The Congregation in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life

Ministry in a Secular Age #3

by Andrew Root, Mike Lenz (Narrator)

Churches often realize they need to change. But if they're not careful, the way they change can hurt more than help.

Leading practical theologian Andrew Root offers a new paradigm for understanding the congregation in contemporary ministry. He articulates why congregations feel pressured by the speed of change in modern life and encourages an approach that doesn't fall into the negative traps of our secular age.

Living in late modernity means our lives are constantly accelerated, and calls for change in the church often support this call to speed up. Root asserts that the recent push toward innovation in churches has led to an acceleration of congregational life that strips the sacred out of time. Many congregations are simply unable to keep up, which leads to burnout and depression. When things move too fast, we feel alienated from life and the voice of a living God.

The Congregation in a Secular Age calls congregations to reimagine what change is and how to live into this future, helping them move from relevance to resonance.

Genres: Theology, Church, Nonfiction, Faith, Philosophy, Christian Living, Ecclesiology

Audio CD

Published February 14, 2023

About the author

Andrew Root joined Luther Seminary in 2005 as assistant professor of youth and family ministry. Previously he was an adjunct professor at Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington D.C., and Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, N.J.

Root received his bachelor of arts degree from Bethel College, St. Paul, Minn., in 1997. He earned his master of divinity (2000) and his master of theology (2001) degrees from Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, Calif. He completed his doctoral degree from Princeton Theological Seminary in 2005.

Root's ministry experience includes being a gang prevention counselor in Los Angeles, youth outreach directed in a congregation, staff member of Young Life, and a confirmation teacher. He has also been a research fellow for Princeton Theological Seminary's Faith Practices Project.

Root has published articles in the Journal of Youth and Theology, The International Journal of Practical Theology, and Word and World.

He is a member of the International Association for the Study of Youth Ministry and the International Bonhoeffer Society.

Reviews

[Kurtley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book about the philosophical headwinds of modernity and how it's impacting pastors and the Christian formation I've read to date. Root makes Charles Taylor accessible!

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best of the trilogy.

[Robert D. Cornwall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Does time seem to be accelerating at a pace that far exceeds our ability to keep up? Does that sound about right? That feeling that time is passing by too quickly might be one of the reasons we look back with fondness at what seems to be a simpler time, like when we had dial phones instead of these smartphones. Wasn't life simpler before computers and the internet? To be honest, I don't want to go back to typewriters. They really were a pain! Nevertheless, it seems harder and harder to keep up. What is true of life is true for the church as it navigates this increasingly secular age.

Andrew Root completes a trilogy with The Congregation in a Secular Age. I read the previous book in the series: The Pastor in a Secular Age: Ministry to People Who No Longer Need a God, but not the first Faith Formation in a Secular Age: Responding to the Church's Obsession with Youthfulness. I will confess that I resonated more with this volume than the one on the pastor, even though I am a pastor and I do recognize that ministry in this secular age often seems to run into the reality that growing numbers of people simply don't feel they need God. Perhaps the reason that this third volume resonated so much is that I'm about to retire for full-time pastoral ministry. Like so many of my colleagues, I'm finding it more and more difficult to keep up with the accelerating pace of our world. This COVID pandemic has made that even clearer. The need to adapt to new forms of technology to stay connected has been a struggle. What does the future hold? I'm not sure I have the energy to lead a congregation in such a context.

While Root had made great use of the work of Charles Taylor on secularism in his previous book (the one I read) in this book he uses the work of German social theorist Hartmut Rosa, whose work on time fits the context of the book. He notes that Rosa not only speaks to the accelerating pace of time in this secular age but that it has stripped the sacred out of time. So, in the preface Root writes that his argument is "that this accelerating of time has had a huge impact on the congregation. I even assert that congregations are struck with depression because they can't keep up with the speed." (p. xii). The challenge here is that the church feels the need to innovate and grow in order to keep up, but despite everything, even congregations that seem to have sufficient resources feel depressed. There is little time or energy. That puts added burdens on clergy who have to pick up the slack.

I will admit that over much of the book I felt a bit depressed. I recognized in myself and my church much of what he was saying. It spoke to why I am retiring a bit early. There is hope, at the end of the book. It's not a word about slowing down and smelling the roses. Slowing down simply doesn't work, but he does believe that sacredness can be restored to time, even if time is accelerating. The key is resonance. Resonance is relational. That is where the hope is to be found.

In Part 1, Root speaks to the reality of Depressed Congregations. He tells stories about churches and their struggles with the speed at which things are changing. He speaks of attempts at being relevant and the idea of fullness as busyness. The subtitle of chapter 3 is revealing: "Why Busy Churches Attract and Then Lose Busy People." We're attracted to churches with lots of things going on. That seems to speak of vitality. But busy people are tired people and so they quickly find themselves stepping aside.

Part 2 is titled Examining Congregational Despondency. It is comprised of seven chapters (most chapters in the book are relatively brief). In what is chapter five of the book --- titled "When Time Isn't What It Used to Be" Root sets up a series of chapters six chapters that explore three dimensions of this speed-up -- technological acceleration, acceleration of social life, and acceleration of the pace of life. The point here is that all three dimensions are interconnected. So the church can't just focus on one dimension of this speed-up, because of they affect each other. Root writes "Wha opens the church to despondency is that it is always trying to catch up, and we envision catching up as taking place inside or alongside technological change. Yet technological change is never disconnected from social change --- and the timekeepers of Silicon Vally know this, which is what gives them such hubris, believing that a new app can change the world." (p. 61). You see, you can't just improve your live stream or add a video to the service and think you've arrived. What happens is fatigue. We chase the new and we fall flat (and exhausted). If you're despondent yet, you may survive.

Part 3 invites us to move from "Relevance to Resonance." There is still some bad news to hear. He offers a chapter on "time-famine and resource obsession." This only leads to alienation from one another, from the church, and even God. He has a chapter that challenges the idea of the "slow church." It doesn't work because the world is on a path that makes it difficult to truly slow down without the world becoming destabilized. But there is hope. Chapter 14 offers resonance as the alternative to alienation, and alienation involves a disconnecting of us from the world. It involves a loss of a sense of divine action. He writes that "Revelation is encountered in the world; it is the unveiling of God's eternal being in time. But if the world is deadened and we feel only a faint connection to it, then believing the immanent frame is closed is the only obvious choice. A grey, hard, inert world is our natural habitat" (p. 193). Does that sound about right? We've lost track of the transcendent. So, where do we find resonance? In the final chapters of the book, Root suggests that we find it not by slowing down but by experiencing relationships within time. It's those moments of delight that often come in encounters with small children.

Chapters fifteen and sixteen speak of children, of carrying children. The first chapter brings Bonhoeffer into the conversation. Then in chapter 16, he turns to Matthew 18 and Jesus' message about welcoming children. It's important to note that the key is not thinking of children as resources, as in the future of the church. They are valued in and of themselves not because they are resources.

The title of chapter 17 seems a bit titillating -- "Enticing with a little erotic ecstasy." If your mind goes to sex then you will either be disappointed or pleasantly surprised. Often we think of agape as the Christian form of love, but Root draws on the work of the Greek Orthodox philosopher/theologian Christos Yannaras, whose book Person and Eros speaks to the issue at hand in terms of relationship. Yannaras begins by contemplating the Trinity, and that eros speaks of God moving toward us. God acts. Eros, according to Yannaras, is love on the move. "it's a love that has a passion for what is other, to resonate with another. Eros seeks to be with and for what Eros is not." (p. 247). I had only recently heard of Yannaras, and Root has enticed me to check out Yannaras' work as it seems to have value for our times, so that the sacred might be restored to time. Root writes that we can't go back to when Avignon was the time-keeper. We can't return to the medieval world, nor would we want to, but there is a way of encountering the sacred within time. That is through relationship.

I think for me it was this final chapter that gave me hope. Yes, I see the depression and the despondency of the church as it struggles to keep up. We hear lots of promises that if only we adopt the practices of Starbucks or Google we too can be successful. That's not likely. We will have to find a different path. Root puts his finger on the problem and perhaps, with the help of Rosa and Yannaras, there is a word of hope.

[Matthew Green · Rating 2 out of 5]

The general conclusion that Root eventually arrives at is good. I appreciate his emphasis on relationship and the value of personhood for its own sake as remedies to the ills of the current era. However, getting to that conclusion was a rough and frustrating journey, and even the end of it still held a number of problematic details, which made the overall book one that I just wasn't happy with.

I had trouble with his use of the term, authenticity, as the cultural virtue of late modernity. While the idea may not entirely be wrong, the term led me to immediately reject it and then turned to endless confusion as I tried to comprehend what he was talking about. Had he called it self-actualization or individuality, that may have made it easier to swallow, as authenticity has an entirely different meaning to me, and arguing that Instagram calls us to endless authenticity made me think the author was speaking nonsense. Unfortunately, this only set the stage for my feeling dubious about the rest of the text.

In addition, I'm not sure it's entirely fair to say that authenticity, as Root understands it, will inevitably lead to depression. I didn't find his argument convincing at all and would challenge him to provide empirical evidence to back up the claim. Further, to argue that the supposed cultural virtue of duty from mid-modernity will inevitably lead to hysteria and that it mostly fell on women because of their societal inability to fulfill their duty is insulting to women, neglects the historical prejudices that created the very diagnosis of hysteria, and again lacks any empirical evidence to back up his claim - one I am guessing evidence would suggest is untrue anyway.

I am, perhaps being nitpicky, though these are early examples of the kind of questionable reasoning that I felt like went into much of the book. Rather than criticizing all the individual issues, I'll jump to the main thrust of his argument.

The majority of the book is spent detailing the assertion that acceleration of time is the principal issue that has shaped western culture (I have wondered if any of his arguments would hold up when considering other global cultures). While it's hard to deny that the world has experienced an acceleration due to technological development and that this has had effects on the culture, it's highly questionable whether the effects are as pervasive and universal as he says. He traces every societal ill back to acceleration, and I simply don't believe many of the individual correlations he draws nor the attempt to make acceleration the root problem of everything. As one example, Root at one point claims that income inequality can be traced back to acceleration, which seems absurd given the existence of medieval feudalism for just one counterexample.

It also seemed that Root was arguing against himself quite regularly. He sets up acceleration as the cause of all these ills, but regularly mentions or implies changes in cultural perspectives on the good life as necessary. In fact, he occasionally sets up changes to perspectives on the good life as part of what led to acceleration. I wondered repeatedly why, then, weren't these new and faulty understandings of the good life the source of problems rather than acceleration? He perhaps answers this when he articulates that people in late modernity have no grasp on the good life in the present but only the possibility of preparing for the good life in the future, but I again didn't find his reasoning persuasive. Most people, I believe, are very clear on what the good life is, though I believe their definition of it is ultimately wrong and will never actually satisfy the real needs of the human person. This wrong take on what is good, I believe, makes a better causal source than acceleration for contemporary ills.

Eventually, the author comes to the thought that the real problem that acceleration has caused is alienation - a detachment from oneself, others, and the world - and that alienation is the fundamental sociological issue of late modernity. Again, I won't say that alienation is not a problem, but I am loathe to say that it is the core problem of the age. Furthermore, his delineation of how acceleration must lead to alienation isn't convincing. He is relying on Hartmut Rosa's reasoning, and seems to be trying to use Rosa's thought as a basis for everything he is building, but either I must disagree with Rosa (whom I haven't read) or believe that Root is attempting to apply it too universally. There are certainly other explanations for how the culture could come to struggle with alienation, but Root doesn't consider any, being already convinced of acceleration as the fundamental source. How he gets there isn't convincing to me. There are other possibilities that seem more plausible in my mind. I also question why, if alienation is the real issue, it was necessary at all to spend so much of the book laying out the issue of acceleration.

Finally, he reaches resonance, his (and Rosa's) solution for late modernity's sickness. To me, resonance seems to be an overly complicated depiction of real relationship and mature love. In a sense, this is wonderful; I agree with him in that love and relationship are absolutely the necessary cures for the problems of the world. "Love covers over a multitude of sins," and "The goal of our instruction is love," it says in the scriptures. However, even here I still struggled. As noted, resonance seems overly complicated while simultaneously lacking in concrete descriptions of how it plays out in the world. I at one point felt like Barbara Frederickson's perspective on love might actually flesh out what he's describing only to discover a few paragraphs later that he'd already read Frederickson but dismissed her work as being too clinical.

Then, while noting that resonance could manifest in myriad ways, he intentionally restricts himself to describing the church having relationships with children. This limited his ability to describe it and narrowed his thinking, leaving his discussion of resonance far emptier than it could and should have been while somehow not managing to really explain how to engage with children in a concrete way. He concludes at one point saying that it's up to each congregation to discover what their journey with resonance will look like, which seemed an abdication of responsibility. He spent a great deal of time delineating a problem but only a short space considering a solution, dropping the rest of the responsibility for figuring out how to implement it into the reader's hands.

Still, as I noted, I like the actual solution in principle. Relationship and love, even if I don't necessarily agree entirely with his analysis and description of them, are necessary. They are what the church is called to, regardless of era, because they will be the solution to many problems, perhaps the ultimate solution, as Jesus demonstrated for us in his willingness to empty himself and die for our sakes. I just find that Root's journey to get to this conclusion was problematic and maybe unnecessary, and his description of the end was weaker than I would have liked.

One more thing I will give the author: he is fairly readable, which is laudable for being as philosophically minded as he is. While some of his concepts get unwieldy, he largely still communicates them in a way that doesn't become overly burdensome to disentangle without an advanced degree.

[Andrew Guthrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a pastor in the 21st century, I have all of these inklings that things aren't working, and that by simply trying hard, we're going to eventually run ourselves ragged. I think about the ways culture has changed in just the 10 years since I was ordained. In 2012 everyone had to have a blog, and that evolved into everyone needs to have twitter, and then snapchat. When the pandemic hit, video became the thing to do, and then tik tok... it just keeps coming, and while it feels neccesary to "keep up" with society, lest the church become irrelevant, it does not feel particularly rooted in any kind of healthy spirituality. It's a "church-leader-as-celebrity" model that, unless you're an enneagram 3, 7, or 8, does not at all feel life giving.

Andy Root gives language to so much of this, and in doing so is reinvigorating my own energy behind ministry, away from the never ending rat-race of relevancy speech, and back towards a deep spirituality that feels much more like what first draw me to faith. For some, this book is probably not what you want to hear. For others, including me, it makes the future of ministry seem much more possible.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an excellent, practical theology for exhausted congregations and pastors. Root’s series has been overall excellent (although I appreciated books 2 and 3 more than 1). I highly recommend reading the series for a new take on innovation/change rooted in the sacred of relationship.

[Alex Connell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andy Root is a gift to the Church, and his Secular Age project is one that every pastor should be engaging in. This third volume focuses on time. Specifically, he discusses the change from sacred time to secular time and asks great questions about who the timekeepers are in our world today.

I’ve loved everything I’ve read from Andy, and I’m eager to read more!

[Stephen Boutry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding. Root provides critically important insight into our cultural moment and how to respond.

[Heatherjoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Andy Root's Secular Age series. Full Stop. The concepts are helpful for interpreting the world as I have experienced it, and this book was no exception. In fact, of the three books in the series, I found the opening chapters of this one the easiest to read because they so intuitively match my experience. I was deeply moved by the concept of resonance in particular, finding that it frames both my efforts in lay ministry and my creative pursuits, especially what I'm trying to capture with my photography.

I did find myself disagreeing with Root on one significant point (which feels very intimidating to own as he is brilliant and has clearly spent a huge amount of time in all kinds of source material that I have no idea how any person has time to read in that quantity!). It is the insistence that carrying children is the primary mode of encountering persons/experiencing resonance. I agree that we do encounter persons and experience resonance when we carry children, but I don't see why that carrying can't be exchangeable with other ministries to vulnerable persons - can't resonance be experienced in carrying the unhomed, the recovering alcoholics, the disabled, the lonely elderly, etc? My own life experience and the narratives I've heard from others it can be experienced in these and other contexts. Of course, that weakens the way Root wants to use Bonhoeffer and the Madonna Nicopeia, but those chapters are where this book feels weakest/most underdeveloped to me. Or perhaps I was just too tired by the end? I found myself a bit lost, though, around the ideas about God and time and change as connected to Eros. I think there's something important there that might help us wrestle with the tension of an unchanging God who also changes in scripture, but I struggled to grasp it in its fullness. I still highly recommend the book, but I didn't find myself quite singing the hallelujah's I was by the end of the prior two volumes.

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subtitle of this book, "Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life," captures Andrew Root's counter-cultural approach to church leadership in a time of great change. Even before the pandemic that has forced change on institutions and individuals in 2020, there was broad consensus among those who care about the Church: too much is changing outside church walls. Church leaders need to innovate, the thinking goes, and adjust to meet the needs of our new American way of life or we're going to lose people. In many congregations, covid has accelerated this pressure to create more and bigger projects.

Root shows how such thinking, while maybe exciting while creativity is flowing, ultimately drains the people, often leading to anxiety and depression. He uses writing from philosophical, sociological, theological, and historical scholars to challenge our unthinking acceptance of the "speed of modern life." He takes that scholarship and shows clear implications for a different path forward. The result is not a quick and breezy read; he made me think, and that careful reading was a joy.

This book belongs on every pastor and congregational leader's "to be read" list.

[Adam Metz · Rating 5 out of 5]

The third installment of Root's Ministry in a Secular Age series continues his important work in connecting the work of Charles Taylor to Western congregational ministry. In this volume, Root adds to his engagement of Taylor the work of Harmut Rosa, a theoretical sociologist (probably is a better title). Root benefits the church by wading through philosophical and theoretical waters and connects dots that help pastoral practitioners make sense of the waters in which we are wading and working. Perhaps more than even the other two volumes in the series, I found myself nodding my head and light bulbs going off as he articulates many of the challenges and problems I have faced in my ministry.

At the heart of this volume are reflections on time and the implications of the constant busyness that seems to plague daily life in our society. Root argues that the church has largely misdiagnosed our crisis as decline which has led to taking the wrong "medicine." Most church leaders believe our crisis is decline: decline membership, declining resources, decline influence. As a result, we double down on already-busy members with more, more, more: more planning, more programming, etc. mimicking the acceleration of the surrounding culture. The results are that we take already burdened members and infuse them with more leaving them feeling guilty, overwhelmed, and helpless. By embracing the culture of faster, bigger, better to address the crisis of decline, Root (on the shoulders of Taylor and Rosa) suggests that we have been addressing the problem.

The crisis, according to Root, is not decline but the inability to experience the presence of God. He argues that moments of resonance (where time stands still and the moments seem to transcend the here and now) highlight the escape from a culture obsessed with acceleration. He describes it this way: "Inside the accelerating pace of life, the culture is alienated from transcendence . . . The problem of secular 3 [a nuanced understanding of the experience of the secularization of Western culture] isn't that fewer people are going to our congregations but rather that many people feel alienated. Inside that alienation, divine action becomes opaque." (146)

His suggestion is that the church needs to move towards creating/reflecting/embodying (not sure the best word there) resonance and resonance can be understood well in considering delight. "Delight is the perfect description for the feeling of the connections that produce resonance. Delight is an encounter, a felt gift of being connected. Delight is never about resources and relevance [two things are current Western church culture has become obsessed with]. It can never be found outside the present. Delight always exists in the now, in the warmth of the gathered experiences of time. It is the result of being connected, being in relationship, experiences a fullness that this is the very Bizarro of busyness (and the alienation of this kind of fullness produces. The fullness of busyness is frantic and stretching. The fullness of resonance is the delight in being." (197)

The volumes of this series are densely packed and take some time to wade through in their implications and reflections. I am currently reading his follow up work (with Blair Bertrand) When Church Stops Working, where they try to simplify some of the concepts in this series and make it more accessible to lay readers - a project much needed. I am curious to see how successful they are in translating some of the philosophical and conceptual jargon. I continue to think that Root is providing the church some of the most important work that I've ran across in the last two decades. He is a prolific author and has been putting a lot of content out for us to reflect on and interact with. These projects are pushing us forward in many important areas.

[Toby · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought that The Congregation in a Secular Age was the third part of a trilogy, although the prolific Andrew Root seems to have published for more books in the past three years so it now seems to be a septology. Whether the subsequent books engage with Charles Taylor in the same depth as these three, or whether they strike out a different course I suppose I will find out if I get round to reading them.

Looking through my reviews of Faith Formation in a Secular Age and The Pastor in a Secular Age, I realise that my critique of both come down to the good ideas wrapped in some quite dense philosophy. The same is true of The Congregation in a Secular Age although I thought that the argument here was tighter with fewer deviations. If Bonhoeffer was the companion at the start of the series then he is present at the end, and more explicitly referenced.

Picking up again on Charles Taylor's idea of the Immanent Frame and the three aspects of secularisation, Root here argues that the characteristic modern malaise of fatigue comes from the perception of ever accelerating time. Using the Avignon as a placeholder for Mediaeval sacred time, he contrasts the time marked by church seasons and bells with the Move Fast and Break Things ethos of Silicon Valley. The secularisation of time has led to "dynamic stabilisation" in which acceleration becomes normative and we only feel at home in constant change (which means that we never feel at home). This is bad for society and fatal for the church. In this dynamic stabilisation everything becomes a resource useful for innovation and jumping ahead of also accelerating rivals. Relationships become instrumental and churches that grow are ones that innovate and therefore buy into the accelerating time of their congregation. The Church of England is not mentioned (he is after all, an American author), but it's hard not to find a critique of the Strategic Development Fund and the Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment Board in this. The names say it all.

So what can be done? Of course a book that spends its time critiquing quick-fix answers and off-the-shelf innovations is not going to fall into the trap of providing the same. This does mean that when you get to the end there is no lightbulb being switched on - "Oh this is how we need to do church!" Picking up, as he does throughout much of the book, on the work of the German sociologist and political theorist Hartmut Rosa (a name unknown to me), he speaks of the need for the Church to rediscover resonance. This is not a slowing down of time (to speak of slowing down is to simply adapt oneself to acceleration in a different way) but an appreciation of eternity in the moment (but not in a mindfulness way), especially the moment of the joyful child. Returning to his roots as a youth worker Root speaks of children has having not yet bought into the acceleration of modernity. Each moment for them is a point of join and relational connectivity. Jesus calls us to be as children, and that means finding relational resonances in our churches.

At times Root ploughs headlong without taking enough time to explain his concepts to the straggling reader. When he speaks of Bonhoeffer's Open/Closed, Individual/Relational, Will/Spirit dichotomies he doesn't really explain what he means. Similarly he picks up on the Greek theologian Christos Yannaras' concept of eros being thing guiding force of love in the universe and the Trinity without saying why Eros when all other Christian thinkers would speak of Agape. Perhaps Yannaras explains this but I could have done with a commentary. Elsewhere I found myself navigating the index to see if an idea had been better explained previously.

[Trey Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Congregation in a Secular Age is another gift to the Church: the last book in Andrew Root’s trilogy unpacking how philosopher Charles Taylor’s magnum opus on secularity might positively affect discipleship, pastoral leadership, and congregational life.

In this volume, Root offers a series of analyses and meditations on time and speed, dialoguing not only with Taylor, who is Catholic, but loads of Protestant theologians, and also other scholars from sociology, political science, and other fields who don’t necessarily identify with a particular faith tradition.

His essential argument is that late modernity’s idol of innovation at all costs (or better put: innovation towards all profits) – with its attendant demigods of technological acceleration, acceleration of social life, and acceleration of pace of life – manufactures a set of conditions that lead to wide-spread depression, fatigue, and hopelessness in people and organizations. "Postmodernity's" addictive need to produce a neo-bohemian (or neo-medieval, etc.) “authenticity” and to curate and publicize multiple selves (“living multiple lifetimes”) leads ironically to a chronic vapidity and an acute felt sense of alienation. This “time sickness” functions through an instrumentalization of human beings, evinced in unlikely bedfellows as diverse as incessant church change agendas and the normalization of pornography. Its common symptom is a disconnected personhood that is more individual than relational, more will than spirit, more open/“available” than “closed”/mysterious – and we therefore find ourselves turned in, unable to forget ourselves, and unlikely to get lost in wonder, love, and praise.

What I love about Root’s work is how deeply theological it is: the antidote to this malaise does not come from inside ourselves, but from God, who is not anti-change but conditions change on relationship with neighbors “we minister to and receive ministry from”, who is always in motion and carrying us into a thorough transformation through sharing in the personhood of Jesus Christ.

What I also love about Root’s work is how practical it is – but never facile. (In my opinion, lots of what peddles itself as new or innovative or liminal or pick-your-cool-label these days is just the next generation’s dressed-up, cocky and often insufferably certain version of the same damn problem. Root calls this “swapping one kind of Christendom for another”.) As I read it, I actually felt better. I felt helped, ministered to – as I did (and still do) after reading the first two books of the trilogy. And I believe deeply that churches and lay and clergy leaders of diverse traditions will feel better, too. Not because we’ve unlocked a fresh, hidden chamber of fabulous new ideas in order to speed up our ministry to keep it relevant. Not because we’ve overcorrected and slowed way down (hint: this book is not a Luddite manifesto and the medicine is not simply to stop). But because we’ve – through prayer, confession, courage and humility, grace and gracious judgment, testimony, neighborliness and mercy and willingness to suffer and celebrate together – started to rediscover the resonance, or fullness of life, that is not held together by the rickety scaffolding of being avant-garde or fascinating or innovative or disruptive or eternally snarky and effing proud of it to your social media followers, but held within the stable creativity who is God, who is the eternity of love breaking into time.

Read it. It's a seam of gold.

[Ryan Linkous · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Andrew Root is to discover an ecclesial theologian who realizes profoundly how different things are in the world where things change at a galactic pace. He does not offer simplistic, quick-fixes (these are part of the problem in his accounting). He doesn't resort to common religious sociology and statistics, but instead plunges into the works of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and German critical theories and sociologist Hartmut Rosa to offer a philosophical account of modernity and the church. It is scintillating at times, and long at others.

Root offers a narrative account of key insights, which is largely successful (Sometimes it seems like rhetorical flourish, especially as parts seem to go long).

This work is heavy on diagnosis and light on prescription. His answer, resonance, remains largely theoretical aside from some narrative accounts he's worked through.

While I felt like my mind was on fire at times, I am intrigued with reservation. Like in Friedrich Schleiermacher's "Five Speeches on Religion," Root's philosophical diagnosis of people's spiritual malaise (even and especially within the church) is largely convincing. Schleiermacher's solution is that Christians needed to "intuit the infinite." Intuition is the Kantian idea that the things we encounter are experienced before they are understood. Schleiermacher was responding to Kant, and grasping at an important question: What is the place of intuition as it relates to our faith?

I wonder if resonance is "intuiting the infinite" zhuzhed up for our late modern moment. (My philosophical knowledge is not a strength, so I may outstip myself). Root clearly has the theological and philosophical acuity to analyze, synthesize, and – even rarer – explain. He's not dealing with foreign categories that intersect in no way with traditional theological categories (although he does seem to want to leave "Medieval" articulations of sin and judgment behind. I'm not sure that's accurate or wise).

As an evangelical, I acknowledge the gap between my context and Root's mainline context. I appreciate that he is familiar with both worlds and makes generous attempts to be understanding and inclusive of evangelicals in his analysis. However, there are certain categories that I use more regularly that he didn't mentioned often, namely, evangelism and discipleship. As fancy and philosophical our ecclesiology might be, it doesn't seem to be that we can move beyond these foundational components of our Jesus'-given mission. Conversion is still critical.

These are my initial thoughts. I think there is much to learn, but I'm going to spend some time processing it, and I'd love some dialogue partners!

[E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last week, and much of it while I was in a monastery on retreat experiencing the rhythms of prayer in monastic time, I was coincidentally/serendipitously reading this book. Root identifies the core problem facing contemporary churches and church people to be time related. This resonated with me. I've long enjoyed exploring the topic of time (you can find a number of my sermons that approach this theme). And how often in the pandemic years have we heard people focus on losing a sense of time?

Root writes, "We long to find a true fullness that draws us not through time, into some future time, but more deeply into time itself. We long to live so deeply in time that we hear and feel the calling of eternity. We yearn to find once again the infinite in time, to find the sacred in the present, and therefore to be truly alive!"

Yes.

The opening chapter on depression is so excellent. He writes that most depression in the 21st century is actually related to time--that we can't keep up the pace of living our best lives. I've copied this chapter to share with someone I thought needed to read it.

This is the sort of book that had me really thinking of how to apply it to my personal life and how to engage its themes as a pastor for my congregation. I think there will be a future worship series formatted around it. Also, at least four books that he references I plan to read, so it will likely lead to intellectual fertility.

My only criticism was that Root summarizes his points so many times that in some places it becomes very repetitive to the point of tiresome. So it could have used some editing. But that overall does not diminish the book too much.

[Tom Greentree · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say? I think all three volumes Root has written are essential for any pastor or leader today, period.

I’ll be not only reading them again, but plan on inviting a few colleagues into a joint reading/conversation through them together.

This volume 3: “This final volume will provide a full-blown theory of modernity in direct conversation with congregational life. This book will explore the congregation in a secular age, an age of accelerated time, wherein the sacred has been replaced by a drive to innovate and grow. Faithfulness has been replaced with a drive for vitality” (xxi).

His work here on time articulates so much of what I’m experiencing as “time sickness” and fatigue — it reordering my world around resonance.

Start with volume 1 (obviously) and then keep going. You won’t regret it.

[David Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andrew Root is an outstanding cultural commentator who skillfully weaves together the work of Charles Taylor and Hartmut Rosa and brings it into conversation with the challenges facing contemporary Christian congregations. His application of Rosa‘s concept of acceleration in late modernity to explain the disillusionment and depression of church communities is very fruitful.
His own constructive contribution at the end of the book could have been a bit more developed but certainly inspired some thought.
This book was great; but the next one in the series called „churches and the crisis of decline“ blew me away.

[Ryan Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this originally for a class right as it came out in 2021. On my second reading, seeing what different things stood out to me was fun. This was the very first Root book I had read in its entirety. Because of it, I have since read nearly all of his books (and there are many).

The book remains, I believe, vital for church leaders to read. His description of the acceleration of time within modernity is deeply relevant and helpful in understanding so much about our capitalist society and how it leads to alienation.

[Becky Swanson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m glad I read this with colleagues. There’s a lot to chew on and I’m not always sure that Root takes to a helpful place if digestion. The hope is there but the example in the book is not the only praxis through. That said, if you are looking for things to try, this is not your book. It is the place to help kick start your prayer and imagination but I highly recommend a group approach or, I fear with this last year it will be too much to carry alone.

[Kevin Hegeman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another excellent book from Andrew Root. As yet, I have not read someone who stimulates brand new thought processes in me as much as he has. This book is a must for congregational leaders and – more than just speaking about the church in the secular age – he characterizes with profound accuracy the source of tiredness, malaise, and (what he would call) depression within the modern world.

Highly recommend

[Ryan Motter · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the first time since seminary, I’ve read something that makes me want to spend more time with theology. Andrew Root’s work here is bound to be a new classic text for ministry formation, with deep pockets of wisdom for any serving in a congregation. I especially enjoyed the last four chapters, which have a beautiful pay off and feel patent made to empower congregations toward contemplative movements. Really grateful for this piece.

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really helpful book for congregational leaders.
It will make you think deeply about our life together - with and for each other.
It will not give you 10 easy steps to be innovative and grow your church.
It gives insights on how we can be more deeply present with one another. That may then help us grow in our relationship with God and with one another.

[Joel Wentz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding, superb cultural exegesis, critique and practical theological response. Loved it. Though Root does a commendable job interpreting thinkers like Taylor and Rosa for the less-initiated, it can still be heady stuff.

Full review forthcoming for Englewood Review of Books.

[Adrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again, I felt this final book in the series was about a third longer than it needed to be. The author got lost over explaining in the middle third and under-developed the final third. Still, what was there was excellent. The best book in a hugely researched and insightful trilogy.

[Scott Gunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helpful critique of why churches are "depressed" -- including a very full and persuasive diagnosis. That part could be just a bit tighter to make more room for perscription. Root gives hints, but what are we to do?

[Dave Pettengill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can agree with his conclusions of time, relationships, resources, and depression in the church but this was a tough read. I powered through it to finish it but I didn't enjoy it as much as some of his other work

[Kyle Haack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helpful diagnosis of the challenges facing churches right now.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for every church leader!

[John Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another excellent entry in the series, describing how modernity has changed our understanding of time and the good life and how churches need to seek resonance rather than innovation.

[Katherine Pershey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to this one, and will need to go back and reread. Especially the last few chapters.

I can’t emphasize enough how wholeheartedly I recommend Andrew Root’s work to congregational pastors.