As it turned out, they only wanted to talk about Joseph Smith. Apparently, our faith movement’s founder represented all that anybody needs to know about contemporary Latter Day Saint groups.

To shorten a long and rather nasty story, I’ll just skip to the part where representatives from United Methodist, Presbyterian, Disciples of Christ, and Roman Catholic Churches prevailed. A Methodist pastor put it this way: “Nobody asked me to prove I was ‘Christian enough’ to join, so why should we start now?”

Eventually most of the fundamentalists/evangelicals bolted from the alliance when an LDS representative was admitted a few years later. They formed their own group, which over time has dwindled in size and influence.

I mention this episode as a way to ask, “Do we expect to be misunderstood or misrepresented?” Is this a natural outgrowth of religious discrimination and persecution experienced by our forebears in the almost two centuries of our faith movement’s existence? Although nobody’s getting tarred and feathered these days (at least here in North America, as far as I’m aware), has suspicion become our default setting?

A few weeks ago I received what was, in actuality, a personal and professional compliment. Yet my first response was something along the lines of “What did he really mean by that?”

Bill Tammeus is the former religion/faith writer for the Kansas City Star. He is highly respected locally and nationally and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for the Star years ago. He graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism a few years before I did. And he writes a monthly column for his own denomination’s magazine, the Presbyterian Outlook, a bi-weekly column for the National Catholic Reporter, and his daily blog, “Faith Matters,” is read by a wide audience.

In early July he featured my book, What Was Paul Thinking?, on that blog. As part of his comments about the book, he noted that it might just be the book to finally get the conversation about the New Perspective on Paul out of scholarly circles and into the hands of people in the pews where it really needs to be today. And then he added this paragraph:

One thing I found especially interesting about this book is that the author is a member of the Community of Christ, which used to be known as the Reorganized Church of Latter-day Saints, the smaller branch of the Mormons. But as far as I could tell nothing in Brown’s book is in any way different from the way a scholar who came from one of the traditional Christian branches (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox) might have written it.

Wait a minute—What?

Several other Community of Christ members agreed with my initial assessment that that was at least a curious thing to say. A couple even thought it might be a veiled slam against the church.

I have since been assured by a highly respected friend, who is personally and professionally acquainted with Mr. Tammeus, that the comment was anything but a “slam.” In fact, my friend said it was a sincere and significant compliment to me, the church, and other Community of Christ members who’ve engaged in graduate-level religious studies. Furthermore, it bodes well for the church long-term.

You can read the entire blog entry here, if you want the complete context. But I’d like to return to my original concern with some questions:

1. Do we still have remnants of a “persecution complex” in the Community of Christ?

2. Will we ever be fully accepted as part of mainstream Christianity—and is that something we should even want anyway? By the way, just how significant was it to have the general secretary of the (U.S.) National Council of Churches address this year’s World Conference?

3. At what point do “different” and “distinct” cross over into “exclusionary”? Is there a slippery slope involved in all this somewhere?

4. What’s been the experience of other CofC members in seminaries, graduate schools, and other higher-education institutions? (My seminary experience was 30 years ago, so I’m certain something has changed.)

5. Will people outside the church (particularly in the media) ever just refer to our church name as Community of Christ without mentioning what it used to be?

Perhaps we in the Community of Christ fuss over the whole question of identity way too much. We’ve certainly spent a lot of time pondering who we are, who we aren’t, what makes us different or distinctive (two quite different things, I contend), what we believe, what we’ve discarded along the way, and what we’ve acquired on our faith journey. I can’t help but wonder if we’d put half that much energy into evangelism and mission (once again, two different things) how our life together might be different today.

Before I begin, I must start with a caveat. I am not actually an economist; I am a political scientist.  I dabbled around the very edges of economics in my Master’s and PhD degrees, and went to a graduate school obsessed with economics. So, if there are any real economists out there reading this — feel free to comment below.

I will start with a problematic: Why is that most CofC congregations in North America and Europe rarely average more than 30 to 50 active members? My hypothesis is that they rarely expand beyond this size because of their predominantly lay leadership and middle-class members. As a result, congregations do not have have the money or human resources to attract or to minister to many more people. Pastors have other jobs, so have little extra time for counseling, home visits, outreach, etc. Moreover, a lack of seminary training reduces pastors ‘productivity’ as spiritual leaders.

The ‘Theory of the Firm‘ is one of the foundations of microeconomics. Among many other things, it tries to explain why certain economic activities are done inside a company, rather than outside it in the market place. One of its applications can be explanations for the size of a firm — why does the hot-dog stand require only one employee, but Target requires hundreds of thousands? I would like to loosely apply this idea to an assumed ‘average’ North American Community of Christ congregation, asking: Why is it the size it is? Is this because it fills a specific niche in the ‘spiritual marketplace’?

Perhaps the best place to begin is with a basic ‘production function‘: the economic Output of a firm is a function of the Labor and Capital (including Land) that is at its disposal (that’s Y=fn(L,K) for the geekier ones among you). In our context, Output, rather than meaning money, means the quality and quantity of spiritual services provided by a congregation. Labor is the work put into the congregation by the pastor, priesthood and lay volunteers. Capital includes the church grounds at building (Land) as we as the financial assets they gain through contributions of offerings and tithes. In short:

The ‘Spiritual Output’ of a congregation = Function of the Labor of priesthood and volunteers and their financial and real estate assets.

As with any production function, this one is subject to a Law of Diminishing Returns.  This means that each marginal new congregant who walks in the door receives less spiritual return from their investment of coming to church. This is because the financial and human resources of the congregation can only stretch so far.  In particular, a pastor who has a full time job is not going to have the time or energy to provide pastoral support to an infinitely large congregation. As s/he is not paid for his/her work and has other responsibilities, s/he likely has an absolute maximum of eight hours a day to spend on church work (eight hours in his/her paid employment, eight hours sleep, eight hours for everything else, including church stuff). Likewise, congregants do not have an infinite amount of money they can put in the offering plate. This scarcity of offerings and tithes similarly limits the amount of programs and services, and the size and quality of the building, the church is able to offer.

At a certain point, there seems to be a ‘tipping point’ where , as the congregation ‘fills’, the opportunity costs of going to a CofC congregation are higher when compared to a well-funded, well-staffed church down the road, that can devote more attention to each marginal new congregant.  In the CofC, this tipping point seems to be around 30-50 congregants, before the church seems unable to accommodate more people. In the spiritual marketplace, the CofC is thus more of a niche ‘boutique’ player – the neighborhood health-food store – rather than a diversified supermarket, like a mainline denomination or a massive Wal-Mart like a Mega Church.  This is not necessarily a bad thing; if the congregation is aware of this dynamic, they can exploits their comparative advantage in this niche: such as providing a small, homey, informal feel to the congregation, a family-like atmosphere.

Nonetheless, the basic production function is not an iron-clad prison. The Solow Growth Model suggests that firms are able to overcome diminishing returns if they can constantly increase the productivity of their labor (through training, mechanization, digitization, etc.) and capital (through improving land and real estate and through savvy investment of finances). For lack of a better word, all these things that increase productivity are lumped under ‘Technology’. (Mathematically, this is expressed as Y=A*fn(L,K), where A=Technology).

This would suggest that a congregation could improve the ‘productivity’ of their labor and capital and thus be able to increase their size beyond what their limited resources might suggest. This could be done through training of priesthood and pastors, better management and support of them by the church bureaucracy and through improving the site where the church is located.

While it may seem crass and mercenistic to think about religious institutions from the profoundly secular standpoint of economics, the church nonetheless operates in a world of scarcity and in a ‘spiritual marketplace’, in which there is competition with other churches. Therefore, seeing the church through an economic lens can help us understand dynamics that seem to be unexplained by theology and history.

-Matthew Bolton

So when a Mormon moves into a new ward (congregation), they can expect that their Sunday School and other class instruction will be from the exact same book, and often the lesson plans will be the same from week to week no matter which church you attend anywhere in the world. Worship formats never change, and the physical spaces where the worship is held, the actual buildings, are often identical to other buildings of the same period for the last thirty years or so (with most of Mormon growth occurring in the last three decades). Older buildings exempted, I can walk into a Mormon chapel just about anywhere and know exactly where the bathroom is, the bishop’s office, the chapel, etc.

Community of Christ’s greatest strength, and potential weakness, is its unity in diversity (one of the church’s Enduring Principles), which I find refreshing.  While I think there are things to be learned and even envied from the Mormon experience, I celebrate the unique creation that is a Community of Christ congregation. Often the people scrimp and save and build the building from the ground up with their own hands, creating an ownership which is unknown among contemporary Mormon wards, especially in the United States. In Gainesville, Florida—our congregation until last month—the members there worked for years at a concessions stand during University of Florida games. In fact, they burned themselves out on building their little church on the hill to the point that they are now hesitant to get around to a badly needed phase-two for their growing congregation.  These are challenges I never faced previously as a Mormon—challenges which make building Zion and a congregation completely new, exciting, and personal.

Moving to Nashville, Tennessee, we have entered a completely different experience in congregational life. The church itself is a large steel-frame structure that also houses a community theater—not because the members rent out a theater, but because a theater grew out of the interests and passions of church members, eventually becoming a very apparent aspect to the building. On our first Sunday here, it was hard to tell if we were worshiping in a church or gathered before a stage for a play. I could go into the relevancy of sacred drama to Christian and Restoration history and worship, but won’t.

The worship experience in Nashville is similar to Gainesville, but has its own uniqueness—allowing for a certain malleability or fluidity which seems congenial to Moroni 6:9:

And their meetings were conducted by the church, after the manner of the workings of the Spirit, and by the power of the Holy Ghost; for as the power of the Holy Ghost led them whether to preach or exhort, or to pray, or to supplicate, or to sing, even so it was done.

Here in Nashville, Restoration Christianity is well balanced, in scripture, hymns, and worship.  For example, last Sunday was a pentocostal endowment experience which drew from Hebrew, Christian, and Restoration understandings of Pentecost and being endowed with the Holy Spirit. I left feeling endowed and recharged, reconnected to my universe and my God.

Community of Christ is not just a journey, but often a wild ride. We’ve had highs and lows, but have never been bored. I felt a very distinct call to join, and understand now—at least in part—why God was calling me here, for it has brought peace back to my soul as a Saint of the Restoration and as a disciple of Jesus Christ. It has given me the opportunity to serve Christ and build Zion. The uniqueness of each congregation is but another example of our “new and everlasting” experience, one that is both unchanging and transcendent, yet new as it is encountered in new places and times and among new peoples.