Pathways Church
Appleton church #2
Pathways Church
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Pathways Church When I visit a church I like to park in the back of the lot so I can walk past the parked cars and look for bumper stickers. As I walked through a long row of cars in front of the entrance to Pathways Church I saw remarkably few bumper stickers. This was an Evangelical church, and according to many polls congregants here should represent Donald Trump’s base of political support. Yet there were few signs of that in the parking lot. I saw no political bumper stickers. This held true inside Pathways Church as well. It was a space empty of direct reference to politics. I walked in on Sunday morning just after the 10:30am service had begun. I looked around for the coffee bar, stocked with large thermoses and Starbucks-style paper cups with plastic tops, and poured myself a cup. Since the service was already off and running, the front doors were closed and people like me were signed to enter from one of the side doors. Apparently it would be too disturbing to the service—or really the show—if those doors were flicking open and shut, thereby letting light into the theater-like worship space. A standard worship band, consisting of a
guitarist, bassist, keyboardist, and drummer behind a muffling glass wall, led the music. A row of song leaders, two male and two female, stood facing the congregation along the platform. There are surely more guitarists who play weekly in front of Evangelical congregations than who play live in clubs or bars around Appleton. The performers at Pathways Church really are good, and the song leaders belt out the praise songs. The only problem is that the professionalism of the delivery is inversely related to singability. Looking around I saw that most people were content to simply watch the ongoing performance going on in front of them. Only a minority appeared to be singing along. The senior pastor Adam Demetrician came out. He was mobile on stage since he had a tiny wireless microphone fixed around his head. He wore jeans, a button-down shirt, and a dark sports jacket. In our current cultural moment an outfit like this is completely unremarkable. At one time this would have registered as “informal,” but it’s the same basic outfit worn by pastors all around the Appleton. Within the megachurch format there is no alternative to this basic look.
I should stop here and admit that I am fascinated by pastor Adam. I looked up his bio on the Pathways Church website and saw that he and I both graduated with a masters degree from Fuller Seminary in Southern California. So we almost certainly shared a professor or two. Yet when I look on Facebook I see we have zero friends in common. He has 2000+ friends, and I have nowhere near that many, but still a few hundred, and we live in a smallish city, probably not so far away from each other, yet we overlap not at all when it comes to friends. At the beginning of the non-musical portion of the service Pastor Adam called up two image from Google Earth families. He reminded the congregation that it was the tradition of Pathways Church to dedicate newborns every year on Mother’s Day. What a heavy burden every aspiring megachurch has to shoulder! Each individual church has to create for itself a set of annual traditions that mark the life-transitions of congregants. And this is a great example of what inevitably happens: church traditions get fixed to national celebrations and the val-
ues of the general culture. It seems like a small thing, but this need to establish a tradition from scratch leads to a dependence of the church on pre-established national traditions. It molds the church calendar to the national calendar. Following this baby dedication, which moved quickly, Pastor Adam introduced the message, which would be given by associate pastor Chris Kliner. And as Pastor Adam left the stage a smartly produced video came up on the large overhead screens. The video gave an animation for the sermon series “Best ... Ever.” And this was followed by a humorous sketch of a dad who dedicated himself to his child. In many large churches today there is a stedy alternation between screens and talking. A short video like this seems to fulfill the YouTube-clip expectations of congregants. Since the use of screens is notable in this church, I should explain their placement in the worship area. The speaker stood in the front, with only a small table nearby where a laptop with sermon notes was
placed. To the left and right of the platform area are large screens. These displayed a close up image of the pastor as he spoke. Concerts are like this now too, as musicians are beamed onto large screens so that everyone in the audience has a good view of what is happening on stage. Then in addition the speaker has a small portable screen that stands just behind him. This screen projects words or images that form the outline of the sermon. This smaller screen is itself broadcast onto the large screens, and shows up as one watches video versions of the message on the church website. One final independent screen, a large flat rectangular one, is set high up above the mid- image from Google Earth dle of the platform, giving the title of the sermon series or the individual sermon. So there are actually four interlocking screen missions: a personal screen for sermon notes, two large screens that capture the speaker, a screen that is used as a prop for the speaker, and then another screen that provides context by framing the scene with a title. I have never encountered a denser set of interlocking screen devices.
The message was on the topic of how to be an influence in the lives of those around us, especially those in our family. This was Mother’s Day, so it’s no surprise there was a topical appeal. It is hard to imagine anyone really objecting to the points made in the message. The opening point was “The best chance to have influence in someone’s life is to show up.” It was odd that on Mother’s Day the message seemed better calibrated to fathers than mothers. But still, it is valuable to point out the importance of showing up at life events and taking part in the daily small things of a child’s life. “Influence” is a non-religious word. It has a deep place in American business culture thanks to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. It has a still more contemporary use in the idea of social media “influencers.” So it felt strange to be thinking about familial relations in terms of influence. But part of the game plan at Pathways Church is to use language from the domains of self-help and business as a way to package the Christian message. This became even more clear in the final
prayer when the speaker prayed for us to “leverage that influence Jesus won on the cross.” The doctrinal statement on the atonement is likely quite orthodox, but this corporate-speak way of talking about the cross points to a deep shift in Christian thinking. The Bible was enlisted in the search for influence in the home. Jesus, it turns out, was just the example we need. That could be surprising since it is possible to read the Gospels as a call to a discipleship that reaches beyond family life. “Put down your nets and follow me” Jesus told his disciples, probably to the consternation of family members who de- image from Google Earth pended on their livelihood. But at Pathways Church Jesus just isn’t radical like that. The story of Jesus approaching the tax collector Zacchaeus, who climbed a tree to get a better view of Jesus, was used as an example of Jesus as an influencer. He approached Zacchaeus where he was—up in that ridiculous tree— and spoke to him with love and compassion. In the same way, we need to meet the people in our lives, especially family
members, where they are at. The story of Nehemiah in the Hebrew Bible is a favorite among Evangelicals. The book describes how Nehemiah rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem with the Israelites who had returned from exile. For many Christians it is an untrodden section of the Bible, but for Evangelicals it holds lessons in leadership and organization that have filled many a sermon. In this message the work of Nehemiah was introduced as an example of familial organization. Nehemiah assigned families to protect each gap in the wall, which was an effective policy since each family would be fighting to protect their own children, their own homes. This use of the story of Nehemiah points to a larger issue: there was no place in this message for loyalty to a group larger than family. In this version of Evangelicalism families are seen as banding together in a kind of mutual defense league, leaving out possible commitments to other social groups. Near the end of the message the speaker described Pathways Church as
existing to help families. No church anywhere would disregard family concerns, but there are ways of thinking about religious life in which loyalty to the church could be in tension with the everyday responsibilities of family. Looking beyond the church, perhaps an ethical life would require careful consideration as to the best way to balance loyalties to nation and the Earth itself with private commitment to one’s family. At the end of the message the associate pastor thanked us for “hanging out” with him. That felt like an odd way to characterize what I had been doing over the past 45 minutes. I knew I had been sitting in this au- image from Google Earth dience and listening to a message, and I am not sure in what sense I could be understood to have been hanging out. That is the language of informal gathering, and although I would By Martyn Smith visit May 12, 2019
estimate that there were 400+ people in this congregation, with the lights low and the spotlight on the speaker, we were supposed to imagine ourselves as individuals hanging out with a small group. At no point did the congregation stand up and speak together in one voice, and at no point were we made aware of larger social questions or tensions that exist in our wider community. We were kept focused on our responsibilities to family. The only possible alternative to that was the false life of complete individualism and disregard for family. When the speaker turned to “super practical” concerns, he challenged us to show up at the dinner table with a personal conversation, and not spend every waking hour at the office. That is the extent of the higher calling on offer here at Pathways Church.