still strong in Pentecostalism around the world, slowly give way to a new, yet faithful expression of the gospel, based on Christian communities in every part of society? Might God be calling a reshaped church, fruitfully adapting to social change, to help embody a trend not to secularization but to post-secularity?5
The ecclesial turn
The church is being pushed to the edge of society.
This largely reflects the church’s failure to adapt to social changes.
The church has become self-limiting in its relevance, availability and organization.
Mission-shaped Church can be seen as a hypothesis – that God will use new contextual churches to help the church be more relevant and available, as it takes shape within all the settings of life.
An ethical turn
A second turn is influencing society. This is ‘a turn away from life lived in terms of external or “objective” roles, duties and obligations, and a turn towards life lived by reference to one’s own subjective experiences’ – a life that may be relational as much as individualistic (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005, p. 2). Individuals pay less attention to divine authority and more attention to their subjective states. Their own needs, desires, capabilities and relationships have become their prime frame of reference.
Charles Taylor has described how following the late eighteenth-century Romantics, the ethic of personal fulfilment was restricted to the intellectual and artistic elites. For most people, personal fulfilment was constrained by the demands of sexual morality and the values of work and productivity. During the 1960s, however, this ethic leapt out of these constraints and became an overriding goal. ‘What is new is that this kind of self-orientation seems to have become a mass phenomenon’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 473).
This represents more than an intensified search for pleasure. It is a new understanding of the good: people have their own ways of realizing their humanity. Each person must live out what is true to them. Rather than having to conform to a model imposed by society, the previous generation, religion or political authority, individuals must be given the opportunity to express their authentic selves, provided they do not harm anyone else.
Ronald Inglehart has spent a lifetime arguing that when economies advance, ‘materialist’ values based on meeting physical security, sustenance, shelter and other needs give way to ‘post-materialist’, quality-of-life values. Recently, however, he has argued that post-materialist values ‘are just one indicator of a much broader cultural shift from survival values to self-expression values’. The latter are changing attitudes to gender roles, sexual orientation, work, religion and child-rearing (Inglehart, 2008, p. 142). This represents a profound ethical turn: the expressive rather than dutiful self dominates society – and increasingly the church.
What lies behind this change?
First, the expressive self reflects post-industrialization, in which subjective opinions are valued more highly (Inglehart and Welzel, 2005, p. 29). This is partly because the post-industrial economy produces unprecedented levels of prosperity, which enhance existential security. Most people now take food, clothing, education and other essentials for granted to an extent never possible before. The proportion of earnings required to secure these necessities has steadily fallen, allowing people to spend more on goals beyond immediate survival. These goals express their subjective selves.
Second, the expressive self is a reaction against an increasingly regulated world. The reaction burst to surface in the 1960s and 1970s. Young people rebelled against the conformity and discipline required by the mass production assembly line and all that supported it, sometimes referred to as Fordism. Postmodernism is ‘the culture of Fordism in crisis’ (Nilges, 2008, p. 30).
The shift away from mass production has not removed the sense of being controlled. If anything, society has become even more organized. The number of organizations has leapt dramatically – registered companies in California expanded fivefold between 1960 and 2001. Organizations are reaching into the informal parts of everyday life – nurseries are replacing childcare at home; the voluntary sector is less informal. Organizations themselves feel more organized – more regulations, more targets and more accountability (Drori, Meyer and Hwang, 2006, pp. 2–7).
On the one hand, work autonomy expands because tasks are too complex to be controlled by the centre. On the other, management standardizes processes to minimize the risk of accidents, substandard performance and wilful damage. Individuals and teams are ruled by tightly defined discretion, targets and frequent appraisals. Bureaucracies have tightened their grip (Grey and Garsten, 2001, p. 238).
Heelas and Woodhead write about the clash between ‘the targeted life’ and the subjective self. Individuals wanting to be themselves use their free time to seek liberation from regimented work and become post-institutional in their attitude to religion.
If they engage with associational forms of the sacred, they are therefore much more likely to be involved with freedom-loving spiritualities of life than with role-enforcing . . . religion. Seeking to escape from externally imposed targets elsewhere in their lives, they will not want more of the same in the sphere of the sacred. (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005, p. 128)
Third, the ‘creative economy’ (Howkins, 2007), in which ideas transform individual talent in novel ways, is producing new opportunities for the expressive self. Initially, growing affluence enabled ordinary people to express their tastes in home furnishings, designer clothes and choice of entertainment to a degree known by the rich alone in previous eras. Now consumers are ‘prosumers’, using new technology to co-produce, co-design, co-innovate, co-distribute and co-consume with others, often across international borders (Chandra and Coviello, 2010).
The academic literature refers to ‘user entrepreneurs’ – individuals or groups of individuals who commercialize a product that they themselves use (Shah and Tripsas, 2007, p. 124). But the trend is wider. Trendwatching.com have dubbed it ‘minipreneurs’: a vast army of consumers turning entrepreneurs, from freelancers to advertising-sponsored bloggers.6 As life becomes more entrepreneurial, church pioneering feels increasingly natural.
Some characteristics of the expressive self
One is that most people seek to express themselves within an ‘immanent frame’. This is Charles Taylor’s term for how the different structures in which people now live – scientific, social, technological and so on – are understood on their own terms. They are ‘this worldly’. The supernatural is left out (Taylor, 2007, pp. 539–93).
Many people live in the here and now. They are preoccupied with day-to-day concerns. A UK questionnaire-and-interview study of people born after 1982 (Generation Y) found that the sample, who attended church to some extent, had an ‘immanent
