The Metaphor Matters

Against the Factory-Floor Church

"The church is a hospital, no no it's a boat crew, actually it's a rescue team, hang-on now it's a family, no really it's a ..."

I’m sure many of us are familiar with hearing of some new metaphor for the church and the life we have together.

These metaphor shifts come with an exhausting regularity these days, as one 'ministry philosophy' fad comes, goes and passes into the last decade before being replaced by another. Despite the dizzying exhaustion that can come in the wake of a whole new metaphor driving all new programs and a total re-imagining of ‘our church’s vision’ very little actually seems to change in any meaningful way. Consequently, many of us have reached a point in which these metaphors wash over us. They seem transient, inconsequential, irrelevant, and impotent.

In this post, I hope to convince you that the revolving door of church metaphors, is itself a symptom of a deeper meta-metaphor shift (there's a mouthful). I contend that our metaphorical framework for what the church is really matters (despite our understandable disinterest). And I want to suggest that God has already provided us with a set of interconnected metaphors, and that if we embraced these instead, the ‘ministry philosophy’ of our modern would be in better health.

The Frothy Top of a Deeper Shift

It's appropriate for a post on metaphors to include some, and so:

Most of the modern metaphor shifts we experience (those short-lived, ephemeral changes that accompany new church programs and vision statements) are bubbles frothing up to the surface arising from a deeper metaphor shift that has been consolidating itself over the last two hundred years or so.

These are the changes in imagery we see on the surface, and they can look remarkably different from each other; boats and rescue teams and hospitals are not the same thing.

But the fact that the shift happens so often is, I would like to suggest, a product of a larger cosmological shift. In the past we imagined the world in organic terms (garden, household, body), today we more readily imagine it in industrial or mechanical terms (the cosmos is a machine).

The fact that this shift has happened in wider society has been discussed extensively by others, so I won't spend too much time on it here. Here, I simply want to observe that this larger societal shift has gripped us in the church as well, and our attempts to imagine the nature and function of the church have inevitably been affected along with it.

It's relatively common to hear people bemoan business models being applied to the church, and that complaint hits close to the heart of the matter. After all, modern corporations, factories, and machines have many similarities, and the application of business practices to church life are a real symptom of this cosmological shift.

However, the real underlying metaphor of the modern church is not simply 'business', but machine. Here’s how it tends to work:

1. The church chooses a product. These vary to some degree, and potential products include convert, 'mature' Christian, evangelist, full time minister.

2. The church defines the parameters of a successful product e.g. ‘this person has prayed a prayer asking Jesus into their heart’, ‘this person leads a small group’, ‘this person evangelises his neighbours’, ‘this person is pursuing full time ministry’.

3. The church designs systems or 'pipelines' that (if completed) will produce the product. uncontacted -> contacted -> pre-evangelism course -> evangelism course -> membership course -> small group attendance -> final product (see above).

4. Once the pipeline is complete, then the person/product is complete (though of course, they need regular maintenance).

5. Crucially, the product is then ready to be pressed into service, and service is defined as contributing to the smooth running of the pipeline.

It’s important to note than in this metaphorical set-up everyone in the church exists for the pipeline. It may be that the product at the end of the pipeline is ‘a mature Christian’, but that Christian’s maturity is defined by their ability to contribute to the smooth running of the machine, and (within reasonable limits) each of the members is more or less an interchangeable part that can be plugged-in wherever the need arises:

‘Why do we want the system? To make converts! To make mature believers! And why do we want converts/mature believers? To man the pipeline!’

Maturity comes to be measured not by godliness in roles outside the programs of the church, but by contribution to the programs of the church.

In some of these set-ups (particularly the largest) the pastor comes to be seen as something of a CEO, though it’s more likely that they become (in both function and appearance) something closer to a middle-manager or foreman.

This metaphorical landscape requires congregants to think highly of the church, but, such is its cosmological and poetic bankruptcy, our attempts to inspire such a love eventually reduce to ‘get with the program or else’.

The factor-floor metaphor is, of course, not without modern critique. As I’ve already mentioned, many reject the idea of the church as a business, but the normal reaction to the ‘church as corporation’ image also demonstrates that we've lost our metaphorical moorings.

Failing to understand the metaphysics of the thing, we tend to reject the wrong parts of the industrial metaphor. The anti-business crowd end up rejecting formality, hierarchy (and with them any shred of transcendence that remained), as well as a sense that the church should be fruitful and reach for the cosy, undemanding, metaphor of the modern family living room.

The Metaphor Matters

The way that we imagine the church, the metaphor that underpins our understanding of what the church is and what it's supposed to do, really matters.

Because we have not understood the church, we have started to describe her poorly, and because we have described her poorly, we no longer understand the church and her purpose.

Two churches can theoretically subscribe to the same subordinate standard and yet be completely different when it comes to practicalities (large and small, tangible and intangible) because they are operating from a different metaphor.

As such we should be paying much closer attention to the metaphors, we are using to describe the church; both to ourselves and to any congregants in our care.

The Essence of the Solution

A simple piece like this can only go so-far into solutions without ballooning beyond all proportion and much more work must be done to flesh out the implications of such metaphor shifts.

But the simple essence of my proposed solution is this:

We must return to the Bible’s series of interconnected metaphors for the nature and purpose of the church, instead of reaching for metaphorical novelty.

Sooner or later, one of us will want to inspire greater love for the church in our people. My basic plea is this; let’s avoid the poetically insipid images we’ve become used to employing and turn again to the riches of those images that the Lord has already provided for us.

Of course, it will take time, energy, and poetic skill to get across the contours of the bible’s metaphorical landscape in a way that makes sense to our people, but the modern metaphors require the same hard work, and they have only a tiny portion of the payoff.

That required exegetical work is beyond the scope of this short article, as is an exploration of the manifold practical implications such metaphors would bring to our churches. But to get the thinking started, let me end this piece with a very short (and by no means exhaustive) list of biblical metaphors for the church.

Perhaps these metaphors will form the basis of future posts from me on this topic. I’m certain that greater minds than mine have already set themselves to that task.

And as you scan the list below, note how organic and covenantal they are, instead of being mechanistic or industrial:

· Vineyard, or garden, or field, of God

· House/Household/Temple of God

· Bride of Christ

· Holy Nation

· Sheep/Shepherds

· Olive Tree

May the Lord help us to realise that the metaphors we use to describe his church matter, and may we return to those that he has given. Here, I believe, lies the solution to a great portion of the exhaustion to be found in modern evangelical churches.

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Photo by Christian on Unsplash