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Given the many challenges facing churches today, it may seem like bringing in the sciences to become a scientifically integrated church is a luxury we can’t afford. After all, aren’t the sciences not strictly necessary? An extra? A potential distraction? Some days it feels like it. But I think such thinking is importantly mistaken. To make my case, I need to back up and explain what I mean by a scientifically integrated church.
Churches are local gatherings of Christ followers. Throughout church history, these groups of people have had to decide which elements of their cultural environment they would reject, adopt, adapt, or transform. Would they speak the same language as those outside the church? Eat similar food? Wear similar clothing? Live and meet in similar buildings? Have similar music? When church communities are not outright rejecting a feature of the surrounding culture, they are integrating that part of culture into the life of the church, by adopting, adapting, or transforming it.
We now live in a cultural condition that values scientific inquiry and, even more so, the technologies that the sciences birth. Churches today must decide, passively or actively, how they will deal with the sciences and their cultural authority. Will the sciences and their technological products be rejected or will churches find ways to integrate the sciences? My view is that the sciences are gifts from God for us to better understand the world around us — including the people in it — so that we can better care for it as God’s stewards. A scientifically integrated church embraces the good gifts of the sciences as tools in God’s Kingdom work. But like any other tools, the sciences have to be cared for and used with skill for appropriate purposes.
Similarly, just as churches in past centuries needed to be communities that welcomed, cared for, discipled, and benefitted from the contributions of farmers, soldiers, merchants, craftspeople, poets, and musicians, today’s churches have to contend with the place of scientists and other science-invested people, “sciency people.” Will sciency people be rejected or marginalized by local communities of Christ followers, or be fully integrated into them? A scientifically integrated church will welcome sciency people who are Christ followers, receive their scientific expertise and skills, and support them in their growth to be more like Jesus and to dedicate their scientific gifts to God’s Kingdom work in the world.
In broad brushstrokes, then, an integrated church integrates sciency people and scientific tools and insights, all for the sake of growing and strengthening the church and God’s work in the local community and the world. I hope it is now clearer why being such a scientifically integrated church is not a luxury. Churches that fail to be hospitable to sciency people, and fail to grow them and their gifts for Kingdom work, will not only risk losing a growing proportion of the population from becoming part of their communities, but also fail to faithfully support this increasingly large part of our population in growing in Christlikeness. Dis-integrated churches of this sort will also fail to benefit from the many gifts that sciency people can bring to the community. Churches that are in cities with colleges and universities, research companies, medical complexes, tech companies, or large-scale agriculture can safely bet that they are surrounded by sciency people who they should be integrating into their church communities.
But scientifically integrated churches are not just important for the churches themselves. Even if a local church feels no particular urgency to become scientifically integrated, the world needs integrated churches. One role for churches is to represent God’s Kingdom on earth. What would it look like for God’s “Kingdom come and will be done on earth as it is in heaven”? All of the world, including its cultural forms, will be placed into service of God’s Kingdom or abandoned. One job of churches is to model what such Kingdom-oriented culture could, should, and will look like, to the best of our understanding. So, what would it be like for the sciences to take a proper place in God’s Kingdom? Churches need to be part of working out and living into the answer to that question.
The specific scholarly questions concerning why and how the church should and could integrate the sciences can be outsourced to universities, scholars, and organizations like Blueprint 1543. But good ideas can only take us so far. What can’t be outsourced is the development of local cultures that embody such integration, and help us all properly adapt our values and lifestyles to take the best of the sciences and transform the worst.
The distinction I am making is analogous to how churches might integrate music. Scholars can write about why we should or shouldn’t embrace music and musical people, and those ideas can help give us good ideas for action steps. In what ways can or should churches incorporate the gifts of musical people in the community? How can churches be hospitable to musical people and help them grow as personally-integrated Christ-followers? What does it mean for music to be a useful tool in God’s Kingdom? What does it look like for Christians to properly care for music as a good gift from God? Answering these questions in the abstract could be an exercise of local churches or outsourced to Christian university theology or music departments. What cannot be outsourced is actually singing together, listening to particular music in our homes and cars, sharing music with each other, learning to play an instrument, or teaching our children how to sing, and doing it all for the glory of God. Until we start putting the intellectual ideas into practice, we won’t see all of the challenges or rewards of musically integrated churches and people. Perhaps more importantly, until actually practicing the integration, we can’t explore and model what God-centered use of music can look like for the rest of the world.
Similarly, local churches may be the best context for exercising what scientific integration can be, and then modeling that for the sake of the world. Will we be prudent and judicious in our care for the sciences and the adoption of scientific technologies? How will we properly value these gifts in our lives and not let them displace more important things? It is in lived communities that this kind of needed experimentation can take place.
Scientifically integrated churches, then, are not a luxury item. Not for churches. Not for the world.
