I recently read Mark Sayers’ phenomenal work “A Non Anxious Presence: How a Changing and Complex World Will Create a Remnant of Renewed Christian Leaders.” Mark Sayers is an Australian pastor and cultural analyst and as I was reading through his excellent work, one idea stuck out with particular relevance. As he works through how we've gotten to the place we're now at culturally, he breaks open a business philosophy called "Taylorism," which can essentially be broken down into these principles:

Taylorism works pretty well in a world that's (generally) stable. If you can be certain that tomorrow, the wifi will work, the mail will be delivered, your car will start and that most things will do what they did yesterday, you can be pretty confident in doing the same thing over and over with the same results. For example, if you run an auto parts factory, Taylorism is an excellent philosophy if your supplies will be delivered, there will be electricity to run the machines, and a truck will arrive on time to pick up the parts and ship them wherever they need to go.

Here’s the problem: what happens when a global pandemic comes out of nowhere and totally disrupts everything we had accepted to be normal? What happens when the most unexpected candidates become leaders of the world's most powerful countries? What happens when the supply chain just stops supplying? Taylorism, suddenly, doesn’t work very well.

The Taylorist philosophy can be applied to spirituality too. It's easy to believe that, with the perfect calibration of our morning routine, God will speak life changing words to us every day without fail. We're easily convinced that if we can just find the right people at the right time and in the right place we can have community in a convenient way that requires very little life change. Evangelization becomes a matter of finding the most effective method that leads to conversion almost every time.

How wonderful would it be if the spiritual life was just a matter of calibration!

So what happens in a world where people expect things to work in a certain way and they are continually frustrated?

Well… everyone kinda loses it.

In other words, we get the 21st century.

How do we respond to a world that’s moved from being complicated to complex? Where any attempt to solve a big problem results in the inadvertent creation of a thousand new problems? This is where Mark Sayers proposes that the only solution is people who have become “non-anxious presences.”

The term “non-anxious presence” originally comes from the book “Failure of Nerve” by Edwin Friedman (another excellent work). Friedman, like Sayers, believes that the only solution to the emotional climate of anxiety in our culture is people who are well-differentiated enough to maintain their sense of self amidst chaos. Unlike Friedman though, Sayers believes that the only way to cultivate this kind of differentiation is to draw on the presence of God. Only people who are deeply formed by and connected to God’s presence can stand in the midst of chaos and be solid enough that others can orient and stabilize themselves around that person.

This cuts against the grain of how we are formed to respond to our complex environment. We live in a culture that believes that we can build utopia without God. Even in the Church, leaders can be tempted to run their ministries in a way that relies more on human cleverness and technique than on a rootedness in the presence of God. Without this rootedness, we’ll try to live into the Theology of Taylorism and find ourselves constantly knocked off course.

This kind of person is desperately needed in our world today. A friend of mine wisely summed up our cultural moment saying “everyone is trying to sell you your own outrage.” Only people who have become a “non-anxious presence” through a rootedness in the peace of Christ Jesus can cut through the age of anger, not just to affect social change, but also to be healthy in the midst of widespread upheaval. Only this kind of person can move past the Taylorist obsession with calibration and respond to chaos with peace.