A Hole in Our Maturity?

A Response to Samuel D. James

I will make boys their rulers, and infants shall rule over them (Isaiah 3:4)

Welcome back to Furnishing Faith. I haven't posted for a couple weeks as I took some time for a much needed vacation. However, during my time away I came across an article from Samuel D. James, an evangelical writer and thinker, posted on Mere Orthodoxy titled "Does Maturity Still Matter?" It's a wonderful article, and I recommend that you read the whole thing. James does an excellent job of diagnosing our cultural ails, and I applaud the clarity he is able to bring to the subject. While not disagreeing at all with James, I'd like to offer a gentle critical evaluation by expanding in some helpful ways, as even James acknowledges that there is much more to say on the topic of maturity, particularly in the Church. James is known for his particular insight into all things digital and social media in particular, showing where these things affect our lives, and this is certainly valid in the discussion of maturity in both Western society and the Church. I'd like to explore some alternate ways in which we see immaturity affecting our everyday lives, personal relations, and especially the Church and its mission. I'd also like to shine a light on a very ordinary, very practical solution which James seems to leave unexplored. I'll briefly summarize some of James's most salient points here to get us started. 

Does Maturity Still Matter?

James begins by highlighting Mark Sayers's book, A Non-Anxious Presence, particularly insofar as Sayers denotes the effect of the emotional and immature within a given network. Sayers's excellent quote is worth repeating here: 

As a network is swamped by chronic anxiety, it is marked by reactivity. Those within the system no longer act rationally, but rather, high emotion becomes the dominant form of interaction. The system’s focus is directed toward the most emotionally immature and reactive members. Those who are more mature and healthy begin to adapt their behavior to appease the most irrational and unhealthy. This creates a scenario where the most emotionally unhealthy and immature members in the system become de facto leaders.

James describes a familiar scene in many organizations of which we are a part, where leadership and even peers become too afraid to speak up to the outraged and immature among us. When everyone is set on appeasing those who either claim to be oppressed or to speak on behalf of those who are, our organizations become paralyzed, ineffective, and afraid to step on the next landmine lest they have to issue a new apology, undergo sensitivity training, lose their livelihood, or be outcast from social circles by those who fear guilt by association. James makes apt connections between failures in several corners of society and the effect of the immature in dominating leadership therein. The reader is left feeling that words have finally been put to what they have experienced for many years. He goes on to explain how the investiture of power within immature, emotionalist activists not only robs institutions and organizations of any positive growth or impact, but that it also becomes poison to the immature as well, because massive influence in the hands of the immature tends to further destroy their character. One thinks of the truism "power tends to corrupt," because if power can sometimes corrupt even the mature, the immature have little if any defense when their angry voice, or most outrageous tweets, are suddenly rewarded by thousands of followers.    

Western society once viewed emotional outbursts, shouting, unreasonableness, and other dramatic flairs as indicative of immaturity, or the inability to effectively communicate due to a lack of experience, character, or competence with respect to ideas, evidence, and conversation. Today however, we have somehow been conned into viewing this same immature behavior instead as indicative of deep sincerity, grave urgency, or even an effort in "speaking truth to power." The immature have recognized the power of the martyr's, those whose maturity in suffering has earned them great influence upon their society after their death. However, the immature, perhaps predictably, prefer instead of suffering themselves to be outspoken on behalf of those they perceive to be suffering, or to exaggerate minor struggles into cosmic injustices. In so doing, they find a martyr's voice, temperament, and resulting power to affect change on the basis of grievance and the shaming of the mature who are in power. Conveniently, they do this with the benefit of not having actually been martyred in the first place. 

Grievance Rush

Naturally, this fast avenue to power and visibility creates a grievance economy. In the late 19th century, discoveries of gold in America's West brought about the "Gold Rush," known for attracting people from all over the world because of the lure of easy wealth and power that resulted from finding gold just laying in the ground. Today, the immature among us are able to find easy power, wealth, and even self-righteousness in all corners of society by the airing of endless grievances. They are enabled to do so, as Samuel D. James also points out, largely because of the out-sized impact of social media on our society, where immature voices are magnified. However, the effect is certainly not limited to social media, and in fact plays out in everyday personal interactions constantly. For instance, the work of James Lindsay along with other academics in successfully publishing farcical research in several journals of grievance studies is indicative of the ease with which infantile outrage and accusation is rewarded with notoriety, esteem, and power. However, the dominance of the immature is not limited to academia, but affects most institutions and organizations today. Most ordinary people no doubt have the experience of staying silent in a conversation, not speaking what they would normally, for fear that even their reasonable words may cause an explosion of outrage in their conversation partner. 

We must finally come to recognize that the flaw in this scenario is not the reasonable words, but the immature explosion of outrage. The inclination to let the outrage of immature persons to dominate our conversations, our policies, our organizations, our faith practices, our parenting, our relationships, our values, and our convictions will inevitably lead to a society which of course looks like it was shaped by children. Where the West used to say "we don't negotiate with terrorists," we have now surprisingly let the immature set the agenda and hold organizations hostage with impunity, cheering their cause while we watch organizations become utterly ineffective. While I do not seek here to make any points about foreign policy or politics at all, the above political phrase illustrates the degree to which Western society has allowed fear, the terror of outrage, to control our narratives, organizations, efforts, and societies. We must leave behind the fear of the immature, and instead learn to speak, act, and especially lead with a maturity which denies domination by the immature. Naturally, this means rediscovering high standards for our leaders, and holding them to it so that they do not bow to the immature.

Shooting at a Target While Blindfolded

While I applaud James's encouragement towards an approach in which "immature members [are] marginalized and discipled, rather than feared and deferred to," I fear that he has pushed in the right direction, though unfortunately without pushing far enough to arrive at the proper destination. Where James seems to sideline "the ordinary means of grace" because "movements and organizations only have so much power to push their members toward these means," I would push back that we ought to for that very reason highlight these means, along with the exemplary leader like elders who administer them appropriately in maturity and in subjection to the Scriptures. Marginalizing and discipling the immature is certainly one half of the solution, but without a renewed and widespread emphasis on the biblical means for inculcating maturity, testing it, and establishing an inflexible requirement for it in our leaders, we will never see fully mature leaders who, like elders, are capable of leading and discipling the immature in the first place without bowing to their whims. 

While James certainly calls for requiring maturity, he nonetheless stops short of exploring the wealth of tools, tests, and targets offered in Scripture which describe faithful, wise, and mature leadership, whether in the Church or in society. This leaves a bit of a hole in the call to maturity, as people must be pointed to examples of maturity, and to its source in Christ and the Scriptures. I echo his call for maturity, but it means nothing if we do not highlight the methods and means to obtain and require this maturity, especially as expounded in Scripture by faithful elders whom God has qualified by his standards. Otherwise it is as if we are trying to take a test without studying, just guessing at what maturity looks like, or firing an arrow at a target while blindfolded.

It is no coincidence that we see the qualifications for mature leadership mentioned multiple times and emphasized in different forms throughout Scripture, from the ideal standards for a king of Israel (Dt 17:14-20) all the way to Paul's own discipleship of Titus and Timothy in the books bearing their names. These standards of wisdom and maturity work quite well outside the Church as well, precisely because they cohere with God's law for a well-ordered society and leaders, as evidenced in the standards of Old Testament Israel. Even their failures at times to live up to these standards provides a useful cautionary tale, especially when examining the leaders of the divided kingdom. In fact, 1 Kings 12:6-8 plainly tells us that the kingdom of Israel divided because king Rehoboam “abandoned the counsel that the old men gave him and took counsel with the young men,” the immature among him. When we ignore or flex on biblical standards of maturity, we ultimately get immature leaders. Or what's worse, when mature leaders are deceived into bowing to the immature emotionalism of the loudest, rudest, most accusing contingent of our society, we witness the ceding of the power and mission of organizations like the Church to those who were never serious candidates for leading people, or Christ's people in particular. For every time an elder uses the pulpit to encourage protest marches on some political issue, or to vote for a particular candidate (or to demonize voting for another), or to encourage some outward display of support for "X marginalized group," we witness the voice of the immature proceeding from the elders mouth, rather than the voice of God from the Scriptures which we expected. 

This is especially the case because Scripture has already outlined the processes for highlighting the marginalized/mistreated and resolving controversies, both of which are overseen by mature officers who have demonstrated wisdom (Acts 6:1-6; Mt 18:15-22). In the case of the marginalized, tending their needs must never interfere with the faithful preaching of God's word or the proper functioning of the organization of the Church or its means of grace, thus mature officers like deacons handle these issues separately. In the case of controversies and conflicts, mature practice demands that these matters be handled privately "between you and him alone," before adding only a few mature mediators, but today movements like #ChurchToo and the deconstruction movement prefer to do the opposite by leaving the Church and taking their grievances to the widest, least mature audience of social media. It is clear then that our culture not only needs to reject the outsized influence of the loudest and least mature among us, but if we do not simultaneously learn the lessons of mature leadership, along with its appropriately high standards as set out in Scripture, then our society will continue to be led by the activism of the immature, even if through the mediated means of formal leadership who bend their own ear to the aims of the immature. Failing to define maturity by biblical standards of wisdom is part of what got us into this mess, so we must not fail in the same way as we seek maturity in leaders today.

Immature Elders, or the Immature as Elders?

If you've spent time in evangelical culture, perhaps you've heard the especially unhelpful phrase "the man is the head, but the woman is the neck, and the neck turns the head," when applied to conversations of egalitarianism vs complementarianism. While I do not seek to comment here on that debate, I have always found the above phrase to be dishonest, and not a little bit gross. The idea is that it is possible to somehow submit to an acknowledged authority, yet also work subtly to influence, or even undermine, that authority towards ones own ends. This is what is happening with immature activists and emotionalism. If they cannot be the head because their immaturity and lack of qualification precludes them, then they will settle for being a neck which turns the head. In the fear produced by activist outrage of every/any flavor, activists are sometimes able to bring organizations and leaders to meet their demands. In other words, they become the neck which has the power to turn the head. 

The immature have been so successful at extorting leaders and organizations in this way that some have even become professional activists, coercing salaries for themselves as "advisors" on the boards of companies, or even forcing them to establish entirely new boards to which the organization must submit, like the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) boards. Rather than their expertise qualifying them for such a role, their excellence in loud and pointed accusation is all that is necessary for such an esteemed position (Dt. 19:15). In the context of churches, some immature members are able to to exert influence in this way by negotiating their grievances into a seat at the table of the elders of the church, or by influencing the votes of members via extravagant displays of outrage or grievance. Where elders had to be mature, qualified, tested, ordained, and voted upon, the immature church activist is able to claim this power for themselves by simply making enough noise, claiming enough personal damage, or by convincingly laying enough blame at the feet of the elders of the church, past and present. The reasoning goes that by listening and deferring to the "hurt" (immature) member, the church is offered a way out from under their alleged culpability, and relieved from making the same mistakes in the future. 

However, to bow to the demands of the immature in this way is to make a decision to leave behind the wisdom and standards of Scripture behind in a misguided attempt to appease. To be clear, abiding by the wisdom of mature practice in Scripture does not mean that real hurts are ignored, but instead that they are handled appropriately with investigation, witnesses, and all overseen by qualified authorities (as Mt 18 above) rather than ruled by the aggrieved. If someone has not demonstrated maturity, then they shouldn't be allowed to shape policies, etc., on the basis of their grievance. We have forgotten about the Bible's basic solutions for the problems which immaturity inflicts upon us today. In that the Bible sets out a mature process for conflict resolution, with a leadership code which thoroughly demands maturity in leadership by testing in several important metrics (we might call these the "metrics of maturity," found in the qualifications for overseers and deacons, 1 Tim. 3), the answer has been staring us in the face from the pages of Scripture. But the West's rejection of, even refusal to acknowledge, Christian wisdom has left us stuck in a mire of our own making, unwilling to grasp the branch extended to us in the solutions of Scripture. 

This applies to the phenomenon of celebrity pastors, as James mentions at one point. When celebrity pastors and mega churches were gaining traction from the early 90's all the way through until the 2010's, the universal refrain was that even though many disagreed with several aspects of the practice of these mega churches, "they must be doing something right" in order to gain so many followers, filling the seats of the church. This same phenomenon now gives inappropriate clout to the immature who yet have massive followings on social media. However, from the perspective of the modern day, most recognize that the mega church movement was flawed from the start, encouraging some of the worst impulses and fostering some of worst abuses of power in recent history. Whether as early as Willow Creek or as late a Mars Hill, immature leadership is enabled by a charismatic presence and a large following, giving legitimacy to the immature and unqualified, and inevitably causing devastating harm along the way. What is obvious today is exactly what was unacceptable to the ear then: if we do not require maturity in the loudest voices leading society in general and the Church in particular, we will inevitably allow simply the loudest and most charismatic voices to steer the ship, so that we end up with ethical and spiritual infants as our leaders (Isa 3:4). 

Conclusion - The Human Flaw and the Way Forward

Those in the Church should especially recognize the flaws in elevating the immature among us. Christian theology teaches that Man as a race is darkened in their thinking by sin and by the Fall (Eph 4:18-20), and that the process of discipleship by the Word, and the Spirit's power, is the main way in which humans come to have their minds renewed in Christ. This process is called progressive sanctification for a reason, and we are told that we should come to expect to see the "fruits" or results of the process steadily appearing in those who are being saved by God's grace, a long process of acquiring maturity. This is achieved in particular by the means of grace, which are the preaching of Scripture and the sacraments, both supplied by mature ministers. Insofar as Christian leaders incline their ear towards the loudest, most outraged among us, they are therefore ignoring the voices of the mature in favor of listening to the immature. Outrage, accusation, and shame are after all a result of sin working within a person, and these are certainly not listed among the Christian virtues, but that which we must grow beyond. Christians are therefore uniquely situated to bring sanity back to public policy and engagement, not merely with the idea of maturity, but with its foundational basis in Scripture and the changed hearts of the mature among us. We need to begin to excel at telling the difference between maturity and immaturity, but without wisdom from Scripture and holding our leaders to its high standards, we will never reach the understanding we have left behind.