HOMILETICS: Do you feel that you’re an outsider peering through the window at the church, or that you’re positioned within the church context and thus able to critique it?
MILLER: A little bit of both. My degree is in theology. The reason why I didn’t go into full- time ministry is that I found that the people who were going into ministry had a subculture that really wasn’t connected to the outer culture. And I was more interested in finding practical bridges between the two, because I found a lot more truth in the business world, and a lot more of the principles of change being expressed in the business world than in the church world. So I could almost go from one world to the other with the values I had as a believer and still be able to distill the essential elements of change and truth in the business world and then import them back into the church in practical ways.
HOMILETICS: So are we looking at a church in crisis?
MILLER: Major crisis. The decline of some segments of the church is well documented. Now even the Willow Creeks, Saddlebacks and other event-driven churches are starting to feel the stress fractures of their model.
Interesting and thought-provoking even if it moves from reasoning to a growing blizzard of assertions which eventually left me me baffled. Anglicans -and Catholics – will simply not accept the assertion that the liturgical Church is a past model. My attention was taken by the comment that churches these days are doctrine lite. Too true, unfortunately. The whole thrust of the interview is to make us think about the digital culture and how it affects our Christian communities, which certainly is something that we need to do. One obvious element is what teachers have been complaining about since television arrived, namely the short attention spans. Not just kids these days. I find people leaving church to take phone calls, or texting during the service.