The Church after Innovation: Questioning Our Obsession with Work, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship (Ministry in a Secular Age)

by Andrew Root

Publisher:

Baker Academic

, 2022

Overview

Churches and their leaders have innovation fever. Innovation seems exciting--a way to enliven tired institutions, embrace creativity, and be proactive--and is a superstar of the business world. But this focus on innovation may be caused by an obsession with contemporary relevance, creativity, and entrepreneurship that inflates the self, lacks theological depth, and promises burnout.

In this follow-up to Churches and the Crisis of Decline, leading practical theologian Andrew Root delves into the problems of innovation. He explores where innovation and entrepreneurship came from, shows how they break into church circles, and counters the "new imaginations" like neoliberalism and technology that hold the church captive to modernity. Root reveals the moral visions of the self that innovation and entrepreneurship deliver--they are dependent on workers (and consumers) being obsessed with their selves, which leads to significant faith-formation issues. This focus on innovation also causes us to think we need to be singularly unique instead of made alive in Christ. Root offers a return to mysticism and the poetry of Meister Eckhart as a healthier spiritual alternative.

Key Features

• Delves into the problems of innovation
• Explores where innovation and entrepreneurship came from
• Gives an understanding of consecuences on trying to push the obsession with Work, creativity, and entrepreneurship into the church

Contents

• Only the Creative Survive: How Mission Became Married to Innovation
• We're All Sandwich Artists Now: Work and Backwash, Reversing a Historical Flow
• Hungry, Hungry Markets: Workers in Contradiction, Children in Consumption
• Let's Get Extra: Exploring the Secular Contradiction of Capitalism
• Leave It to Management: Managing for Permanent Innovation
• The Viennese Worm That Exposes the True Self: When Work Becomes about Flexible Projects
• Justification by Creative Works Alone: When Creativity Becomes King, the Self Becomes a Star
• Why You're Not That Special but Feel the Need to Be: Singularity and the Self
• Standing Naked against Money
• The Three Amigos of the Mystical Path: How the Self Is Freed from Singularity
• Aesthetic Epiphanies, Mad Poets, and a Humble Example of What This All Looks Like

Product Details

• Title: The Church after Innovation: Questioning Our Obsession with Work, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship
• Author: Andrew Root
• Series: Ministry in a Secular Age
• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Print Publication Date: 2022
• Logos Release Date: 2022
• Pages: 242
• Era: era:contemporary
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Subject: Church renewal
• ISBNs: 9781493438372, 9781540964823, 9781540966155, 9781493438358, 9781493438365, 1540964825, 1540966151, 1493438352, 1493438360, 1493438379
• Resource ID: LLS:CHRCHNNVTNSCLRG
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-12-16T18:05:08Z

About Andrew Root

Andrew Root (PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary) is Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has written extensively about youth ministry. He is the author of numerous books, including Faith Formation in a Secular Age, The Pastor in a Secular Age, Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker, The Children of Divorce, Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry, and Relationships Unfiltered, and the coauthor (with Kenda Creasy Dean) of The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry.