In the last two posts unpacking Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine as it relates to what I’m calling ‘machine church’, we’ve started building out a bit of a case study looking at the way church, as we know it, is a product of a technology — the automobile — which is embedded in the architecture of our cities, and the structure (and thinking) underpinning our lives — not just urban, but modern (in that this is perhaps even ‘truer’ in rural and regional areas).
We’ve unpacked the car’s impact on cities, and the psyche — now I’m going to unpack the traceable and observable impact the car has had on how we approach (literally as well as figuratively) church (both as the gathering people of God in a discrete community, and the ‘places’ these gatherings meet).
Just to recap, to save you reading those now month old posts, modern cities evolved around roads (and carparks), and have changed shape — and the shape of our interactions with and in them — based on the kinds of cars we invent and drive. The suburb and the ‘CBD’ are both functions of transport technology (and industrialisation); and this reordering of the physical structure of life impacted what Charles Taylor calls the ‘social imaginary’ — shaping the background conditions of our beliefs and habits (our habitats shape our habits, which shape our character).
In the second post we explored what Taylor calls the ‘age of mobilisation’ — the way the incredible increase of ‘personal choice’ and ‘individual expression,’ brought by the automobile, has shifted the religious and political landscape as people live in a more connected world, freed from previous social orders/hierarchies/inherited career paths in family businesses. We considered that ‘auto’ is the word for ‘self’ — and the overlap of the literal ‘mobilisation’ that is extended by a car, and this change in social order — and how ‘consumer choice’ becomes a factor in modern life and the way institutions cater to ‘auto-mobile’ individuals — hinting that this might be a factor with church, and religious belief and practice (Taylor is explicit about this).
In this post I’m going to unpack a history of the modern (machine) church as it relates to the car — but my argument is not that the church is exclusively a product of the car (or the suburbs and conditions of choice created by and around the car), but a product of (often uncritically) embracing machine technologies (and accompanying philosophies, practices, and anthropologies) like a Trojan horse that end up shaping our habitats (‘ecology’ and ‘economy’) and habits — and our ‘ecclesiology’ and ‘missiology’. In a future post I’ll consider implications of this descriptive work, and then how digital technology is reshaping churches in the present the way cars did in the past, but in this one we’ll land on my hypothesis that a ‘church will grow to the size of its carpark.’
In all this, I’m essentially following Neil Postman’s observation in his essay Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change:
“What I am saying is that our enthusiasm for technology can turn into a form of idolatry and our belief in its beneficence can be a false absolute. The best way to view technology is as a strange intruder, to remember that technology is not part of God’s plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us.”
I’m not yet convinced that there is ‘nothing good’ about the kinds of technology harnessed by ‘the machine’ — but rather, that unless we see the forces (powers and principalities) using the technologies and shaping the technologies through idolatrous humans who want to ‘be like God’ — we can’t possibly treat technology as ‘neutral’ or ‘plunder Egypt and use it to preach Christ’ (to slightly misquote Augustine).
Neil Postman’s successor in the field of media ecology, Marshall McLuhan, wrote:
“Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”
So. In this series of observations about the car and the church, we’re trying not to be idiots.
Here’s a passage from McLuhan’s Understanding Media, drawing on Lewis Mumford (quoted in a the ‘car-city’ post), and noting the way he (in the 1960s) saw the wheel and combustion engine being replaced by ‘electronic’ technology and screens.
“The automobile, followed by the airplane, dissolved this grouping and ended the pedestrian, or human, scale of the suburb. Lewis Mumford contends that the car turned the suburban housewife into a full-time chauffeur. Certainly the transformations of the wheel as expediter of tasks, and architect of ever-new human relations, is far from finished, but its shaping power is waning in the electric age of information, and that fact makes us much more aware of its characteristic form as now tending toward the archaic.”
This quote resonates a bit with one from Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, which, with Mumford, formed something of the basis of Paul Kingsnorth’s metaphor of ‘the machine.’
“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.”
This is to say, cars are a form of the machine that begin to rewrite our experience of being human — and our social structures and architecture — including the nature of church communities.
The Auto-Church
So. Let’s talk about the ‘age of mobilisation’ and the car — the annihilation of space — and the impact this has on the modern self, via the impact it has on the modern church.
Now. I like being able to drive (and fly) places. I like choice. I enjoy international food that I would not have discovered but for global connectivity. I am happy to do the ‘Michelin restaurant’ thing (from the previous post), seeking out drinking and dining experiences by car.
And, when it comes to church, I love my church family — and recognise that people in our community, if you plot them on a map of greater Brisbane — live up to an hour’s drive away from one another and the car (and other technologies) mediate genuine ‘unity-in-the-Spirit’ communion between people who have chosen to be part of the same expression of the household of God.
I recognise that there are complex economic forces driving a diasporic experience of ‘household life’ connected to the availability of affordable housing; that fragments communities (and families) across suburban, regional, state, and international borders and that technology (whether mechanical or digital) sustains connections across that fragmentation.
In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), when wired telephony, television, and radio waves were precursors to the Internet and the mobile phone, McLuhan coined a phrase to highlight how these ‘mediums’ recreate “the world in the image of a global village.” This is part of the ‘ecology’ and the competing effects of different technologies — I simultaneously can feel a room-to-room, screen-to-screen connection with family across the country, while needing to drive an hour to see members of my church community in their distant suburb.
I will almost always choose to drive and park rather than walk, or catch public transport — because — I, dear reader — have grown up in a world, and a church, shaped by the machine.
It is true that at various points — both in my childhood and early teenage years, and then for a short period in my early 20s, I have experienced the joy of living on the same block as the church I attended — and that proximity is beautiful to me, but my normal practice is to drive to church, and in doing so, to drive past other churches and through other suburbs — and people drive to our church by choice because of the ‘service’ we offer and a kind of affinity or preference for that service, not simply to maintain pre-existing relational connections (though also often because the housing constraints in modern life force people to affordable fringes and away from their established geographic roots).
Your normal practice is probably to drive to a church you like too.
It is simply the case that this is a very new phenomenon. Historically speaking. And that it changes the nature of church — both as a gathering people, and our relationship to church as autonomous ‘consumers’ who choose, rather than ‘being given’ a family, community, and story we belong to ‘rooted’ in time and place.
These changes are not all negative, but they are a picture of the symbiotic (or parasitic) relationship between the church and the machine; and our modern obsession with eradicating rather than embracing the comforting discomfort of limits.
In what follows I am going to give an historical account — a description — of the modern machine church — the ‘automobile’ church. I’m going to initially draw on historical sources and an essay, ‘Effects of Auto-Mobility on Church Life and Culture’ by Craig Van Gelder, published in the journal Word and World in 2008, and give an account of the modern ‘mega church’ — a church designed for consumers in the machine age — that again is demonstrably a piece of modern church history (and technological dependence).
We covered the shifting architecture of life around the development of cities and suburbs alongside road and rail — we’re going to pick up the story of the impact of this shift on the church from the late 1800s, when Van Gelder notes “electric streetcar systems” and their stops and stations led to the “formation of thousands of city-neighborhood congregations” serving “a well-defined, three-generational neighbourhood” that “required the development of little or no parking space, an unintended consequence that would later come back to haunt them.”
At the moment I am responsible for two suburban Presbyterian congregations in inner-city Brisbane — one has a carpark the other does not. There are all sorts of ways that inherited church spaces reflect the transportation habits, or choices available, to congregants of the past that do impose certain limits on how churches use those spaces now. In one of these churches, to seek to change how we use the building, our options are severely limited in terms of local government zoning, because we have no designated parking.
My experience in ‘machine church’ is also instructive here; our mother ship is a large suburban church with a large multi-purpose facility, and an exceptionally large carpark — we planted in an inner city theatre with limited on-site parking, moved to a temporary location with no on site parking (and only expensive paid parking nearby) and immediately almost halved in regular attendance, before relocating again to a rented ‘warehouse conversion’ — a black box auditorium operated by a local Pentecostal church who hired another nearby shed as parking space.
The earliest automobiles — available in various (expensive) forms from the late 1890s — did not influence urban church communities; however there is some influence the automobile reshaped regional and rural churches — where communities who had previously shared ‘itinerant’ pastors they might see semi-regularly could now share a preacher who drove from town to town delivering the same sermon multiple times on a Sunday (interestingly this produced a corresponding increase in workload on the pastor; who now had to write a new sermon every week, rather than one a month, and drive from location to location).
Henry Ford began mass-producing the affordable automobile (the Model T) in 1908, through a mechanised assembly process — machines making machines. The rapid uptake of this technology reshaped the city, Van Gelder notes “State highway departments were organized across the country, and road construction, especially paved-road construction, became a boom industry. The first networks of both state highways and U.S. highways were well in place by the early to mid 1920s,” he also notes the uptake produced the “values of personal mobility and individual freedom, which led to the automobile beginning to reshape the social geography.” People were still using public transport until (according to Van Gelder) General Motors bought up and demolished over 100 electric street car systems, before selling buses to those cities.
Van Gelder notes cities like Los Angeles, California, were pioneer ‘automobile cities,’ where physical and social geography was shaped around the car. The re-organisation of cities — whether overtly organised ‘automobile cities’ or not — changed the physical architecture of church spaces (and the land used), so “congregations began to set aside increased space for parking and as newly forming congregations secured locations not tied as directly to fixed-rail systems of transportation.”
Here’s a collection of written responses to the changes wrought to ‘modern life’ by the car from people living in the 1920s. Two articles from ‘The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science’ in 1924 examine the impact of the automobile in this era in rural and urban churches.
In ‘What the Automobile Has Done to and for the Country Church,’ Warren Wilson noted that young people enjoying the ‘speed and vivacity’ provided by the car were suddenly afforded the option ‘not’ to be at their local church. He suggested that unless the preacher could “attract and hold the young” they would “yield to the temptation to go somewhere on Sunday,” while the church could demonise the car in “deploring” the irreligion of the young; while if a pastor was “of fertile spirit and contagious religious purpose” cars would bring a “new throng of young people,” coming as a result of this newly available consumer choice.
James Coale wrote a corresponding piece on the ‘Influence of the Automobile on the City Church,’ he was more optimistic about the impacts of the car — seeing it ‘giving and taking away’ — while people might go on road trips out of the city, rural folks might come to the city at the same time; and “good church members” would attend wherever they were — even in “another city a hundred miles from home.” He believed the car would “be an instrument of blessing” — making very similar points to those made about screens during a pandemic — “it makes possible attendance on the part of the invalid and the aged, who without it could not attend public worship. It facilitates the work of the church in caring for the sick and the indigent.”
Back to Van Gelder — his ‘phase 2’ of the impact of the car spans from 1930s to the 1960s — reflected an expansion of the ‘core values’ produced in the age of auto-mobilisation. Phase 1 included the values of ‘speed, fun, personal freedom, and individual mobility’ — phase 2 added “choice and identity.” It’s interesting that this corresponds with a rapid uptick of the use of the word identity in the fields of psychology and sociology documented in this article in my archives.
His account dovetails with McLuhan’s observations canvassed in a previous post — where ‘mass produced automobiles became increasingly personalised’ with more models, and accessories, and the “personalised automobile culture” described in the 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders.
As the city and the psyche shifted — becoming decentralised from the streetcar network “in all directions” on roads and highways constructed primarily for cars, that connected so-called “automobile suburbs,” where peoples homes were in separate locations to their places of work — “a whole set of new institutional forms was generated to serve these suburban communities, including shopping centers, suburban (one-story) schools, and suburban congregations.” Van Gelder notes:
“The massive migration of population from both the central cities and the rural areas into this new type of housing community generated a lifestyle and set of values that dramatically reshaped both congregational identity and the primary practices for carrying out congregational life and ministry. The suburban success of the churches was quite remarkable, with thousands of new congregations developed to serve the expanding systems of suburban communities.”
This new ‘automobility’ meant membership was transient; according to Van Gelder’s research, seventy percent of a suburban congregation cycled out of the community within ten years, and “this transience required the development of a new logic for fostering congregational identity—a logic that became known as the “program church,” where a shared set of programs and activities under the administrative oversight of a “professional minister” became the norm,” he cites Gibson Winter’s The Suburban Captivity of the Churches, which describes “the commodification of personal identity around the automobile, the suburb and the suburban church epitomized the commodification of the American dream.”
The next ‘epoch’ Van Gelder charts covers a period from 1965 (around the time McLuhan, Mumford and Ellul were writing) to 1995, where we see the rise of the ‘megachurch’ (especially, but not only, in America). Hillsong’s development in the ‘hills district’ of Sydney in the early 80s also tracks with the description in the US.
The megachurch — and its correspondence with the ‘church growth movement’ launched by Donald McGavran, who published Understanding Church Growth in 1970 — are, to my mind archetypes of the ‘machine church’ where technology and technique are embraced as opportunities to maximise the reach of the Gospel in the cultural conditions described, in part, by Van Gelder with the values of auto-mobility “speed, fun, personal freedom, individual mobility, choice and identity.”
None of this analysis of the changing nature of church through this period is particularly new, and in a large part we’re still engaged in the task of ‘description’ — Van Gelder notes that megachurches are typically located in the suburbs, “on large-acreage tracts in close proximity to major freeways, and they usually serve a large regional constituency. Most of these congregations provide “seven-day-a-week” ministries, with scores of programmatic opportunities for participation.” This is, amongst other things, a description that fits my experiences of machine church here in Queensland.
We’re going to detour — or take an off ramp — for a minute and consider the way the automobile was literally at the centre of the development of what many consider to be ‘the first mega church’. And we’re going to use some quotes from an episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, Boomers, The Big Sort, and Really, Really Big Churches, to unpack this history.
It’s a church in California, 40 minutes drive from Los Angeles (the ‘automobile city’), in Garden Grove; a church planted in 1955 by Robert Schuller.
Schuller’s first iteration of what would become the Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove Community Church began in a Drive In Movie theatre — parishioners could come to church and stay in their cars. A Time Magazine article from 1967 describes a Sunday service:
“As the choir sang Holy, Holy, Holy, the Rev. Robert H. Schuller mounted the pulpit of his new $3,000,000 church in Garden Grove, Calif., and pushed a button. Two 25-ft.-high sections of the glass wall before him separated slowly, leaving only open air between the preacher and nearly 1,500 worshipers in 500 cars parked below him.
Schuller’s nondenominational Protestant parish, as its newspaper advertisements state, is a “walkin, drive-in” church—one of more than 70 now operating across the nation.”
It ends with a pastor joking that he “worries that he will one day mount the pulpit and absentmindedly intone: “Will the autos of the congregation please rise?”
A congregation of cars.
The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill featured an audio clip from Schuller, describing the strategy to provide “seating in the sanctuary and drive-up speakers in the parking lot for people who wanted to continue to worship in their cars.”
“I started because we didn’t have property. I went to the Orange Drive in Theatre… unchurched people came safely in their cars… we had 50 cars that first Sunday and here 53 years later, we had a nice church.”
The podcast ep notes that because people were driving half an hour to work, or half an hour to the shops, they didn’t think twice about driving past 30 churches to the ‘megachurch they wanted to associate with,’ while ‘everything was getting bigger’ — houses, shops, and box stores. Growth enabled by changing “infrastructure, technology and industrial advancement… Cars, highways and interstates, audio amplifiers and sound systems, air conditioning, a staple of the suburban experience in new homes and shopping malls.”
Again, this is simply description — and not new — a Christianity Today article from 2014 argued that the car created the mega church.
“Not only has car culture nurtured an emphasis on affinity, but it has also altered ecclesiology (our beliefs about the church). How pastors preach, what they preach about, worship experience, and church governance are all affected. Cars have put church “consumers” in the driver’s seat like never before, and church leaders are forced to buckle up for the ride…
For many pastors and church leaders, an attractional model of church becomes almost a necessity—subject to forces beyond any one pastor’s control. When parishioners can drive anywhere, pastors are forced to think strategically about how to attract and retain them.”
Van Gelder’s next description also fits my experience as a ‘campus pastor’ within such a machine; we even had ‘multisite consultant’ Wade Burnett do a day workshop with our ministry team articulating the need for campuses to have a clear model, and multisite churches to be both ‘attractional’ (with strong attractors around teaching, worship, community and kids programming) and ‘missional’ (with strong connections to place).
“…most have attracted large numbers of members from other congregations, usually the older city neighbourhood and suburban congregations. Second, those seeking to plant new congregations, apart from the effort to build a megachurch, experienced difficulty in knowing how to develop a ministry and locate its life. Target-focused ministry around affinity networks became increasingly the pattern for starting new congregations, and most of these were started by renting space for their first years, often in schools.”
This is the pattern here in Australia — and the ‘driver’ behind both small affinity churches (like ours) that attract people from across suburban Brisbane, and ‘megachurches’ — is the automobile, and appealing to consumer choice. At least in the first instance — even if this is the choice ‘not to be part of a machine’ (that’s still product differentiation). This description from Van Gelder also fits my experience.
“Constructing a congregational identity around an affinity-based constituency that is regionally dispersed has also placed new demands on pastoral leadership, emphasizing certain leadership personality traits and focusing increasingly on pastoral persona.”
The CT article makes the same point that the ‘auto-mobile’ (self-mobile) centres personal preference, whether choosing ‘big’ or ‘small’:
“Affinity doesn’t apply only to megachurches or only to shallow, selfish churchgoers though. The fundamentalist church down the road and the lifestyle-affirming church in town both play into it. Even the most doctrine-driven Christians likely choose their churches based on that personal value. They don’t really have an alternative.”
Van Gelder’s article also describes my experience coming in to assist a suburban congregation in a property without car parking…
“The older, city-neighborhood congregations fell on even harder times as a result of significant racial and ethnic changes in their communities over more than forty years. Those that continue to survive with some dimension of their original identity, whether based in ethnicity or social class or both, usually have memberships with an average age of over sixty. In addition, almost all of these congregations face the steep challenge of being able to provide anything near the parking required for their drive-in membership.”
His whole article is worth reading as an exemplar of how our habitats shape our habits. Church architecture matters — so does the shape of urban and suburban life — and technology — including the automobile — shapes our interactions with space in ways we sometimes take for granted or assume to be ‘normal’ or ‘good’. I wonder if there’ll be a workshop on church carparks at this year’s Reach Australia conference?
The Car Park Theory of Church Growth
While we’ve stuck as closely as possible to description — both of the reshaping of community (rural, regional and urban) life, and church life in the west in the last 150 years, I’m going to tease out some implications in the next post (don’t worry — I’ve already written it — I just excised 3,000 additional words from this one…).
The one implication I want to land on in this contribution to the discussion of machine church is that while it is popular to locate ‘church growth’ in the hands and efforts of a visionary leader who ‘attracts’ with personality, and programs that are spectacular (ie the ‘attractional model’) the dependence on the automobile has created a natural limit; one that serves as a significant push/pull factor in church attendance.
The car park.
I have a pretty solid theory that much like Douglas Adam’s ‘puddle will always grow to the size of its hole’ idea that ‘the way things are account for the way things are’.
You can be the most compelling leader in the world, but if people can’t park at your church — if this is how we’ve conditioned (or discipled) church goers — if they can’t park, they won’t come. And, conversely — if people’s church habits are in part technological, they will come if they can park; and this might be less about your abilities or programs than you think.
A modern church will not grow to the capacity of its programs, ability of its leader, or number of seats in the building — though these are all limits — but the number of car parks. There are, of course, outliers — destination churches that attract people because they are located near transport hubs (especially CBD churches, but some of these historic churches have also invested in car parking via property developments).
And that once it is inconvenient to park, or more convenient to drive a few more minutes for a park close to a different building, people will do that — if all things are equal travel time and carpark wise, then people might decide about other things. It’s simplistic — but it’s also true that it is very difficult to grow beyond the size of your carpark.
My own experiences support this theory. Well, it could simply and legitimately be that I am incompetent and our church is not a product people want to consume — we began with a car park, and grew to its size; we were forced to move locations to a site where parking cost $23 an hour — we shrank. We moved to a location with a car park, and grew, and then moved to our now home, where, we have, once again, grown to the size of our carpark.
This anecdata supports my theory even if I am incompetent — in that people were willing to put up with that incompetence until the parking was impossible.
