Negative World Missiology

Doing mission in the Negative World, immigration economies, Dick Van Dyke and more in this week's roundup.

I’ll be putting up a podcast post on Monday, then will resume posting in the New Year. I’m including a few Christmas holiday long reads in this one to keep you company over the break.

What I’ve been reading: Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard

It’s been pretty mind blowing to watch how my “negative world” concept has resonated within evangelicalism. The three different evangelical groups I identified in my book have actually responded in different ways. The culture warriors mostly did not engage with it at all. I don’t think they’ve read my work. The cultural engagers (mostly the urban church) have been the most skeptical. While they’ve given me a respectful hearing, they are mostly wedded to their legacy approaches and models of the world.

The group that has liked it the most is actually the seeker sensitives. My work really resonates with megachurch pastors. Which is interesting because that’s not my cultural background. As pastor Josh McPerson of Grace City Church in Wenatchee, WA put it, “I have found every pastor I’ve unpacked his taxonomy with and explained to them, it answer - it explains their life. It explains the world they are living in. And it’s instantly self-authenticating.”

Josh Howerton, pastor of Lakepointe Church in Dallas, posted a viral tweet about what he called “Negative World missiology.” He then joined Josh McPherson to create a podcast called Resurge about the way the church needs to change to thrive in the Negative World.

A person I follow on X noted that Howerton’s missiology sounded a lot like the old Mark Driscoll, and it struck me that Driscoll had a ministry similarly named the Resurgence. While Driscoll is out of favor with many today, he was undeniably successful in center city Seattle in an environment that was probably negative world avant la lattre.

Here’s the first episode of the podcast, which is called provocatively titled “The Seeker-Sensitive Movement Is Dying.”

It’s really interesting to watch the use to which these guys put the framework. I didn’t know either of them until very recently, and they are coming from a very different professional perspective and cultural environment. When you watch the very crisp and memorable phrasing they use to talk, you can see that these kinds of pastors have a ton of talent and expertise at what they do.

One of Howerton’s takeways is that my framework described “crystallized missiologies” for the positive world (seeker sensitivity) and neutral world (cultural engagement). He sees a gap in developing a negative world crystallized missiology. I hadn’t been thinking about it in precisely that way, but he’s very right.

One of my goals for the negative world idea is that I’d lose control of it. That is, that it would take on a life of its own and people would start using it in ways I might not have anticipated. If I try to treat it as too proprietary, I’ll limit my impact in the world. So it’s awesome to see guys like Howerton and McPherson making it their own.

I’m not a pastor. There’s no way I could do what these guys do. What I do is provide insight to help pastors (and others!) understand the world we are living, and how to operate in it. Then they have to be the ones to take that, add it to everything else they are taking in, and integrate it in way that makes sense to advance their work.

Howerton uses an interesting threefold division of labor: builder, philosopher, artist. I wouldn’t claim to be an actual philosopher, but my work is primarily intellectual. Guys like Howertown and McPherson are builders. We have different roles on the team, as it were.

There are four episodes of this podcast that have been released so far, and I liked all of them. Episode two is about building a family for negative world ministry (super important!), episode three is about politics, and episode four is a killer interview with NYC pastor Jon Tyson. (I also interviewed Tyson for my own podcast).

Some quotes I loved:

• “Men, read the books, listen to the podcasts, learn from other good men - and then stand on your own two feet and do your thing. Trust the work that God wants to do in you.”

• “If you want to be faithful on the front line, you need to be dialed at home.”

• “Get a vision for your family that’s bigger than the vision for your church. Don’t make your wife an associate pastor. Guard your travel.”

• “Elevate your vision” (Makes me think of my post from this week on elevating people’s sights).

I wanted to share this podcast because it’s great stuff and people should listen and wrestle with these issues. But it’s also an example of the real world impact of my own work, and how my ideas are shaping how people structure their ministry. That comes with a huge weight of responsibility to get it right, and I will work hard to make sure I am doing my best to live up to that.

I’d also like to again encourage pastors and church leaders to think about supporting my work out of your missions budget for next year. As you can see, this is an important ministry. We do a lot to support builders (church planters, campus ministers, etc), but far less financial support gets directed into intellectual and artistic work. But those are critical to informing and supporting the builder work.

I’m looking for churches who are willing to provide a small about of recurring monthly financial support. For those who support me at $100/month, as a token of gratitude I’d give full subscriber status to every church employee (with an email address on the church’s domain). For those who support at $250/month, I would do the same, plus spend four hours over the next year engaging on specific problems the church is wrestling with.

If you are ready to commit, you can do so easily with a credit card on Patreon. If you have questions or want to arrange another form of payment - or if you are another kind of organization that would like to support me - just email me.

Thank you so much, because I can’t do this work without financial support.

How Immigration Restructured Our Economies for the Worse

Sarah O’Connor had an interesting column in the Financial Times talking about the impact of immigration on our economies. She makes this common sense observation:

For years, mainstream economists have told people who worry that migrants are undercutting wages that they are wrong. Yes, they have said, new people increase the supply of labour, but they also increase the demand for goods and services, so in the end it more-or-less washes out. The theory is backed up with a large number of empirical studies which have found only small, if any, effects from immigration on the wages of native workers.

Yet many economists are now warning that president-elect Donald Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented migrants will create labour shortages, push up costs and increase inflation in the US economy. Can those statements both be true? Doesn’t the idea that deportations will fuel inflation implicitly acknowledge that migrant workers had indeed been holding down wages all along? People aren’t stupid: I suspect they notice the apparent intellectual inconsistency, and it makes them more likely to mistrust or simply ignore what economists have to say on the topic.

She then points out that both of them can be true at the same time, because the economies of Western countries were reshaped such that entire industries are now almost entirely oriented around foreign labor. This labor isn’t just paid less. Every aspect of the industries they dominate have been restructured to essentially degrade working conditions in ways that make the jobs less attractive to native workers.

As an example, consider the vantage point of a woman I once interviewed who worked in a food factory in Sheffield. She had watched as a rising share of the expanding workforce became agency workers, mostly from eastern Europe, whose schedules could be chopped and changed with no notice and who did not receive the same benefits as her. Her wages and conditions weren’t undercut, but she thought her migrant colleagues were exploited and the sector was no longer a good place for new entrants. Over time, people like her retired and the sector became dominated by migrant workers.

The point is that economies are dynamic, and employers in some sectors respond to the availability of migrant workers by changing or expanding in certain ways they might not otherwise have done. Meat processing plants in the UK shifted gradually to 12-hour shifts and remote locations because they could find temporary migrant workers to fill these roles, even though they wouldn’t work well for settled workers who might have families and prefer to live in bigger towns with more amenities. As the head of the British Meat Processors Association once told me: “If we’re honest, the working patterns have evolved around having non-UK labour.” Farmers in the UK had responded to the availability of seasonal workers from eastern Europe after 2004 by planting more labour-intensive soft fruits.

Businesses basically were able to take away hard won gains for labor like an eight hour day, or insist on unstable schedules or locate facilities in unattractive but cheap locations or reduce benefits because they had a new labor source that would accept them. This of course led to those industries becoming entirely immigrant dominated, and thus depending on migration in some sense.

In other words, as is obvious, immigration has been undercutting the British (and American) worker. It’s very obvious that some economists flat out lie about immigration, the way they flat out lied about global trade.

Of course, many of these foreign workers are illegal, which means they can be paid even less and treated even worse - a big advantage from an employer perspective. The NYT had a recent piece on this:

But the judge overseeing the case found that the number of undocumented workers provided by Human Bees suggested that the hirings were not an “isolated incident” or a mistake. An audit of the work authorization status of the 159 workers dispatched by Human Bees showed that nearly half were “not eligible currently.”

…

In an interview, Geetesh Goyal, chief executive and co-owner of Human Bees, said he was “not incredibly surprised” the audit found that some of the firm’s temporary employees were unauthorized, though the percentage was higher than he had expected. He attributed it to the high volume of undocumented workers in California, which he described as “an open-border state.” He added, “The whole state is open, right, so, like where are these people going?”

Firms today regularly outsource functions to third parties or to staffing agencies. While there’s some economic rationale for this, this practice, as with manufacturing in China, outsources abuses and even illegal behavior, with the putative arms length relationship to the vendor giving the firm plausible deniability that it knew what was going on. In some cases, this leads to horrific results such as the Grenfell fire in London. Sometimes it just means hiring lots of illegal workers. As the Times writes:

Chris Thomas, a Denver lawyer who advises employers on immigration compliance, recently warned clients that the new administration was likely to discourage employers from using staffing agencies “to obscure the employment of undocumented workers.” In its November investigation, The Times found that staffing agencies often shielded partner companies from responsibility for hiring undocumented workers.

Best of the Web

Robert Ordway: Midnight McDonalds - What two months of unemployment in DC can teach you about yourself and others - A great essay.

Tom Edsall/NYT: If Men Are in Trouble, What Is the Cause?

Autor and his colleagues found that boys suffered much more than girls from “adverse child-rearing conditions” and “that less favorable home environments differentially raise the prevalence of adverse outcomes among boys relative to girls.”

The biggest “adverse child-rearing condition” here is growing up in a single mother household. America has a higher share of single parent households than any other country in the world. Divorce and out of wedlock birth rates are a huge factor in the challenges facing boys and young men, particularly those from lower income economic backgrounds (which itself is also heavily correlated with race, meaning black boys are much more affected by this).

Scott Greer: Going Joker Mode - The celebration of nihilistic violence only reinforces the worst aspects of modern society - A surprising number of people, mostly on the left but some on the right, are celebrating the murder of the UHC CEO and praising his alleged killer. A poll found that 41% of young voters found the killing acceptable. It’s another example of the collapse in social trust, and the rise of a post-Christian negative world.

Louise Perry: The myth of female agency - Practically speaking, feminism is the ideology that says women should be maximally empowered to do anything they want, but are not responsible for any of the consequences of what they choose to do.

Washington Post: Child care gets little help in Idaho. A family-run center is buckling

Rachel Aldhizer/WSJ: The Abortion Lobby Endangers Pregnant Women - Apparently various medical groups and abortion lobbies are trying to officially reclassify treatment for miscarriages and certain pregnancy problems as “abortion care.”

Politico: The Catholics in Trump’s administration could take GOP in whole new direction - An article about how a number of top Trump advisors and appointees are Catholic. Now, if you look at the people in Trump’s faith advisory circles, there are a lot of charismatic evangelicals. Trump himself is basically an adherent of a sort of mainline prosperity gospel (he attended the church pastored by Norman Vincent Peale). But the “decider” type appointees are Catholic. It’s example of both the Catholic normativity of conservatism, and the way evangelicals punch below their weight at the senior levels of society.

Yuval Levin: American Renewal: The Nehemiah Option - Rebuilding our culture with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other - An adaptation of his talk at this years Jewish Leadership Conference in New York

Coldplay just put out an interesting video featuring a 99 year old Dick Van Dyke. It’s an unusual unapologetic celebration of yesterday’s America.

Holiday Long Reads

If you are looking for alternatives to watching the NFL over your Christmas holiday, here are some pieces that may be of interest.

David Brooks: The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be

The Tablet: Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment - A great piece talking about the engineering of social change. If you want to understand why the media said it was “misinformation” to suggest that Joe Biden was less than all there prior to his disastrous debate with Trump, this will explain it.

Harpers: Ghosts in the Machine - Spotify’s plot against musicians

I haven’t gotten a chance to listen to this one yet myself, but Lyman Stone was a guest on the Modern Wisdom podcast talking about declining birth rates. He’s one of the best at talking about this issue.

New Content and Media Mentions

I was a guest on Joe Deitzer’s podcast this week.

New this week:

• I wrote a piece on why churches should financially support my work.

• Elevating People’s Sights - One of the most important things we can do as a parent, mentor or friend to others is to help them imagine possibilities and think bigger.

• Another Window Into America’s Two-Tiered System of Justice - My piece on how the federal government treats bank failures differently, depending on whether or not the depositors are part of the connected class.

• My podcast this week is with Jon Askonas on building a future in the face of apocalypse.

• Joseph Holmes wrote about why Father Stu is a rare faith-based film for men.

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