July 25, 2025

Summer Reads:

The Sacred Canopy and Joe Shlabotnik

In keeping with the baseball theme of last Sunday’s sermon, this week’s Notes is a bit of a double header. The first game is what I promised last week, a book that predicted what caused Eugene Peterson’s malaise. Peter Berger (1929-2017) was both a sociologist of some note, and a theologian. His Invitation to Sociology (1963) was a profoundly influential book in my studies after leaving Engineering. I continue to read sociology to this day. Berger’s works that followed Introduction were much more explicitly focused on meaning, faith, and religion. As a sociologist he never apologized for being a person of faith, nor for critiquing the state of religion.

His work The Sacred Canopy (1967) is the book I would recommend. In particular, Chapter 6, “Secularization and the Problem of Plausibility.” Allow me to offer a simplistic summary of Berger’s work. The Enlightenment was a period in which the mystery of religion was challenged by the empiricism of science and reason. In the Enlightenment, God was at best a creator who, like a clock maker, made the world, ‘wound it up,’ and then let it run without further interaction or maintenance. This was a cool, distant God. Pietism, both Lutheran and Anglican (think Wesleys), was a response to the Enlightenment, with its warmer, nearer God. Our nation and its understanding of religion and state was established by enlightened men like Jefferson and Franklin.

As the Protestant churches become more and more influenced by the Enlightenment, the Protestant faith lost the three essentials of religion: mystery, magic, and miracle. These transcendent realties create a “sacred canopy,’ a roof to protect us from falling into isolation, meaninglessness, and despair, holding us together as a society. The result of this shift was an increase in secularization and individualism. This led to the Evangelical concept of “Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior.” (I’m still looking for that in the Bible, by the way.)

Berger made two profoundly accurate predictions regarding the future of religion about 60 years ago. The first is that the widening gap between the “sacred” and the “secular” would lead to the rise of twenty-first-century global religious fundamentalism that seeks to narrow this gulf through political coercion, sectarian violence, and the increase of tribalism, not nationalism, as key to one’s identity. Frightening close to being spot on, I would say.

Even more keen was Berger’s prediction of ministry in this context. Given that each person had a personal, unmediated relationship with God, Protestant clergy had nothing to offer to the typical believer that they did not already have. Berger’s conclusion was that Protestant ministry would be reduced to sales, trying to attract the believer into their ministry by offering spiritual resources that would be to their benefit. Berger’s study in the early 1960s would prove to be most prophetic as the marketing of the church would be seen in Robert Schuler’s Crystal Cathedral and Bill Hybel’s Willow Creek in the 70s and 80s. George Barna’s work on marketing the church in the 90s further validates Berger’s thesis. As does the market-driven, customer-centered churches that continue to proliferate. To this point, Peterson called pastors “shopkeepers.” Eugene Peterson’s many works, including Working the Angles, respond exactly to this reality.

You may never desire to read Berger, but if you made it to the end of this piece, maybe that is enough. I hope this will help you understand how our church and its ministries are unique and distinct from many of our sister churches. I wish every church to be who God has called them to be. I believe God has called our church to be a church that bucks the trends named by Peterson and Berger and offers a God outside not only ourselves, but outside our capacity to fully understand. Truly God is a mystery, a God who even more mysteriously has chosen to reveal God’s love for all creation and all people who dwell in it.

The second game is much, much lighter. Here is a nice piece on Charlie Brown and his love of Joe Shlabotnik. It is a good reminder about our values and God’s incredible grace.

Happy reading!

~ Pastor Todd

Illustration by Jeff HansPetersen