Purpose, The Pastor, and Charles Taylor

Religion is undergoing great changes. It’s centrality, both in individuals’ lives and society as a whole, is dissipating. Young people are disaffiliating from faith communities, moral codes of the Christian imagination are disappearing, and science is undercutting the plausibility of a personal God. While these change are visceral to many, it’s hard to describe and diagnose, making it nearly impossible to address. When trying to articulate these changes we fall into subtraction stories, assuming that the changes have to do with losses: If only people still went to neighborhood churches, read their bibles, prayed before dinner, or weren’t so busy. But when stuck in such subtraction tales we miss how these changes in religion are more profoundly due to additions. People have discovered all sorts of new ways to find purpose. The addition of a new ethic that says that every individual should find what speaks to him/her, leads to a surplus of all sorts of spiritualities and pseudo-religions. We can now all have our own personalized religions, whether yoga, youth soccer, mindfulness, or making money. As people have added new ways to find purpose, few churches and leaders, with notable exception, have been able to keep up. Increasingly, what churches are offering has less traction. The priority of participation has been significantly downgraded, and religious leaders are scrambling to counter a rising tide of indifference. This project will begin to explore how to help pastors understand the conditions in which they are operating and the leadership it requires. We believe no one has better named these conditions than Charles Taylor. Our core questions will be: Could a critical engagement with Taylor’s work help pastors discover new ways to engage faith practice with their people and help people forge purposeful lives? Could Taylor's work help pastors find new forms of vocational identity and purpose? The project will produce a new paradigm for the pastor in a secular age.