The Church Is No Shack

One of the most helpful and, at the same time, disturbing elements about The Shack it its resistance to the the institutional church. The Shack has a decidedly anti-institutional stance with regards to the church. By institutional I mean "organized religion," where you have a committed groups of people who meet on an ongoing basis for "religious" purposes. This will include some form of defined leadership and regular "spiritual" practices & beliefs. (e.g., communion, baptism, teaching, etc.) There is a community of spiritual formation and allegiance, not just the island of individual preferences. I think this, in part makes The Shack very popular, in part, because it goes with the common grain in our society that wants kernel of spirituality while ditching the husk of the church or organized religion. But is this either good or realistic?

Here are some quotes from the early sections of the The Shack which lead me in part to draw this conclusion:

1) Mack is a theologically reflective person. We are told that at one point in his life he went to seminary on Australia..."Whatever happened, in his early twenties he eventually ended up in a seminary in Australia. When Mack had his fill of theology and philosophy he came back to the States, made peace with his mama and sisters, and moved out to Oregon where he met an married Nannette A. Samuelson." (p.9) The point of this observation is that Mack tried seminary (a religious institution to train clergy to fill the institution of the organized church), but he had his "fill." Usually when someone has had their "fill" of something they've had more than they can stomach.

2) The book admits that Mack is "not very religious." "But at the same time, Mack is not very religious. He seems to have a love/hate relationship with Religion, and maybe even with the God that he suspects is brooding, distant, and aloof. Little barbs of sarcasm occasionally spill through the cracks in his reserve like piercing darts dipped in poison from a well deep inside. Although we sometimes both show up on Sundays at the same local pew and pulpit Bible church, you can tell that he is not too comfortable there." (p.10) Religion or church is associated with something that is uncomfortable and shows God as "brooding, distant, and aloof."

3) When Mack inquires to Annie, the "matronly postmaster," about Tony, Mack's postal worker, she throws in this offhanded question....What’s wrong with you, Mack? Still smoking too much dope or do you just do that on Sunday mornings to make it through the church service? At this she started to laugh, as if caught off guard by the brilliance of her own sense of humor. (p.19) It does seem a bit unusual that in a real conversation someone would make that kind of offhanded comment about getting through church unless the author (William Young) had a real intention of making a subtle but very clear point. This is further confirmed as Young draws out Mack's inner reflections with his conversation with Annie...“Now Annie, you know I don’t smoke dope-never did, and don’t ever want to.” Of course Annie knew no such thing, but Mack was taking no chances on how she might remember the conversation in a day or two. Wouldn’t be the first time that her sense of humor morphed into a good story that soon became “fact.” He could see his name being added to the church prayer chain. (p.20)

4) Finally we see that one of Mack's favoritie programs is Bill Moyer's show... A quick glance at the clock told him that Bill Moyer’s show had just started; a favorite program that he tried never to miss. Moyer was one of a handful of people whom Mack would love to meet; a brilliant and outspoken man, able to express intense compassion for both people and truth with unusual clarity. (pp.22-23) Bill Moyers, as a journalist, has reported much on the power of "Myth" without the real need of any doctrines, creeds, that is guarded and taught with instituional or religious accountablilty.

Reflections:

1) As is always the case the instutional church is always in need of reform. This book is a good reminder that we, who are a part of the church, should not become distant or irrelevant to our original mission. The church too often becomes an institution which exists to serve its own puposes on the level of any human club. When this happenes a lot of problems occur. The Shack serves as a very sharp prod to point the church away from irrelevancy and self-service. (Yet do we needs to throw the baby out with...)

2) Without "organized" church the Christian faith will die. Church is not simply Christians who love God. It is an organized community centered with a called eldership, regular practice and discipleship guided with biblical accountaibility. Without the organized church Christianity will die.

3) It is possible to be a Christian without being a part of the organized church. However, it is impossible to be a mature Christian who is fulfilling his/her calling without the organized church. A quarterback can throw the ball without the the team, but he cannot play the game of football. So it is with the Christian. You can be saved and on your way to heaven but without the church you cannot fulfill the purposes for which God has put you here on this earth.

4) Being a part of the church is very challenging. Yet it was meant to be that way because that is what maturing in love requires. We are called to be with people and in ministries that have challenges and diffifulties because we are called to walk out of our comfort zones of self-centeredness and learn the true nature of Christ-like and sacrificial love. This is impossible to do in individual isolation or alone with just a few other people we are comfortable with.

5) Without the organized church the mission of Christ cannot be carried out. When God's purposes are carried out it is always done through the organized church.

In defense of William Young I think it is important to understand the background from which he writes: he was the child of missionaries in West Papua, among the Dani, a technologically stone age tribal people. There he was sexuallyabused. This radically altered his experience and interpretation of the world. Having worked with several people who have been sexually abused I have come to understand that there is often a strong resistance to traditional structures of authority. (Such as religious institutions and their leaders.) This is a "defense mechanism" to protect them from the fear of being abused again by a trusted authority figure. In an interview with World Magazine's Susan Olasky, Young, who is no longer a member of a church, said "(The institutional church) doesn't work for those of us who are hurt and those of us who are damaged. . . . If God is a loving God and there's grace in this world and it doesn't work for those of us who didn't get dealt a very good hand in the deck, then why are we doing this? . . . Legalism within Christian or religious circles doesn't work very well for people who are good at it. And I wasn't very good at it."

As Young writes from that lens I think he has a lot of valuable things to tell us. The church must more greatly reflect the love and unbounded joy of God. The church must war against the destructive legalisms that stain the fruit that should come from a Spirit-filled life. And as Young says in another section of the book...I suppose that since most of our hurts come through relationships so will our healing...(p.11) May the church be an organized and life-giving body of people to whom healing can come for those who have been broken.

The Unwanted Fruit of the Sexual Revolution (or) Why Women Are So Unhappy On Sex and the City (or) The Vindication of Dan Quayle

"Facts are stubborn things." So spoke Benjamin Franklin, or John Adams, or one of the great American Revolutionary fathers. Facts stubbornly speak in favor of "traditional" marriage and the family. The record shows the important benefits of marriage and monogamy.

Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has shown, for example, monogamous married people score better on all kinds of measures of well-being. They tend to be happier than others. Women whose husbands are the breadwinners also tend to be happier than others, and men who are married earn more and work harder than men who are not. Conversely (as Wilcox’s research has also shown) promiscuity on campus appears closely related to educational failure and other problems such as alcohol and drug consumption. Wilcox and the author Maggie Gallagher have also shown that widespread divorce and unwed motherhood—two offspring of the sexual revolution—are not only bad for many people but also costly for society.

Or so reports one time social liberal turned conservative, Mary Eberstadt. Sara McLanahan, similarly, has been doing important work from the days when she seemed practically a lone voice in a liberationist wilderness. Her seminal 1994 book, Growing Up with a Single Parent, co­authored with Gary Sandefur, features on its first page one of the most succinct indictments of the sexual revolution yet written:

“We have been studying this question for ten years, and in our opinion
the evidence is quite clear: Children who grow up with only one biological
parent are worse off, on average, than children who grow up in a household
with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parents’ race or
educational background, regardless of whether the parents are married when
the children are born, and regardless of whether the resident parent remarries.”

Or consider more recent evidence of the revolution’s toll. One is an interesting book published a few years ago by Elizabeth Marquardt entitled Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. Based on a 125-question survey administered with her coresearcher Norval Glenn to two groups—those who had grown up in divorced homes on the one hand, and those from intact homes on the other—Marquardt’s results show clearly the higher risks of dysfunction and disturbance that follow many of her subjects into adulthood.

This brings us to the moral core of the sexual revolution: the abundant evidence that its fruits have been worst for women and children. Even people who pride themselves on politically correct compassion, who criticize conservatives and religious believers for their supposed “lack of feeling,” fail to see the contradiction between their public professions of compassion and their private adherence to a liberationist ethic.

Think about those who are the most stalwart defenders of laissez-faire sexuality in the public square: libertarians, many of them young men, almost all of them (I have in mind the blogosphere) single. This is the demographic in which liberationism thrives, among those generally strongest, in the prime of their lives and operating on the assumption only of the revolution’s benefits for themselves.

And just as so many passionate and enlightened people ignore the fact that kids have been damaged by an anything-goes zeitgeist, so too do they ignore this related fact: The sexual revolution has been a disaster for many women. Like hostages in the grip of Stockholm syndrome, feminists—above almost all other interest groups, pornographers excepted—cling to the defense of the sexual revolution. How many feminist-minded students who demonstrate for abortion rights realize that in many parts of the world, including the United States, girls are more likely to be aborted than boys?

Though it’s regarded as outrageous to say so in our metrosexual, unchivalrous times, women are more vulnerable than men to physical abuse. The empirical evidence bears this out. Women who are divorced or unmarried are far more likely—twice as likely, according to one study—to suffer physical abuse than are women in an intact marriage. To emphasize the ways in which sexual liberationism has injured women is not to say that men are unaffected. But with many men, the sexual revolution seems more like a slow-acting virus whose damage does not become apparent till much later in life. As Linda Waite, for one, has emphasized, divorced men have higher rates of depression, alcoholism, and other forms of “risk taking”—including such pedestrian oversights as failing to go to the doctor.

For women, though, the fallout from the revolution appears more immediate and acute. It is women who have abortions and get depressed about them, women who are usually left to raise children alone when a man leaves for someone younger, women who typically take the biggest financial hit in divorce, and women who fill the pages of such magazines as Cosmopolitan and Mirabella and liberationy websites like Salon with sexual doublespeak.

Just look at any one of those sources, or take in a segment of those women’s morning talk shows or a random ten minutes of Sex and the City. All reveal a wildly contradictory mix of chatter about how wonderful it is to be liberated by sex, on the one hand—and how impossible it has become to find a good, steady, committed boyfriend or husband on the other. It’s as if, say, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals were to put out magazines that were half pitches for vegetarianism and half glossy pages of pork and beef and chicken simmering in sumptuous sauces. If something like that were to happen, people would notice the contradiction. But because of the will to disbelieve in some of the consequences of the sexual revolution, they don’t when the subject is sex.

The Shack, written by William Young, was originally penned as a Christmas gift for his six children. He has no intention to publish it. What stands out about the success of the book is that it acheived its sales success largely by word of mouth. It is a self-published book which originally spent about $300 on marketing. As of January 2009, The Shack had over 5 million copies in print, and had been at number 1 on the New York Times best seller list for 35 weeks.It is a grassroots cultural phenomena, not a commercialized by-product.

Many evangelical leaders have been very critical of the book, and for some understandable reasons. Chuck Colson, who I have the deepest respect, wrote an article for his Breakpoint, "Stay Out Of The Shack." Albert Mohler has called the book "deeply troubling." For whatever justified concerns there are with The Shack, (I believe there are some.) I think the strongest critics of the book fail to realize that the book is filling a spiritual hole and a theological vacuum in the evangelical world.

Specifically...The Shack makes a very brave, daring, and thoughtful attempt to tackle the reality of brutal evil and unimaginable pain in the world while reconciling it with the love and unbounded joy of God. (It is a Theodicy.) To tackle this problem is certainly not new, even for a novel. What is new is that Young does it at the level where it really counts and makes the biggest difference...he takes theology and addresses it at the level of the human heart. Young has said himself that the title of the book is a metaphor for “the house you build out of your own pain.”

In fact, Young confronts the reality of evil within "religious" society itself. Look at how he portrays the childhood of Mack, the main character of the story...

Mack was born somewhere in the Midwest, a farm boy in an Irish-American family committed to calloused hands and rigorous rules. Although externally religious, his overly strict church-elder father was a closet drinker, especially when the rain didn’t come, or came too early, and most of the times between. Mack never talks much about him, but when he does his face loses emotion like a tide going out leaving dark and lifeless eyes. From the few stories Mack has told me, I know his daddy was not a fall-asleep-happy kind of alcoholic but a vicious mean beat-your wife-and then –ask-God-for-forgiveness drunk. (Pg. 9)

Look how Mack is abusively treated by his "religious" father...

It all came to a head when thirteen-year-old Mackenzie reluctantly bared his soul to a church leader during a youth revival. Overtaken by the conviction of the moment, Mack confessed in tears that he hadn’t done anything to help his mama as he witnessed, on more than one occasion, his drunken dad beat her unconscious. What Mack failed to consider was that his confessor worked and churched with his father, and by the time he got home his daddy was waiting for him on the front porch with his mama and sisters conspicuously absent. He later learned that they had been shuttled off to his Aunt May’s in order to give his father some freedom to teach his rebellious son a lesson about respect. For almost two days, tied to the big oak at the back of the house, he was beaten with a belt and Bible verses every time his dad woke from a stupor and put down his bottle. (p.8)

This background provided in the forward section of the book sets the stage where we will see one of the most imaginative portrayals of the Trinitian love of God which has been lost and greatly misunderstood by the ones who are called to be the caretakers of that proclamation and reality.

Conclusions:

1) The Shack calls us to rethink the church and a lot of religious society.

2) It is an apologetic or theodicy for a strand of evangelical Christianity. But it is an apologetic which defends God and the Christian faith but radically distances itself from the traditional church. It does so, I think, because many people are greatly turned off by the abuses and apathy of the traditional church, which some people would view as part of the problem of evil in the world.

3) I think there are theological and anthropological problems in The Shack, but in my opinion it is a book that needs to challenge the lovelessness and abuses that can go on in the church and religious institutions.