Hope in Coronavirus with Andy Crouch
Today’s guest on the podcast is going to give us a hopeful vision for this season of life. Andy Crouch is a partner for theology and culture at Praxis and he's the author of a few amazing books including The Tech Wise Family. What he says might be shocking, but it’s also a hopeful look into the future.
Andy, I really want to talk about perspective today. You and given Zac and I a lot of perspective when those articles you wrote went viral. Let’s talk about what you see as a unique moment in time. I know there’s not much about our lives that haven’t changed. What do you see specifically to do with the church and business and as Christians? How do we view this time?
I mean the first thing is how long of a duration this is going to be in terms of how it changes all of our lives in really profound ways. One of the pieces that we wrote at Praxis, we talked about the difference between a blizzard and a whole season called winter and then something we call the little ice age. I think initially this whole thing felt a lot like a snow day. You know a blizzard that maybe lasts for three or four days and things are shut down, but then they go back to normal. It's dawning on everyone, that this is a matter of weeks, not days. But the effects of this on all of us will actually be years, not weeks. That’s what most of us have not absorbed yet. We haven’t come to terms with how long our lives are going to change in really significant ways. This is a time of really rapid reset of our expectations for the next couple of years.
I feel like I should ask you a question and I think I know what you're going to say. Should we talk about the bad news or the good news first? Why don't we talk about the bad news first? Because I know that this creates a lot of anxiety, specifically around finances, the elderly, and providing for our families. You gave me some bad news in that article - that we could be without large gatherings for 12 to 18 months. I run an organization that has large events. But when I read that, I was able to go back to my organization and start to make plans that shifted everything about our year. So it felt like a gift. I wanted to say that to everyone listening first, because this news actually helps us lead our families, our organizations, and our churches. It helps us set our own expectations so we can make better decisions for the future. So let's talk about the bad news first.
Let me give you a kind of tactical view of it first. Starting on April 1st, my family is on a budget that assumes my own salary goes to almost nothing for two years because I make almost all my living through events and writing books. But I'm not sure how many people are going to be buying any of the books. We are planning on a really significant change in our own circumstances at home. The organization I work for, Praxis, everything we do is by gathering people. So we are rethinking and assuming that the largest group you'll be able to get together with any predictability will be 50 for the next 12 to 18 months. I would say lots of organizations and especially churches, should start thinking that way. This is overwhelming at first. But then what happens is some creativity starts to appear. When we wrote the article “Leading Beyond the Blizzard” we kind of thought about the immediate moment, to the 12 to 18 months, to maybe the 24 month horizon. We said, assume all the resources you’ve been able to count on go away, except for trust. What would you build with those constraints? None of us know forsure what the next 24 months will look like. It won’t be 24 months of lockdown, because that’s absolutely impossible for any society to sustain. It's more likely to be a lot of turbulence and unpredictability, but that will still effect a lot of the things we could count on just a couple weeks ago. So here's the deeper perspective that's been so helpful to me and it's a very simple definition of anxiety. One of the most helpful things I've ever heard is that anxiety is imagining the future without Jesus in it. So when I'm anxious and I start imagining the future, I am not imagining a future in which Jesus is present to me. I'm imagining a future unlike my past, unlike even my present, where somehow I've taken him out of the picture and I start imagining and my mind goes crazy. If I can take some time and actually reflect on my reality, that Jesus is with me, that changes how I feel about the things I can control and the things I cannot control.
I think the idea, that creativity and innovation surface in the midst of restraint, is how we lead through this. That’s true for our homes, our organizations, everything. I’ve watched Annie Downs, who is single and alone in her home, be one of the most creative and innovative people I’ve ever seen. You can get creative and innovative about how you’re going to lead yourself, your friends, or your family. This is something that all of us need to think about. I know some people are naturally more creative than others. Maybe could you give us just a little bit, Andy, of what it could look like for us to go through that process? Some people listening right now are probably in a panic. But what does it look like to be strategic right now?
If this were just a blizzard, we'd all just grit our teeth and bear it and wait for it to be over. But if it's a season or even a couple of years, that requires something different. And here's one way I've been thinking about it. You're going to need a rule of life. You're going to need a way of living in the midst of these constraints rather than just improvising, continually waiting for the restraints to go away so you can go back to normal. I just took a walk with my wife and we said, okay, what is our rule of life in this time? I've never had a particularly good rhythm of family prayer. There's some things our family's really good at and there are other things that it's embarrassing to say we are not very good at. Our daughter is suddenly home from college. We are all living with these new stresses and we realized we've got to end the day with prayer. So we’ve built that into our daily rhythm. Another thing is the rhythm of technology. We are all going to be just swamped with information and also with entertainment and neither of those is especially good for us. I don't think it's so important exactly what's in the rule that you and your family live by, but it’s important to make some choices about what will help us stay sane, stay calm, and stay connected. We have a neighbor with young kids, and when we talked about this with her, she looked terrified when she realized her kids wouldn’t be going back to school. This could be August. Hopefully not longer, but it could be. The thing about kids is the more you entertain them, the more bored they become. That is increasing. Entertainment actually increases how quickly kids get bored. So we've got to think about totally flipping that so we entertain them less, and over the next few months, our kids get better and better at self entertainment and less bored. Or we’re all going to go utterly crazy.
Andy, do you think this is good for us? Do you think this is good for the church?
No, I think this is horrible grief and loss. We're going to lose so many things of value. We're going to lose businesses that people spent huge amounts of time and energy and love and care to build. We're going to lose people we care about. I doubt any of us gets out of this without someone we love either dying or being very, very sick. Our churches are going to struggle and we're going to lose people who we thought were with us, but we actually had no deep connection to them. Under these conditions, those connections are going to get thinner and thinner. But at the same time, the history of the church is that specifically plagues have been moments when there was a renewal of Christian practice. There's two big anchor points in history to look at and one is a little bit more recent. It's the black death that hit Europe in 1347 for the first time and came back for three centuries from time to time and 30% of the population died. We won't see anything like that from this virus. What came out of that was a tradition where people began to think about how do you die? Well, it turns out the way you die well is you live well. There were actually these books written about how to prepare yourself for your death. A person who is well prepared for death, is actually well prepared to live well for however much time they have. That was a really important discipleship tool in the Middle Ages. There were lots of plagues that swept the Roman world before the church was really established, and it was just the little house churches. These plagues would have 20-30% mortality rates, and people fled the cities. The Christians decided not to leave and instead serve their neighbors. There’s an amazing book called Rise of Christianity by Rodney Starkers, who is a sociologist, argues that the fact the Christians stayed when no one else would stay and take care of the sick, often at the cost of their own lives, was one of the most important contributors to the growth of the church. So it's not good that this is happening and I hope it ends way quicker than we can envision now and with way less loss of life than we fear. I hope our churches are open and in many ways we’re able to go back to what we were doing. But no matter how bad it is, God can work redemptively through us. We can look back on it and say, we all grew from this in amazing ways. We can say our churches grew in the most important way, namely depth of trust in one another and in God. This is our chance to see that happen.
I love what you’re saying first in how devastating this is, because one thing I keep telling my kids and friends is that it’s okay that there’s a grief and a sadness right now. This is not something we should just be positive about and pretend we’re okay. But I have a lot of questions about the second part of this, because as someone who loves to do the next thing and cause good in the world, I feel paralyzed. I feel at this loss of even how to encourage people to help. The main ways we know how to serve and love at the church would be going against the commissioning to quarantine. So let's talk about what that looks like right now and how to even approach being creative with our love in this time.
There are ways we can coordinate certain kinds of action and I've heard really cool stories and I’m sure we'll hear more. We work with entrepreneurs at Praxis, so on the one hand they're all super vulnerable at this moment, but on the other hand, they're super nimble. They're able to change. One of them is in the upstate New York and they work with women coming out of addiction and recovery. Their whole manufacturing process has come to a halt, but they realized they could turn their whole manufacturing building into a place to create masks for medical personnel. One thing I would say is don’t short circuit the sense of grief and loss. I sat down when I became fully aware of what was happening two weeks ago, and probably only two other times in my adult life have done this, but I just wept. For about 30 minutes I wept and it was just deep, deep emotion. But it was essential, and I was letting go of all the things I love to do that I'm not going to be doing for maybe years and maybe never, you know? But then I was free to start imagining something different. And when you start imagining something different, you really have to ask, who have I got? Who could I call? Bandwidth really matters now in the sense that the more we can get rich interaction with each other the better. I would highly recommend people call their friends rather than text their friends, zoom your friends rather than call your friends, unless you get totally burned out on zoom, which those of us who are doing meetings all day do. Walk around the neighborhood if you’re allowed to do that. The other thing is Americans are activists and our leaders are activists. It’s not bad to be active, but it’s not always good to be an activist. We love to act, to do something, and to make it better. But at some point, this is a season where we also just need to sit and listen. We could deepen our relationship with God and other people, and wait for the right moment to act.
This is a great humbling, the whole thing. It feels like we thought we had a lot more control than we have. My first reaction to it is anxiety. And then my next reaction is a peace. Because we don’t want to be the boss of something like this. So I guess what does it look like to receive this circumstance on one hand and then also do good with it and take initiative with it and not just watch Netflix with it. You know, it's that tension of no control, but yet there are some things we can control.
The phrase that comes to mind is actually from Acts 2: “you will receive power from on high when the Holy spirit comes on. But until then, wait in the city.” Acts 2 happens in a very interesting moment. They’ve seen their Lord crucified and buried. They know he has risen, but he’s also ascended to Heaven and is no longer there. That’s a weird moment. They’re still feeling a lot of trauma from his death. There’s a lot of mystery in Jesus’ appearances after he is risen - you’re definitely not in control of when he shows up. You’re in a room praying and then he appears and then he’s gone. You’re walking down the road and someone’s talking to you and then your heart is burning. He breaks the bread and then he disappears. You are totally out of control. I think that’s kind of where we are. We believe Jesus is risen and is Lord and reigning over our present circumstances, but we are not in control. We’ve been completely emptied of our sense of control, which was an illusion in the first place. Control is always an illusion outside of mechanical systems and the world is not a mechanical system. Other people aren't a mechanical system. Our work in the world is not a mechanical system. So control was never ours in the first place. But we have to keep putting ourselves in the position of waiting to be clothed with power, and then see what that looks like each day.
I think one of your gifts is that you're a futurist. I think you think about the future really well. And I think that's why two different times through this process you have really spoken to Zac and I and moved us to more future thinking. What do you see when you look six months to a year down the road? What do you see on the other side of this for the church? Like how do we come out of this and how do we look different for the better?
Even if a relatively worse case scenario happens epidemiologically and economically there is a hopeful scenario for the church. It is very possible that the largest groups we're going to be able to reliably gather with will be around 10 people. That’s what we used to call small group ministry. What I think we can get back to is this idea of a household - not just a nuclear family, but a small group of people gathered around a home, often with a family at the heart. The early Christians begin to organize themselves into households and they think of themselves as the household of God. Now it's not a Greco Roman household. The Greco Roman household was this kind of patriarchal, powerplay status driven world. Christians rewrote the rules for husbands and wives, parents and children, even masters and slaves. We see this in Romans 16 - it’s a long list of greetings to the church in Rome, but who sends the greetings? The people who are with Paul. There’s slaves there, there’s a guy who has quite a bit of status, you’ve got he city treasurer, Paul who is a Jewish rabbi, and Phoebe. Let's think about this little group of people. They qualify for the quarantine rule, right? But they look nothing like any other household in that city. The neighbors walk by and look in at who's around that table and treating one another as brother and sister. They would be completely freaked out and either they'd say, I want no part of that or they'd say, could I be a part of a household line? Is there another world? Is there another kind of household? The hopeful outcome for this is that we come out of this having rebuilt everything we do on the level of community at which you can be truly known, which is about 10 people. You can't be known in a room of a thousand people, but you can be known in a room of 10. Each of us who have homes are going to need to figure out who's in our household, who do we open it up to, who doesn't have anywhere else to go and, and household by household we're going to rebuild what it means to do church.
This is so moving to me because the next book I was writing prior to any of this happening and I'm working on currently, is based on the idea that we’re meant to live in villages. That village life is really the way we’re uniquely crafted to live, and that most everyone on earth still lives in villages. Most every generation that’s ever lived has lived in villages. But my conundrum is how do I do that in Dallas? Zac and I have worked really hard to build that life here, and I know it’s possible. But now God has just caused it to happen for all of us. The large group gathering feels like such a huge loss, but there’s something you’re saying about the smaller group of people and how it works better. It brings about a fuller life. If we could choose our smaller group, pick our people, and go deeper with them, we could have a fuller life. You just have to be super intentional and you have to build a life that includes restraint, because we could all have endless numbers of shallow associations. That takes a lot of cutting things out. But it’s still possible, even right now over technology.
