Are you a theology geek? Is that a problem?

What’s a geek? Back in the days of vaudville a geek was someone whose performance on stage included a variety of bizarre and often disgusting acts I won’t enumerate here. Nowadays the word “geek”, like its synonym “nerd” generally connotes someone who is very bright and capable in his chosen field (usually computers or technology) but who may be dysfunctional when it comes to communicating or building relationships with people outside the chosen discipline. The stereotype has warrant enough that we recognize and laugh at geeks in films and shows like the British sitcom “The IT Crowd.” And in my day job as a systems admin building and running servers in a large corporate data center, I’ve worked with geeks and nerds for years.

What really makes someone a geek or nerd is not being a whiz with computers and technology, skills that many otherwise normal people have. Being a geek proceeds rather from the lack of facility geeks have in other areas: social awkwardness, difficulty with nonverbal communication, difficulty functioning outside areas of strength. Well rounded people who relate socially and build relationships in a variety of disciplines don’t fit the category of geek or nerd, despite the fact that they may be adept computer engineers or programmers. “Geek” and “nerd” describe the social or other deficit, not the technological surplus, in the personality of the person described. What does being a geek or nerd have to do with church leadership? I’m glad you asked.

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In my journey of faith I’ve met a variety of pastors. Among them I’ve noticed a number of what I can only call theology geeks. These are guys who are extremely bright, gifted and well educated in theology, but outside that field may demonstrate infacility by degrees or even dysfunctionality. As with computer geeks, it is not the superlative skill and training in theology that makes a theology geek, but the privation of other skills and abilities, and especially unawareness of it, that leads to theological geekiness.

As with many sorts of social or behavioral eccentricities, theological geekiness is without a hard and fast litmus test that says, if X, then you are a theology geek. If you can wax eloquent about the perichoretic interpenetration of the persons of the Trinity but don’t know what a directory is on your computer, you may be a theology geek. If you can distinguish between the Zwinglian, Reformed, Lutheran and Roman Catholic views of the eucharist and think it’s fine to wear wing tips and over the calf black socks with cargo shorts, you may be a theology geek. If you have the dying speeches of Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer and Christopher Ridley memorized but you don’t know what a critical path is and why it is important to the building campaign at your church, then you might be a theology geek.

I’m reticent to publish the next part, as it’s going to hurt. Theology geeks who pastor plateaued or declining churches get together with other theology geeks to try to solve the problems that lead to church decline, but, seeking to be faithful to the primacy of theology and Scripture, will talk over some fine point of theology rather than dealing with leaderhsip issues. Theology geeks tend toward organizational parochiality – Reformed theology geeks will read materials only from Reformed writers, Baptist theology geeks will eschew writings from non-Baptists, Lutheran theology geeks will look for materials that come from Concordia or Augsberg Press, and so forth. Any suggestion about organizational leadership, structure, or process that is not explicitly and exclusively theologically based is viewed with suspicion or may meet with abject incomprehension, something so alien or foreign that the mind of the theology geek can’t register it.

Theology geeks don’t deserve scorn or derision. They love God, want to serve Jesus, and truly feel themselves called by God to be involved in service to the church. They are willing to suffer, to deprive themselves and their families in order to pursue the calling they have received. They don’t deserve derision or contempt – they deserve respect and compassion. But they are simply overwhelmed with the task of leading the church, and though they are willing to go to any length to serve God and the church, they are often simply at a loss for ideas about what to do in the plateaued, declining or troubled church.

So, like everyone else, they retreat to their place of strength and comfort, and throw more theology at the challenges that face them. If they can just be faithful to Scripture and to the distinctives of their tradition, God will honor that faithfulness. And so they plod on, preaching passionately but never seeing the fruitfulness they wish God would grant. Seminary never prepared the theology geek for the challenges he’s facing in church leadership; there’s little in the seminary program about the dynamics of human organizations, very little about organizational administration, and nothing at all about managing a logistical infrastructure, which is often one of the many tasks a pastor has to either undertake or delegate.

The theology geek will view things from outside the theological disciplines with suspicion. What, after all, has Jerusalem to do with Athens? Business Schools are worldly institutions built on greed and avarice. We don’t need to bring that sort of unsanctified learning in the church, do we? Okay, point taken. We don’t need greed and avarice in the church (though there seems to be no shortage of it in the ministry game). But understanding processes and procedures, being able to visualize, organize, administer, surely these are things that are worthwhile.

In this post I’ve engaged in over-simplification and hyperbole, to be sure. But the point of the post is that theology alone is not enough. In his epochal 1995 book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind church historian Mark Noll lamented the lack of intellectual vitality among evangelicals. Evangelicals, said Noll, tend to do theology pretty well, and build good theology schools and Bible Colleges. But where are the evangelical research universities doing breakthrough work in medicine, law, chemistry, physics, or biology? One can as easily ask, where are the evangelical business schools that ought to be turning out Christian business leaders, captains of industry, and yes, church leaders who can do both theology and organizational transformation? Are John Kotter’s eight disciplines of organizational transformation somehow suspect or deficient because they were not invented in the church? Is there no common grace to be found in the fourteen points or the seven deadly diseases pointed out by W. Edwards Deming? Just because there’s no biblical proof text for applying systems thinking to the church, should it be discarded in favor of strictly theological approaches? Surely not.

If geekiness is, as I suggested above, not a measure of someone’s giftedness, whether in computers or theology, but actually proceeds from the dysfunctionality that accompanies unbalanced giftedness, then perhaps there might be more than a coincidental relationship between theological geekiness and the percentage of churches that are in a state of plateau or decline.

At this point I’m not really prepared to go any further with the topic. I’ll be interested to see if it generates any discussion. I hope this won’t outrage anyone who might be a theology geek. Perhaps after I process the idea a little more I’ll be able to offer something a bit more positive, but I don’t know. Either I’m onto something here, or I’m just geeking out myself.