Americans have become consumers, religious consumers. Our faith is now a matter of something that we have chosen, a matter of personal preference, individual expression. What are the implications for this for the practice of Christian ministry?

Alan Wolfe, sociologist at Boston College, talks about how the expectations and the appetites of people have shifted beneath the church over the past few generations. As a sociologist, he is accustomed to speaking in terms of roles. Religion has moved from an ascribed role, Wolfe maintains, to an achieved role. An ascribed role is one you are born with; an achieved role is one you choose and work with. The implications of this are greater than first meets the eye. Wolfe outlined his thinking in a book that he, with good reason, wanted to entitle The Taming of American Religion. His publisher overruled him into the milder, The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith.

Wolfe suggests that matters of faith were not long ago considered vast and momentous, bigger than our personal predilections and beyond our individual agency. Today, being religious has become a lifestyle enclave that we rummage through in order to find the most personally advantageous package. An interview with Homiletics magazine indicates that this trend is less than encouraging.

Wolfe: (F)or more and more Americans now, religion is something that – at a certain point in your life – you decide that you’re going to feel invested in and empowered by, that you’re going to recommend to others, but you can’t necessarily enforce it on others, even your children, as much as you might like to. This is the single biggest change

Homiletics: If a church doesn’t empower us, we switch churches or religions. We’ve become a nation of switchers, as you call them, or a nation of free agents, and our pastors, priests, rabbis and imams know that.

Wolfe: I use the phrase ‘balance of power,’ that is, the way the balance of power has shifted in the relationship between the clergy and the congregation. The authority in many ways once lay with the clergy. They had a message, and their job was to preach the message, and the congregation was expected to sit there and absorb the message. In many ways the power has shifted from the clergy to the congregation. The congregation now says to the clergy, ‘You give us a message that we want to hear or we’re going elsewhere.’ That’s what free agency is. We see it all the time in sports, and it certainly leads to better contracts, but whether it leads to team loyalty is another matter.

(Alan Wolfe, The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith (New York: Free Press, 2003).

— Excerpt from Who Are You to Say? Establishing Pastoral Authority in Matters of Faith, by Dale Rosenberger, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2005, pp. 103-104.