In Defense of Brute Force

Some years back, I started getting interested in the Japanese game, Go. Actually, my interest has come in three waves, and the first two waves died for lack of time or someone to show me how to play. The third phase of my interest came to an end about a year and a half ago. See, Go is a strategy game, but it’s not like chess. It’s a 19x19 grid, and players take turns placing a black or white pebble on the points of intersection. The goal is to surround as many of your opponents pieces as possible. There is not a set opening, as in chess, where all the pieces are on the board. The game has almost infinite variety. So much so, in fact, that a computer can’t play it and win, whereas in chess, a computer can now beat the greatest players because it can predict all the possible moves.

Chess is a game of force, whereas Go is a game of patience. Maybe that’s not the right word. You take possession of property in Go by surrounding an opponent’s pieces, and the patterns that develop from that are beautiful. You take control in chess by bluntly forcing the opponent off the board, by bringing more force to bear than your opponent has.

I confess, I was interested in Go because of its elegance. I like chess a lot, but Go had some hold on my imagination. I also used to like bonsai. I always wanted to have a cedar or pine bonsai that I could make to look like the memories of my childhood on the beaches of California’s Central Coast—windswept and battered, but the tree endured, flourished, even, in spite of circumstances.

But my interest in Go ended because my interest in bonsai ended, and my interest in bonsai ended in George Strunk’s office. See, he has a bonsai plant there, in its nice little enameled trough. But it is totally dead. All its needles may be gone by this point. I asked him about it, and his answer was a real wake-up call. He said he just could not get into bonsai, could not bring himself to accede to the very idea of bonsai. He went on to say that he thought it was unnatural, to keep something from growing, to prune it, to take it out of its pot and prune its roots to keep it small, to keep it from growing. “It’s not the Kingdom,” he said.

Sometimes you need someone else to shake you out of complacency. You think you know something, you think you’re sold out to something. In my case, I like to think I am sold out to the growth of the Kingdom, the agricultural metaphors of Jesus. And yet there was a double-mind of interest in bonsai.

I know that sounds melodramatic, but I think that what was behind what George was saying was you have to believe. I don’t mean just lip-service, or think it’s a cool idea. But there is more to it than even working hard at it.

So there I was. I let go of bonsai, and Go, too. Because around the time that I heard George’s parable, I was also reading Victor Hanson’s Carnage and Culture, a book everyone should read. Hanson discusses the Western way of war in contrast to non-Western ways. He says what makes the Western way more effective is that it is finally amoral and not ritualized. That is to say, it is not so much interested in how as in what. There is a goal that is independent of the means to the extent that the Western way adopts and adapts to accomplish the ends of war as opposed to the forms.

This is what I mean by the title of this blog entry—in defense of brute force I mean we have to let go of notions about church that may be pleasing, elegant, or time-honored. Bonsai are pleasing. Go is elegant. Sure, if you want to sound cool at a cocktail party, read Sun Tzu. But if you want to win, try de Jomini. Sure bonsai is fun in a solipsistic way, but better the man who plants a tree that produces fruit that produces seeds to produce many more trees to produce fruit…

There is a K-mart future for the United Methodist Church. That is, in the next 10 years, we will see an acceleration of churches closing, especially in the rural areas. Some will close because older congregants die. Some will close because they are run by wolves and vultures. Some will close because the pastors, perhaps hampered by wolves and vultures, won’t bring in the new people who have moved to the country. But close they will. And then there will be one option: to sell the property. And then we will, like K-mart, make a killing. Then comes the crucial moment. What will we do with the money?

What we should do is put it into starting new congregations all over the place, even in the poorest, inelegant places. Find by hook and by crook the kinds of pastors who can start a new work, and rebuild the church. What we will do, I am afraid, is send the money to the bureaucrats who can prop up the same failed plans that got us into this mess in the first place. But for a little while there will be a chance to lay aside things that are pleasing and even elegant in our own tradition for the things that will get the job done. From the beginning, the Kingdom has been forcefully advancing…

Let me give you an example of the frightening problems at the highest levels of the United Methodist Church, the jokers who get too much of our money. When I was at Christ Church, I was doing some research on how do churches grow by conversion, not transfer. Our growth comes from transfer—people moving from one town to another, or people who come from another denomination. That’s not growth. You can see it in a horrible piece of reality: there is no county in America that has more people attending church now than it did in 1990. Lots of churches have grown, but Christianity is dying. So, the key is to learn how to get back to making converts to the faith.

So, I did the logical thing. I called and emailed the United Methodist Church’s General Board of Discipleship and asked for the Evangelism bureau. We have a few people heading that up for the church. I asked what I thought was a simple question: which UM churches are growing by “profession of faith,” that is, conversion? I figured once I heard about who was doing it, I would look for churches about Christ Church’s size and learn from them.

They did not know. The very people in charge of evangelism for the largest mainline denomination in America have no idea which of their churches are growing by profession of faith; the people in charge of evangelism do not know which churches are doing evangelism!

But they did have a suggestion for me: I should get in contact with GCFA, the General Council on Finance and Administration. This agency keeps all the records for the UMC. So, since every church turns in a yearly report that has a line for “professions of faith,” they should be able to tell me which churches are growing by professions of faith.

Now, disregard the fact that maybe the evangelism gurus in the Board of Discipleship should already know that. So I got in touch with GCFA. Naturally, it’s not really their job to worry about that specific line in the report. They offered to send me the data reports of all 40,000 or so United Methodist Churches and then I could look at the profession of faith lines for each church…

Finally I broke down and called a retired bishop, Bishop Looney, who started the Foundation for Evangelism. I guess he started it because the bureaucrats weren’t doing evangelism. He gave me the names of a few churches based on my criteria. He knew it off the top of his head—because first, there are very few churches growing this way, and because he keeps up with such stuff.

We can keep doing what we’ve been doing. Or we can take the chance that is going to be offered us: to put our money to good use. Quit doing it the way we have been and do something that works. We have such an elegant structure, vast and sprawling, and many times that is all Go comes down to—a game that is about a beautiful and unpredictable complex design. Looks cool in a coffee house, but it’s not very good training for war.