My grandfather ran a neighborhood grocery store in a small Midwestern town until the late 1950s. Many neighborhoods in that town had small grocery stores like his. If one looks carefully while driving through the older parts of small towns in the heartland, one may still see the buildings that have survived, many converted into family dwellings or storage units. I am old enough to remember when a big change came along and destroyed the business to which my grandfather had given his life. It came in the form of the supermarket, a large grocery store, clean and bright, used by multiple neighborhoods, with larger selection and lower prices than the old store on the corner. “Why are they able to sell food cheaper than little stores?” I remember asking someone, probably my father. He answered, “It’s because they can purchase larger batches of items, and the more you buy the cheaper it is. And since they are owned by a corporation with lots of these stores, they can buy even bigger quantities and pass the savings on to their customers and still potentially make a great deal of money.” It was the first lesson in economics—and value—that I can remember. Here is how I interpreted it: “Bigger is better.”
Forty-something years later, the building that housed that supermarket is now my home town’s public library, and the super-supermarket Wal-Mart is king, offering prices so relatively low it would amaze my octogenarian father—who refuses to shop there, on principle. I used to think dad was just a Luddite, refusing to embrace progress, but now I am beginning to understand his conviction. It’s old-fashioned wisdom, but it’s also new, and spiritual, and very needed.
As time has passed, I have seen that bigger is not necessarily better. For example, big grocery stores offer greater potential variety, lower unit cost, greater efficiency for retailer and customer, and the unmatched carnival atmosphere of bigness. But their critics charge that they also tend to nourish patrons and workers poorly, destroy communities and culture completely, and inspire agoraphobia and frustration frequently. Even the best of us have Wal-Mart meltdowns during the holidays. In the business world there has been a niche backlash to the megamart trend that involves more personal approaches to marketing: small batch, customized, high quality, organic, hand-crafted, and relational are adjectives usually applied to purveyors of the “anti-big” movement. They may never defeat the great leviathan, but they will preserve and rebuild a way of life that many people are longing for by emphasizing boutique rather than bloat. The more these small-time operators succeed, the more they show that entertaining variety in showcasing products and amazing efficiency in satisfying masses is not at all what the commercial life of a community is all about.
This has everything to do with how we do the third place in the third millennium. The third place is where we choose to hang out after first, where we physically live, and second, where we work for a living. It was argued, particularly in the Northwest, that the coffee house was the best contemporary venue for the third place. As an evangelical follower of Jesus I may want that third place to be with other followers of Jesus but the last place on earth I want to be is in a scripted, predictable, lackluster, unexplained, meaningless entertainment spectacle that is often the big church service. Don’t get me wrong, big services can be very nourishing and meaningful, but it is much more difficult to encourage folks to connect with one another and with God rather than hide when one has a big meeting. If I might be allowed for a moment to get in touch with what energizes me to take up my cross and follow Jesus, I really believe I need quality, meaningful, biblical, unscripted, somewhat raw, somewhat safe, thought-provoking, storytelling, face-to-face and side-to-side worship with exposition and exhortation that is hand-crafted by a gifted person who knows and loves me well. The latter string of experiences is what I am drawn to, whether it is in a church that meets in a house or a small group made up of people from a larger local church. This artisan church movement is sometimes called simple, or liquid, or house church, and its more thoughtful advocates rarely disparage the big church meeting, but insist that it cannot be the core of what constitutes ekklesia.
I now submit that I want to take this perhaps oversimplified observation one step further. So, biblical ekklesia can happen in a living room, but why must leadership equipping in service to that ekklesia occur only in classroom buildings with dry-erase boards and chairs with writing tablets? The scholarship that only the traditional seminary institution provides is valuable and necessary to the church, but relationship and spiritual formation are just as critical and can only be effectively provided through individual mentoring and spiritual direction. The latter qualities are terribly inefficient and difficult to pull off economically for a school that must support aging buildings with deferred maintenance issues, highly-paid administrators and developers, and the escalating costs of satisfying the demands of the accreditation club. Most seminaries wisely operate on some form of the business model, but many of these same institutions are fiscally marginal and must charge ever higher tuitions just to tread water. The result of this battle for institutional survival is often at cross-purposes with the stated mission when graduates are saddled with huge student debt that keeps them from traditionally low-paying pastoral and missionary careers.
One alternative to a picture much bleaker than school ads in Christianity Today would admit to is the boutique seminary. The boutique seminary uses a model that was highly developed by the English Puritans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to respond to the needs of local churches emerging in the Reformation. A small number of select students study with a small, talented faculty in an urban or university community environment. The focus is on intentional community (not just as a recruiting claim, but as a real outcome) with frequent face-to-face interaction between faculty and students, often in the homes of faculty members. Offering theory, but insisting on practice, boutique seminaries are "terribly inefficient" and so must rely on faculty homes and rented classrooms, university libraries, and even local coffee houses to deliver content and ministry practice. Low overhead is passed on to students in the form of lower tuition which allows them the opportunity to be debt-free when they finish their preparation. The advantages are enormous, but I would never claim the experience is for everyone. Boutique seminaries should never be reactive against the traditional divinity schools, but, like their commercial counterparts, operate in the niche. Few boutiques will produce Semitic scholars or offer courses in Ugaritic, but they will prepare relational and effective pastors, church planters, and missionaries. They will not produce licensed professional counselors or marriage and family therapists because they will probably not get accredited in the foreseeable future, but they will, and have already prepared really good spiritual directors who are effective at leading people to faith in Christ and to growth in relation to the heavenly Father. The outcome could be quality and craftsmanship in theological education, and yet, ironically, at a lower cost. The boutique seminary could also serve the burgeoning simple church movement as a means of equipping leaders without uprooting them to other far-flung cities that constitute the seats of the most venerable theological schools. Boutique enrollments are limited to no more than a dozen new students per year, and the focus is on multiplying seminaries rather than theological empire-building. Thus, the vision for the boutique I direct, Emmanuel House, is to respond to invitations to produce new boutiques, particularly in other university cities (including large urban areas) and in other cultural settings. Intimate community is modeled in boutiques in a way that lends itself naturally to simple churches. Graduates are used to bi-vocational ministry and are potentially debt-free. Some simple churches have employed a “raft” concept, where individuals and couples who have been discipled together in university communities, for example, choose to relocate to new cities together. Boutique grads will be capable bi-vocational guides for the raft community. (I want to give credit to Brett Yohn, Christian Challenge director at U of Nebraska-Lincoln, for this picture of the raft. I named the blog site in his honor!) The picture of a white water raft shooting the rapids under the watchful eye of a prepared guide (who is nevertheless one of the team) is a great metaphor of community and the ability to respond to vanishing opportunity with mobility and speed.
There is a niche for the boutique seminary. It will not replace the traditional seminary that is so effective in identifying scholars in its mission to prepare pastors, missionaries, and counselors, but it may prove to be a valuable partner of the church in the task of discipling a whole nation. I still shop at “Wal-Mart” because I am not wealthy, but my heart and as much of my resources as I can spare go to the boutique, where theological artisanship still survives. Ω
(Liam says, by way of postscript:) I know I have raised many more questions for discussion. Hopefully this is what a competent blogger does. I value your constructive comments and observations as an opportuinity for me to refine ideas and grow in my thinking. Please dialogue with me about this. Want more information about boutique seminary? The Puritans called them household seminaries. Read the historical account in John Morgan's Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education, 1560-1640. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Check out the Emmanuel House story at www.lothlorien.us and by 07/01/2005 at a new website: www.emmahouse.org.
