Church after Innovation, The: Questioning Our Obsession with Work, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship

Outreach 2023 Resource of the Year (Church)

Named One of Fifteen Important Theology Books of 2022, Englewood Review of Books

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.

This is the fifth book in Root’s Ministry in a Secular Age series.

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

256 pages.