Jake Meador

Summary: Observing the breakdown in community in both church and society, the author traces the root causes, and the practices of Christian community that can lead to recovery of community and a church that seeks the common good in society.

Many attentive culture watchers have noted the parallel declines of both church and wider American culture. Attendance is dropping in many churches even as churches are rocked with scandals of sexual abuse and financial mismanagement. The seduction of the show more church to corrupt political alliances, whether of the left or the right, in the author's view, is only the final step in a church that has given itself to power instead of the doing of "small things with great love." While all this goes on, America is "bowling alone" to even a greater extend than when Robert Putnam first published his study of the decline of social capital and community in America. Suicide rates are up, life expectancy is dropping, and the professionalized care industry is booming, even as local community and a sense of cohesion and pursuit of common good is vanishing in a land of toxic discourse.

Jake Meador chronicles these parallel declines and traces them to three factors. One is a loss of meaning, a pervasive existentialism that pretends to meaning in choices of radical freedom, yet without hope. A second is a loss of wonder, a dis-enchantment with the world as the buffered self cuts us off from both danger and wonder, resulting pervasive boredom. A third is the hollowing out of work, where efficiency and profitability is the sum total of work's meaning, where we are alienated both from our work, and by our work from home, family, and religious life, as work becomes all-consuming.

Meador proposes three practices that may play a crucial role in restoring Christian communities to health, enabling them to exercise a societal presence that fosters a wider common good. He begins with the surprising proposal of keeping sabbath, as a tangible way of underscoring that human beings were made, not for work, but for God, that we are human beings, not human doings. One of the things Meador argues for is corporate worship, as one tangible way of keeping sabbath that begins to restore a sense of our being part of some "common good." He adopts Wendell Berry's idea of "membership" in which we recognize that we are embedded in both a human and wider biological community. He advocates for work that is sacramental--that work is good and offers ways to bless others, that produces wealth, and is attentive to the membership.

His final section consists of two parts. The latter grounds the former, and really all that he has written, in the new heaven and new earth, a hope that is even more real than life in the present age. The former talks about what it means for the community of God's people to be citizens in earthly societies. It is here perhaps that he makes one of his most trenchant observations:

Put another way, the political priorities of many American Christians in recent years have been precisely backward. We ought to have begun with doctrine because doctrine defines the good life as it relates to political systems and societies. Then we ought to have turned to the formation of citizens. We should have asked what kind of virtues are necessary to live well in community with one another and what particular virtues are necessary for responsible political action. Then we should have asked how to cultivate those virtues within our people. Finally, only after attending to these issues, we should have moved on to debating policy....American Christians, and evangelicals especially, have done the exact opposite. (p. 161).

He argues for a political doctrine shaped by the Kuyperian ideas of solidarity and sphere sovereignty, and the practice of subsidiarity--that government should only do those things it is large enough to do, leaving other matters to other spheres of life.

Reading Jake Meador as a sixty-something took me back to what it was like to read as a college student a young Os Guinness in The Dust of Death, with his sweeping discussion of culture, and what it meant for Christians to live as a third way. There is the same scope of considering cultural forces, the intellectual ideas behind them, and a fresh vision of what Christian faithfulness might look like in the present time. Sadly, a boomer generation fascinated with "fast-everything" circumvented doctrine and virtue and communal practices in pursuit of policy influence, power, or a personal prosperity without a sense of our membership and solidarity with others and all living things.

This leaves me reflecting. Os Guinness is still speaking and writing. Jake Meador has written for a number of publications. But who is reading? And who is heeding? I hope someone is and that the American church wakes up to how far it has declined over forty years, before all we can do is cry "Ichabod. The glory has departed!" (1 Samuel 4:21). Meador's ideas and commended practices offer light for those tired of groping in the darkness.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. show less

Admittedly, the first time I read Meador's book I was mostly unimpressed and frustrated. But after returning to it for a seminary class, I found it quite good on my second reading. Perhaps it is because I have had a couple kids myself, and have witnessed an increasingly belligerent conservatism within my own tribe (Presbyterianism). What I once saw as an overreaction and a bit patronizing on the part of Meadow, I now see as possessing some merit.

Meadow does well to criticize the sacred cows show more of modernism: existentialism, self-actualization, and autonomy. These tear against fundamental principles of Christian discipleship: solidarity, dispossession, and the common good. The modernist's vision of community--which is no less a buzzword among pagans as it is believers today--is a false one. Christianity offers the corrective even if it is illiberal. I think Meador is strongest when he advocates for resourcement and retrieval. Christians today are not on our own. We stand on the shoulders of giants who have gone before us. May we heed their wisdom and counsel.

My only complaint is that Meador at times sounds like an advocate for reforming evangelicalism as a movement whereas I would prefer to abandon it altogether. I think Meador recognizes the importance of the local church, it's just his ideal sounds too much like evangelicalism albeit a federated form. I would prefer lowest common-denominator Christianity be cast aside for robust denominational distinctions. There's no reason why Presbyterians, Baptists, Anglicans, and the like can't tease their respective theologies to their own natural conclusions on some of these matters while still extending the right hand of fellowship. show less

Summary: An argument for a Christian politics that recognizes the goodness of all creation including all peoples, that rejects the manipulation of people and places and our own bodies that disregards their nature.

Jake Meador begins this work with the story of Father Ted, who helped a journalist covering apartheid South Africa, escape house arrest and the country. He represents to Meador a kingdom politics committed to life for the whole of life. Meador argues that much of American show more Christianity divorces faith from creation, from our embodied life, and other human beings, all for our own political and economic ends.

Drawing on the work of Herman Bavinck and Willie Jennings, he describes the immense inheritance we have inherited in the creation and one another. We repudiate this in our Western disregard of both the places we inhabit, living in accord with the particular character of that place, and in our colonization, in our disregard the peoples there before us. The particular expression of our alienation from God for those in the West is the exaltation of whiteness, and the oppression of others. Our reductionist education results in a loss of wonder.

Another reformer points the way back. Martin Bucer taught that the renewal of our relationship with God in Christ renews our relationship to neighbor, to proper governance, and to the care of the land. We learn again to accept the givenness of nature and our place in it. We embrace the household, marriage, and sexuality lived within that relationship, and lives of faithfulness to one another in sickness and health. And we embrace the larger community of God’s people in a particular place. Meador upholds the model of the Bruderhof, who renounce private ownership of material possessions. He advocates for the more challenging work of being this community in one’s own city and neighborhood.

I’m wrestling with my reaction to this book. Meador has great facility for drawing together the work of various theologians, philosophers, and writers, along with some great personal stories. Yet I found the thread of this article not easy to follow, and a more prolix statement of what Wendell Berry articulates so straightforwardly in What Are People For? and other essays. But it is an important and perceptive argument. The gospel not only restores us to God but to our embodied existence, each other as families and communities, states and the world, and to God’s good earth. It is apparent that our politically and economically captive churches have not heard this enough and this message is so urgent that it cannot be spoken and written and lived enough, until we recover a sense of what Christians are for.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. show less

ECPA Christian Book Award Finalist - Faith and Culture
Christianity Today Book of the Year Award, Politics and Public Life

Common life in our society is in decline.

Our communities are disintegrating, as the loss of meaningful work and the breakdown of the family leave us anxious and alone—indeed, half of all Americans report daily feelings of loneliness. Our public discourse is polarized and hateful. Ethnic minorities face systemic injustices and the ever-present fear of violence and show more deportation. Economic inequalities are widening.

In this book, Jake Meador diagnoses our society's decline as the failure of a particular story we've told about ourselves: the story of modern liberalism. He shows us how that story has led to our collective loss of meaning, wonder, and good work, and then recovers each of these by grounding them in a different story—a story rooted in the deep tradition of the Christian faith.

Our story doesn't have to end in loneliness and despair. There are reasons for hope—reasons grounded in a different, better story. In Search of the Common Good reclaims a vision of common life for our fractured times: a vision that doesn't depend on the destinies of our economies or our political institutions, but on our citizenship in a heavenly city. Only through that vision—and that citizenship—can we truly work together for the common good.

Contents
Foreword by Timothy Keller
Introduction

Part 1: The Breakdown of Community
1. The Passing of the American Church
2. The Unwinding of Common Life in America

Part 2: The Problems for Community
3. The Loss of Meaning
4. The Loss of Wonder
5. The Loss of Good Work

Part 3: The Practices of Community
6. Sabbath and the Chief End of Man
7. The Membership
8. Work

Part 4: The Promise of Community
9. Political Doctrine and Civil Virtue
10. The Eternal City
Acknowledgments
Notes

Praise for In Search of the Common Good
"There are voices today that seem either to rub our noses in the church's failures or to revel in the culture's fragmentation. While In Search of the Common Good does confront us with the considerable ills of our time, it does so without giving up on either the church or the culture. Instead, it calls us back toward a vision of the 'good life'—a vision both abandoned by those who have given up on Christian faith and obscured by the harrowed activism of others striving to do influential things in prominent ways in order to demonstrate Christianity's continued cultural viability. Indebted to his own deep Nebraskan roots (and to thoughtful others far beyond his local community), Meador has written a clear, compelling, and distinctly Christian volume focused on restoring communal flourishing. Born of the belief that Christianity is good news for a world beset by evil and for a church struggling with compromise, so we are encouraged to make our difference by taking up a humbler set of Christian disciplines and practicing ordinary piety. Should Wendell Berry, Charles Taylor, and Francis Schaeffer ever have met to discuss the need for the church to lead by loving Jesus in daily neighbor-benefitting fashion, and should that conversation ever have been recorded, then I can imagine it looking and sounding rather like Jake Meador's In Search of the Common Good. A bracing, prayer-inducing yet hope-filled read, I am only glad to have read this volume and pray that it finds a wider audience that will take it to heart."

"Christian cultural commentators find themselves caught between the Scylla of despair and the Charybdis of triumphalism. It takes a wise, experienced navigator to sail between the two temptations. Meador's book somehow manages to pair a trenchant diagnosis of our polarized communities with a hopeful prognosis built on a deep theological conception of the good life. It challenges but does not provoke. It offers hope without presumption. Few will agree with Meador on every practical or theological point, but this is exactly why this book deserves to find a wide readership."

"Like everything else Jake Meador writes, his call to reflect on our pursuit of the common good is a thought-provoking, worthwhile read. It's also a timely one, if only because it seems so easy to spot our common ills. A distorted notion of freedom in America has given birth to the slavery of self and all its attendant pathologies: loneliness, existential anomie, and pointless work, which form the inner reality of economic instability and sociopolitical isolation. Unfortunately, a malformed, superficial, and ill-catechized church reflects the world at just this point. What, then, may we hope for our common life? Drawing on the wisdom of Scripture, natural law, and the practices of the Christian tradition, Jake points us to a vision of work, community, and politics attuned to the rhythms of creation, reflective of the eternal city and ultimately rooted in the goodness of God himself. I was challenged by this book and I know I'll be wrestling with and reflecting on its argument for some time. I suspect I won't be the only one."

"I've long admired the breadth of knowledge on display in Jake Meador's writing. You'll see his characteristic combination of deep learning with an earthy touch in this wide-ranging book. You won't need to agree with every conclusion in order to appreciate how he makes you think and act more deliberately. We need more writers like him to help us live as faithful Christians in a fractured world."

"Jake's book accurately diagnoses some of the ills of our modern world and, even more importantly, provides a vivid, specific vision of a full and flourishing Christian life."

"Jake Meador is one of the most insightful evangelical writers of his generation. Without downplaying the severity of the crises that are currently crippling both our churches and our country, he nevertheless sketches what a quietly hopeful Christian witness in our troubled times might look like. By turns diagnostic, instructive, expository, and artful and with a disarming lack of cynicism throughout, this moving book channels Wendell Berry in arguing for the renewable dignity of disappearing virtues."

"What if the malaise that grips American communities is the fruit of a church that has failed to bear faithful witness to her King? Jake Meador's convicting yet hope-giving book calls the church to take up the practice of distinctively Christian forms of membership in order to serve the common good. Meador reminds us that when Christians pursue hidden fidelity rather than public praise, sacrificial service rather than personal peace and affluence, and patient catechesis rather than flashy policy proposals, it is then that they will bless their neighbors."

"If the bonds of modern society show signs of strain, it is in part because the goods we share as members have ceased to be common or perceived as good. Yet, as Jake Meador reminds us in In Search of the Common Good, the love that unites us around the goods we share in common is reaffirmed through our practices of community and renewed by the promise of community. Meador has provided here an important recovery of the deeply Christian notion of the common good, offering a knowledgeable diagnosis of the common good's fall into disfavor and an equally knowledgeable proposal for recovering it. Meador reminds us that the common good is worth searching for, and in searching for it we share in it together, eager for all to receive the gifts God has given. Read this book—for you and for your community."

"In Search of the Common Good is not just a good book, it is a necessary book for our time. Jake diagnoses many of the deep problems in our society and offers a distinctly Christian path forward. I have already begun recommending the book widely, and I suspect that the church in America will be reading and discussing it for a long time to come."

"In this beautiful and compelling book, Meador offers readers more than a list of our societal ills. He offers us hope—and a clear and steady path to restoring our homes, churches, and communities. For those already on that path, In Search of the Common Good will breathe new life into their efforts, encouraging them that their lives of quiet faithfulness and goodness are far more significant than they realize. And for those still finding their way, Meador's words beckon us to the path of life."

"In Search of the Common Good offers a vision for life together that is deep, compelling, and wise. This is a profound and important work by an exceptional writer."

"In Search of the Common Good is for Christians with hungry souls—Christians seeking more than our stressed and fractured culture can provide. Meador's work pushes us beyond the realm of political vitriol and atomistic individualism toward real flourishing. He prompts us to consider the world beyond our heads, the entire fabric of creation and community that we have so long neglected—and thus proffers an essential vision for Christians living in our society. This book is ecumenical and inspiring, but most of all, it is right."

"Jake Meador has written a learned cri de coeur that situates the division and confusion American Christians face, not in politics, but in our theological imaginations. Carefully analyzing the sources of anger and despair in American life through the lens of the ideas about the common good advanced by Christian luminaries from the church fathers to the Reformers, Meador shows how a renewed understanding of the common good leads out of despair toward hope."

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jake Meador is vice president of the Davenant Institute and the editor in chief of Mere Orthodoxy, an online magazine covering the Christian faith in the public sphere. He lives with his wife and children in his hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska. show less