The Great Giveaway: Book Review and Reflections

A new book on the postmodern Christianity scene is The Great Giveaway by David Fitch. Fitch, an Evangelical and a Christian Missionary Alliance pastor near Chicago, sets out to help examine the Evangelical church and its practices. His premise for doing so is that the Evangelical Church has bought into so many of the practices and philosophies of Modernity that it has lost much of its mission. He examines the church's ideas of Success, Evangelism, Leadership, Worship, Preaching, Justice, Spiritual Formation and Moral Education. It is an amazingly comprehensive work for the task he set forth to do. 

It is an important book and one I would recommend for any evangelical. Unlike some of the Emerging Church, Fitch refuses to trade in his evangelical heritage because of its faults and instead works to try and redeem and refocus the church. It is a courageous book that tackles some immense topics and I fear no review can sufficiently reflect on all of his ideas.

Fitch begins by looking at our Definition of Success in the evangelical church. For many in the church, success has become a game of numbers. Our goals for success are built around growth in the three B's: Buildings, Bucks and Behinds in the seats. The churches that are celebrated as successful in evangelicalism are often the megachurches such as Willow Creek, Saddle Back, North Point, and others.  Fitch asks the questions of how we got to this place and is it a good place to be. He suggests that the church got this way because of the individualism and corporate models that dominate our culture. I would agree and suggest that there is no separating the profound effects of the corporate world or our inherent American individualism from life in the Evangelical church. Just as there was no separating the early church from the philosophies and structures of the Roman Empire. There were efforts to overcome both of these in the early church (see Colossians) but I don't know if they did much better of a job than we do. (After all the church structured itself after the Roman Empire and ended up with an emperor, see The Pope)

So if this is true, that the evangelical church has allowed individualism and corporations to define our success, what cost has it brought? Fitch suggests that the cost is that we only focus on professions of faith, a one time crisis event, as a mark for identifying salvation in a new believer, and we are growing into unhealthy churches by following corporate models. Instead of this emphasis on crisis moment conversions the church should look to baptisms and disciples as signs of proper growth. An improper focus on shallow salvation has lead to bad growth in the church.

Why can growth be a bad sign? As you create a church and set up the organizational systems and goals of that church you create it with an end product in mind and ultimately you find out how well you have done by what you have produced. It is often said that as an organization you are perfectly set up to produce whatever kind of product you are currently producing. You have to change the organization to change the product. So lets look at the product we are producing within evangelicalism to examine the machine. Are we producing mature Christians? Are we raising up a generation of Biblically literate, socially concerned, sanctified stewards of the Gospel? In some cases yes, in many cases no. What we are creating, Fitch points out, is a community of consumers. Our churches offer services to make us attractive to the consumer. And as long as we offer those services and they meet the needs of the consumer they come to our church. When we cease to offer the services they want, or someone else offers them better we lose them as consumers of our goods. Church isn't neat and clean and tidy. It doesn't always meet your needs; at least as you perceive them. It requires more than that. Doing church right is messy, hard, it takes a long time to build up, and it requires dedication and commitment of time and resources. But those are not values built into a church designed to grow rapidly or build big numbers. They can exist in a large church, but being large is no sign that real growth of spiritual depth is going on. It may actually be a sign that it is not. 

So what does success look like in the church? It certainly isn't about budgets or the number of people coming. It is about the lives that are being transformed and shaped into the image of Christ. That is a process that is slow, intentional, and requires full engagement. It requires each of us to examine our own faith and determine how committed to working out our salvation we are as well.

Going beyond ideas of success, which is really only the first section of the book, Fitch lays out a return to more ancient and proven church practices in the Evangelical church. This includes sacramental living and worship, using the lectionary, balancing between teaching centered and experiential worship, living each year in rhythms of the church calendar, and recapturing the prophetic imagination of narrative in our preaching. For each of these subjects Fitch, fairly comprehensively, examines the historical roots, modern realities, and hopeful future of the evangelical church.

What is most striking about Fitch’s book, especially for those well versed in the Emerging Church and its writers is that actually offers answers to the problems he sees in evangelicalism. He isn’t abandoning his heritage, his denomination, or his backing down from the challenges he sees. Instead, he works to recapture a holistic missional vision for evangelicalism that doesn’t abandon its strengths or history. For those of us in the Emerging Church this book serves as a brilliant beacon of hope shimmering forth in the darkness of the postmodern soup. Maybe there are actual answers to these struggles we have with the church. Maybe in the search for the church of the 21^st Century we will discover that it doesn’t require us to reinvent the church so much as rediscovering the church.

The Great Giveaway is a fantastic book and well worth picking up. I have already given copies to a number of friends and recommended it to many others. Pick it up, chew on the ecclesial meat it provides and begin to reexamine your own church and your vision for the church through Fitch’s lens. If you do, you will rejoice over the church you find.