The three lies of leadership culture driving us to apocalypse.

We are on an accelerating trajectory toward another needed reformation, and we must understand how we arrived at our current deformity to be formed anew.

My assumption is that in reading my work, you have an orientation toward what is true, good, and beautiful, and you have not given yourself up to the movement toward harm, lies, and debauchery. I’ll bet that’s a fair if not obvious assumption, but it’s worth noting because I’m going to begin exploring in a series of posts (that will eventually become a book) the sharp contrast between who we were created to be as humans and leaders and the culture of lies that has been laid, especially over the past 400 years, leading us into deformation instead of formation.

These myths are so culturally pervasive and have subtly been layered over each other that we aren’t aware how radically they have shaped our lives and our communities. While certainly not exhaustive, I’ve identified three foundational lies that have coincided with major cultural innovations—the lies of individualism, industrialism, and consumerism.

In her 2008 book, The Great Emergence, How Christianity is Changing and Why, Phyllis Tickle describes our current cultural moment as the beginning of the end of a 500 year cycle in which the church cleans out its attic for a rummage sale, citing a series of 500 year cycles of “Greats” in the history of the Church. From the advent of Christianity in the birth of Jesus the Christ, to the monastic movement of Gregory the Great, to the Great Schism, to the Great Reformation, each ~500 year cycle culminates in an upheaval that has radically changed not only how we see our faith, but how faith is seen and expressed, and how they world operates as a result.

As I’ve looked back at the last ~400 years with the help of Tickle and others interested in the history of the church and culture, I’ve observed three “isms” born out of major innovations—tangible and intellectual—that now shape what we believe about ourselves, our faith, each other, and the world. And what we believe becomes how we act. I’ll briefly introduce these three isms here and then flesh them out in future posts.

The reason I call them lies and “isms” is because these cultural movements are not bad in and of themselves. To recognize our identities and worth as individuals, for example, is important. When we allow individualism to dominant our worldview, however, we do that at the expense of seeing ourselves as part of the body of humanity, and for followers of Christ, as the body of the Church.

The same goes for industrialism. Efficiency and consistency are not bad things in and of themselves. One could argue that efficiency and consistency in our food system has massively reduced extreme poverty worldwide. When nutrients are stripped from our food in favor of volume and non-food food shapes a pandemic of morbid obesity in Western society, for example, industry becomes industrialism, and we see that we’ve bought into a destructive lie.

Compound this with consuming. Consuming what we need to live is a healthy part of life. Consumerism, however, turns us from consuming only what we need to consuming to make us happy for a moment, never actually being fulfilled and growing our addiction to ruining our planet through multiple forms of waste.

I invite you to join me in a journey exploring these three lies over the following weeks, followed by the truths we need to believe and embody that will help us fight for our formation against the deformation that currently dominates us.