Great Giveaway, The: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch Organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism, and Other Modern Maladies [Paperback]

A lot of books critique the modern evangelical church. A critique can be helpful, but what is even more useful is some help on how to be the church more faithfully. It's even better if this help is given from someone who is thoughtful, not just pragmatic, and a practitioner, not just a theoretician.

The Great Giveaway is a book that offers this type of help. It's written by David E. Fitch, pastor of Life on the Vine Christian Community in Long Grove, Illinois.

"The thesis of the book is that evangelicalism has 'given away' being the church in North America." How? By forfeiting the practices that constitute being the church.

According to Fitch, evangelicalism has given away being the church by accepting the assumptions of modernism, which are increasingly suspect.

The Great Giveaway examines how the church has given away eight functions of the church to modernity, and offers solutions on how to recover each function:

-Our definition of success - We measure success by size because we have accepted the modern values of individualism and efficiency. Big churches are seen as successful, when it is more difficult to be the church past a certain size. Instead, success should be measured by measuring faithfulness rather than size.

-Evangelism - We rely on arguments, presentations, and proofs in our Gospel presentations, rather than embodying the reality of Jesus Christ being lived within our churches.

-Leadership - We have imported CEO-styles of leadership into the church, and measured pastors by success in ministry more than faithfulness to Christ. CEO-style leaders are isolated and it is assumed they can manage their own sanctification. Instead, the church needs to rediscover leadership as servanthood and not as vocational success.

-Worship - We measure success in worship by positive emotional experiences and the hearing of "good" sermons. In other words, the individual self is at the center of worship, and that individual self has been more formed by the post-Christian world than by the reality of God. Instead, we should reclaim worship practices that form us into the experience of God, rather than attempting to shape God into our experience.

-Preaching - Expository preaching is not as biblical as we think. It allows both the preacher and the audience to control the Word, and it often results in "to do" lists. Instead, preaching should proclaim the reality of who God is, and invite us to live in that reality.

-Justice - Our definition of justice is more shaped by liberal democracy and capitalism by Scripture. We need to recapture the Biblical ideal of justice, and learn how to live in capitalism but not of it.

-Spiritual Formation - We have accepted therapy and psychology, and in many cases have substituted these for the biblical practices of confession, repentance, and speaking the truth in love in the context of community.

-Moral Education - Our children are shaped by a post-Christian culture rather than by the reality of Christ lived out in church. We need to reclaim practices that raise up our children to be faithful followers of Christ.

Fitch writes:

"We must recover the truly amazing way of life given to us as people by God through his redemption in Jesus Christ. The only way we can resist the totalizing forces of late capitalism and its derivatives is by recovering being the church. Is this not possible?...I hope this book gives hope and direction to seminarians, pastors of small churches, and all those people who have tired of evangelicalism's incessant marketing and mega-sizing. May we start gatherings of people that practice the practices of being the body of Christ. As difficult as it might be, let us join to together and find our way back to the practices of being the people of God under the reign of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. For he truly is the hope of the world."

I love the idea of developing a reinvigorated ecclesiology. I am sometimes frustrated by those who dismiss the church because of its current state. Fitch doesn't do this. Instead, he imagines what it should be.

I also love the depth of this book. Many of the individual chapters contain more to think about than some whole books I've read. The endnotes (over 30 pages) are a gold mine. The Great Giveaway is very well thought out, and it stimulates thinking rather than giving all the answers.

I have rarely read a book that has stimulated so much thinking. At times I wished that I had more concrete action steps and a clear picture of what such a church. Instead, Fitch did exactly what he described in his chapter on preaching: he refused to give me a to-do list, and instead unfurled a reality, and invited me to enter in.

This is easily one of the top books that I have read this year.

This biting critique of the modern American church has basically lifted the veil off the capitalistic, consumeristic, numbers-oriented megachurches. David Fitch, Pastor of a church just 20 minutes from the headlining, 10,000 member Willow Creek Community Church, levels a pretty harsh attack on the big churches. While there are positive suggestions for alternative church models at the end of every chapter, it's clear that Fitch has a bone to pick.

He goes systematically through the modern church's emphasis on quantifiable success, evangelism, leadership without moral accountability, emotive worship, expository preaching that does not take place in community, justice that is farmed out to parachurch organizations, spiritual formation that is farmed out to psychiatrists, and education of children that is entrusted to an areligious public school system.

For anyone whose lived in the world of the megachurch, this is a really fun read. It's what we whisper about over coffee on the patio when the sermon has taught us 7 steps to better marriages or when the Good Friday service is "exciting" rather than sobering. Fitch has a determined, analytical mind. I hope he writes more.

The downside is that his alternatives sound like an afterthought that do not admit to their own weaknesses. It's very dubious that he's found an alternative to megachurches that is itself without just as many flaws. He's not nuanced enough to suggest that he's offering a cooperative alternative in a megachurch culture. Rather, they're wrong and he's right. Secondly, chapter seven, on spiritual formation, is a bit insensitive. Though he credits this to modern ideologies, it might be his personal style.

But everyone who's interested in the evolution of church culture and the development of new models of community should definitely read this book. Anyone who's either been to or resented the megachurches, everyone whose ever used or disparaged the word emergent, and pretty much anyone else who wants to know where church is going should read Fitch.

In his excellent study "The Way of the Modern World," Craig Gay observes that "it seems that the ideas with the most profound consequences are frequently taken for granted. They are the ideas that lie just behind conscious thought, providing a kind of foundation for the deliberations of everyday life." In "The Great Giveaway," Dave Fitch attempts to diagnose and offer correctives to some of the ways in which the evangelical church in North America has come to "take for granted" many of the unconscious assumptions and controlling ideas of secular modernity thus leading it to "give away" being the living Body of Christ in the world. He attempts to uncover the ways in which modern assumptions concerning such things as success, leadership, character formation, and justice have warped our understandings of them as Christians and have lead us to be unfaithful to the Bible and the gospel of Christ. He also attempts show how evangelicals have given away even specific practices of the church such as preaching, worship, and evangelism to the controlling assumptions of modernity, sometimes even when we think we are being the most faithful.

Fitch identifies some of the hallmark characteristics of modernity as being a fascination with technique, a fixation on efficiency and effectiveness, individualism, elevation of experience and self-expression, and an attachment to scientific rationality among other things. Fitch argues that these characteristic assumptions of modernity have infiltrated evangelicalism and have hampered our ability to be faithful to the mission of Christ in the world. For example, he argues that our view of leadership in the church has become more shaped by the CEO model of American business culture than by the teachings of Jesus and the model of the New Testament church. Or again, he argues that our understanding of spiritual formation and personal well-being has been overtaken by the categories of modern psychology.

Fitch is not the first person to express concern about the shape and character of contemporary evangelicalism. Fitch's book differs, however, in the way he uses the insights of post-modern thinkers to expose and undermine the modern assumptions that have shaped the practices and character of contemporary evangelicalism. Many of those who have expressed concern over the state of current evangelicalism have specifically associated some of its negative character traits with post-modernity and have displayed an almost reflexive anti-postmodern attitude. While Fitch does not endorse post-modernism willy-nilly, he sees the insights of post-modern thinkers as a source of help for the church and as a means of deconstructing the pretensions of modernity that hold evangelicalism captive. In some cases this leads directly to controversy, such as Fitch's claim that expository preaching, which for some evangelicals is synonymous with faithfulness to scripture, actually ends up giving away the faithful proclamation of scripture to the forces of modernity while leading us to believe that somehow we are interpreting scripture "objectively" and are therefore protected from error. In other cases, however, I think it clearly makes Fitch's case stronger, such as when he uncovers the interpretive, narrative, non-scientific character of much of modern psychology and shows how it contrasts with the scriptural narrative that should be shaping us as Christians.

Since each chapter of the book deals with a different issue, it is possible to read and benefit from individual chapters without reading the whole book. My guess is that most discerning readers who are alert to the issues and problems of contemporary evangelicalism will find at least one or two chapters they agree with, even if they find themselves in violent disagreement with others. In my opinion, the first, third, and seventh chapters alone make the book worth purchasing. It is also my feeling that reading the whole book will lead to a better overall picture of the state of the contemporary evangelical church and the crisis it faces. If I had any criticism to make of the book it would be that I wish certain parts were better documented, which would make Fitch's overall case even stronger, especially given the controversial nature of some of his claims. Overall, however, I think Fitch strikes a good balance between academic seriousness and accessibility to the layperson. I think he has rightly diagnosed many of the serious problems that currently plague the evangelical church and has offered some helpful suggestions for how we might begin to reclaim being the Body of Christ again in North America. I think this book is must reading for anyone seriously concerned about the faithfulness of the church in our times.

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