitally delivered tools for local home churches to use.
Successful front-line evangelism in the Third World will not be conducted by denominations in First World nations. Their theologies, their traditions, their real estate, and their judicial structures militate against successful front-line evangelism.
Christendom will move into phase two in Third World countries when the Christians in First World nations who have educations start training the Pentecostals and home churches, who will in turn begin to understand that Christians have social responsibilities and need education. The division of intellectual labor will then begin. It has yet to begin.
As for successful evangelism in First World cities, I think the same strategy will be adopted. The major barrier to entry is the price of real estate. There is a way around this. Circuit riding works -- big-screen circuit riding.
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Posted on February 2, 2023. Published originally on February 19, 2014. Recommended by donanobislibertatem.
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