The Sweet Smell of Success

It is now some sixteen years since the disaster that was `The Nine O'Clock Service.'  This was the name given to an Anglican church in Sheffield which had started as a signs and wonders gig, gone Anglican, morphed into an odd fusion of Anglo-Catholicism and ecological mysticism and finally gone bust amidst allegations that the vicar, Chris Brain, had been having sexual relations with women in the church.  In the process, the church grew from 10 to over 600 mainly young people.  Its sacramental life centered on the memorably entitled and utterly mad `Planetary Mass' which Brain celebrated wearing the actual robe Robert DeNiro used in the film The Mission.  He also formed a personal bodyguard of young, attractive women.  You could instantly recognize them: they were the ones wearing the black catsuits.  They were also the ones he was sexually enjoying on a regular basis.

What was so stunning when it all went horribly wrong was how so many people in positions of power and responsibility had watched the whole thing develop and had uttered not a syllable of concern.  Not when Brain started talking gibberish about the Planetary Mass; not when he bought the DeNiro robe; and not when he recruited the catsuited stunners to meet his every need.  And when it all blew up, all these people of influence - from the bishop down - shuffled away muttering `Nothing to do with me, guvnor' to anybody who asked why they had allowed this to happen.

There is a lesson there: fill the church, especially with hip youngsters and young professionals, and you can get away with anything, even dressing like DeNiro and having an all-female catsuit bodyguard.  Well, you can for a while, at least.

This all takes me back to a question I have raised before: in a world where success is the ultimate sacrament of absolution, who is there with the credibility to call the successful to account?  Not the man in the small church.  Suspicion that he is motivated by envy will always undermine his authority in such a context.  And, if we are honest, envy will likely always be a part of the motivation for such criticism. I preach total depravity, after all, and it is also the one example where I can honestly say I consistently practice what I preach.  What pastor of a church of fifty does not want to be pastor of a church of five hundred?  The church I serve has ca. 90 on a Sunday.  Yes, I would love a few hundred more.  If we ever got to four hundred, I hope we would plant a church, as long as I did not have to drink zinfandel and grow a soul patch.  But yes, I would be lying if I said I did not have a twinge of envy at those whose ministries are - well, you know, successful.  I guess that is the word.

What about the pundit?  Can he find a hearing? If reactions to my comments about the impact of celebrity culture on American reformed evangelicalism are a safe guide, then probably not.  That American reformed evangelicalism is increasingly shaped by such celebrity culture seems to me a point so self-evident that I am still amazed that anybody thinks it worth disputing.  Clearly, the critics of the celebrity aesthetic are as implausible to those enamoured of the big, the bold and the beautiful as is the man in the small church.  Not because of their envy but, apparently, because of their hypocrisy. The logic of `I have never met Trueman but I have heard of him, therefore he must be a celebrity; thus he is a hypocrite in criticizing celebrity culture and can simply be ignored' is both silly, in its conflation of "being known" and "being a celebrity", and illogical in rejecting an argument simply on the grounds of the alleged moral failing of the one articulating it.   He may be a hypocrite; but if the man tells you that two plus two equals four, then you might want to listen to him.

So what about the successful?  Will they point out the problematic excesses of the self-promotional culture which seems to pervade much of the modern conservative evangelical church?  One can only hope so; but history gives little cause for optimism on that score.  Nobody wants to bash the successful, for our culture assumes that that would be to identify with failure and mediocrity.  

The psychology of success is fascinating: those who are successful often start as well-intentioned people; but increasing success almost always seems to bring in its wake an increasingly relaxed attitude to the rules, a fuzzier conception of right and wrong and an odd sense of entitlement whereby the successful come to think that, for them, the normal criteria of behaviour do not apply.  This incremental exceptionalism is reinforced by the failure of those who should check them from actually doing so.  It is almost as if, for all of us, success (and in church we typically mean numerical size and growth) is the ultimate criterion of truth and that therefore as long as it seems to be working, as long as it is popular, it must be true.  You can ape the Hollywood aesthetic; you can be increasingly vague on the hard teachings; but as long as the machine keeps working as it should, everybody is happy -- or at least comfortable in their silence.

The Nine O'Clock Service debacle seems to indicate that as long as you pull in the punters, especially the young ones, as long as your name on the conference flier helps to sell tickets, and as long as your preaching is popular with the rising generation, those with the standing to state the obvious and do something about the excesses will generally not do so for fear of spoiling something which seems to be working as it should.  Indeed, you will enjoy the benefits of a powerful and heady perfume which gives the successful a high and hides the hollow reality from outsiders: the sweet smell of success.  You just can't beat it.

And when it all blows up, you can be confident it will be nothing to do with anyone.  "Seriously, guv, I never even knew the man....."
 Carl Trueman