Interdependence and the Future

To get a handle on where the world is headed, let’s look at a general pattern of development through which we, as human beings, progress. In many areas in life, there is a progression of maturity that begins in dependence, makes it way through to independence, then continues onwards into interdependence. Each of these phases involves a different way of seeing yourself and the world, and relating to others.

To illustrate, consider parenting. When children are first born, they are almost entirely dependent. The parents have to feed, clothe, and bathe the child. They need help with every task and every decision (a big part of what makes parenting young kids so exhausting!). The child is incapable of meeting his or her needs without help.

As parents, we work to gradually guide our children from this highly dependent state into growing levels of independence. We start by taking the food out of a jar and putting it into the child’s mouth ourselves, but in time we teach our children to take silverware and take the food off the plate and into their mouth themselves. As time goes by, we increasingly point to the refrigerator as the source of food and encourage them to prepare their own food, which they will put into their own mouth. After that, we instruct our children to get a job so they can have money to get their own food, to prepare themselves, to put into their own mouths. Layer by layer, we are training and empowering them to meet their own needs for themselves. This happens, of course, not only with the need for physical nutrition, but for a whole spectrum of needs.

This growing independence really flowers in the teenage years. Teenagers develop not only the ability to meet their needs independently (at least to some extent), but they begin to feel the need to have an independent identity. They realize their whole life has happened in the context of their home and family, and that truth be told, they don’t quite know where they end and their parents begin. They don’t know whether their beliefs or what they want is really independent thinking or just repeating back what they’ve been taught. So they begin to push against authority to open up enough room to find an identity independent of their mothers and fathers. Where they used to need the input and guidance from their parents, they now resist their thoughts and opinions. They push away to try to allow enough space to find out exactly how far their self extends.

This phase of independence extends until the budding adult is able to develop a stable sense of self. They are now able to see themselves as distinct from others, and the presence of others isn’t a threat to losing themselves back to the group. Ideally, as they begin to exit the teenage years into adulthood, they start to transition into interdependence. In interdependence, the self is stable enough that we can safely engage with others without losing our connection to who we are. We feel comfortable and able to disagree with the opinions and beliefs of others, so we can approach relationships with a bit of an “eat the meat, spit out the bones” kind of attitude. We realize the world does not revolve around ourselves (unlike our world, which up until this point, has), and that our life will be richer for having others in it. We recognize that we have a unique set of skills, abilities, and passions, and that when combined with others’ skills, abilities, and passions, we’re better together. We enter into relationship because we want to, and our life is richer for it. This interdependent mindset is what allows us to be a productive member of a team and add value to society as a whole.

This pattern of dependence, independence, and interdependence is rather generic and replicates itself through just about any relational system. Consider marriages. You probably know couples who are living in each of these stages, and you have perhaps taken notice of couples who have graduated from one stage to the next and what effect that transition has had upon them. Christians walk through these same steps with our local churches; first we are dependent on the church for our own growth, then we are able to connect with God and grow ourselves, and finally we enter into interdependent relationships with other believers because we choose it. This pattern is a general feature of relational development.

From Dependence to Independence

If we look at how the Reformation catalyzed society at large, there is an underlying thread of transitioning from dependent mindsets and structures to independent mindsets and structures. As government by pure monarchy trends toward dependence, the monarch (the parent of the country) has all the power and makes decisions on behalf of the children. As government by consent emerges, it is built around the concept of individual rights and the individual’s ability to self-determine. Government is organizing around a core principle of dependence, then independence. 

The transition between these two comes with the governmental version of “pushing” against the parents to open up enough room to self-define. As a well-known example, consider the United States’ Declaration of Independence—a national version of the teenager telling the parents, “Stop telling me what to do!” Look at how independent thinking undergirds the language:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

In other words: we think what matters is the individual, and we’re going to build our government around empowering the individual’s right to self-choose. Since you’re not empowering that right, we are going to use our self-choosing power to choose to not be under your rule anymore.

Let’s also look at economics. At about the same time the United States was declaring itself free of the British crown, Adam Smith was writing about economics and laying down much of the mental framework of capitalism. His work is largely framed around this concept: if you free individuals to do what they want with their own money, an invisible hand will guide all of society to the best situation for everyone. In other words, if we allow people to act independently, all of society will benefit. Independence is the best way to allow individuals to use their resources. This is the backbone of the capitalist experiment of the last two hundred years.

As a result of the Reformation, Western society pivoted strongly into independently-oriented mental frameworks and societal models. This was probably inevitable because, in terms of faith, what Martin Luther did was shift the understanding of faith and salvation from dependent terms to independent terms. Rather than needing a priest and the church to help regulate meeting your spiritual needs (dependence), Jesus empowered you to know God directly, and it was your own relationship with God that provided the ability to meet your spiritual needs (independence).

Luther, of course, didn’t frame it this way; to the teenager pushing against his parents, relational issues are usually framed with moral sentiments. It’s not that the terms of the relationship need to shift; this is an injustice that needs to be corrected! This is sin! (A sentiment that more independently-minded Protestants will still voice.) At the risk of sounding just a bit anti-Reformation, I’m not entirely sure the divide between Catholics and Protestants is as much an issue of salvation as it was framed. It wasn’t that the Catholics didn’t believe it was still Jesus who saved you, it was that Protestants and Catholics disagreed on how exactly that salvation from Jesus came into your life. But if we’re honest with ourselves, isn’t it true that none of us understands everything about how salvation works? After all, it is not our understanding that saves us, but our relationship to the God who saves us, regardless of whether we understand it all perfectly or not. Now, there were legitimate theological developments that were critically important—I’m just saying sometimes teenagers are a bit myopic in how they process the situations they’re pushing against to find their own independence.

Moving toward Interdependence

All this to say, one way to look at the Reformation and Renaissance is to see them as the windows of time in which Western society as a whole began to orient around and build upon independent faith, mindsets, and principles rather than dependent ones. If that’s true, then we ought to expect that there may come a time and place where society transitions once more into building around an interdependent faith, mindset, and set of principles.

When could that pivot toward interdependence be triggered? When it becomes technologically available. Remember, it wasn’t just Luther’s theology that triggered this change; it was the printing press that allowed his ideas to flow in new ways. In fact, the idea flow had already begun to reshape society, and it was Luther’s theology that provided the anchor point necessary.

The printing press was what was needed to facilitate a transition to independence. To self-define is about seizing the ability to choose one’s own actions, values, opinions, and beliefs, and that choice was not even possible until ideas could flow well enough through society that there were multiple options on the table for the average person to choose from. Without the printing press, no one is even able to self-define on the landscape of ideas, and the choice-atrophy virtually guarantees a slide into dependent thinking and behavior.

What sort of technology would be needed, then, to trigger a societal pivot from independence to interdependence? I would suggest a connective one. Interdependence is all about re-entry into relationship built on the foundation established by independence. Just as societal independence can’t be triggered without a threshold level of ideas (information) available to a significant percentage of people, I would propose that interdependence can’t be triggered without a threshold level of connectedness (relationship) available to people at large. This threshold level of interconnection would need to have a broad reach as well; societal interdependence can easily be undercut by forming silos of relationship that relate to one another independently. This is essentially what has held back interdependence from emerging at a global scale up until this point: any given person’s set of relationships has a tendency to isolate into little pockets of communities.

The Digital Revolution’s crown jewel, the Internet, may be just the technology needed. The web empowers a network of relationships at a distance and scale that, until now, most of us could hardly imagine. Interestingly, when you look at the organizations that the Internet has driven to prominence, many of them are about playing the role of connector. The emphasis has shifted from product to facilitating connection.

Twenty-five years ago, the people driving the music industry were the top bands and companies selling albums. The industry was driven by the product. Now it is driven by platforms. iTunes doesn’t create or own any of the music it sells, and yet it has reshaped the industry powerfully by connecting purchasers to the music more directly. Amazon doesn’t primarily sell its own merchandise, rather it is a tool that connects you to other stores that sell on that platform. Google doesn’t make its own webpages (at least not too many of them), but it is the center point for finding something on the Internet. The list goes on (Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, etc.); the giants of industry of our day are more about connecting you to someone else than a specific product they deliver.

The technology we’ve developed over the last thirty years is accelerating our society toward interdependence. We’re not just experiencing more change than ever; that change is more dramatic than any of us has experienced in our lifetime. The world isn’t just becoming a bigger, faster caterpillar; it is at the very beginning of transforming into a butterfly.

The Interdependent Church

If all of this is true, we as the church have been given an incredible opportunity—a once-every-five-hundred-year opportunity—to help disciple culture as it transitions into a new grounding paradigm. As in Luther’s day, the transition has begun, but I believe it will be incomplete without the church. The church has the ability to tap into a wisdom the world doesn’t have access to—the mind of God. God is the one who has designed dependence, independence, and interdependence. He knows how to build a society on each of them, and He knows how to move from one chapter to the next.

What would it look like to step into this world-changing calling? How might the church begin to step up to the task? There is much discovery work to do ahead with this, but I find solace in the fact that the Bible has always described the body of Christ as interdependent:

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body-Jews or Greeks, slaves or free-and all were made to drink of one Spirit.

For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.  1 Corinthians 12:12-20, 26-27

Why is is that these Scriptures seem so far from the way the Church operates in our time? I believe it is because we don't know how to even think about faith and church in interdependent terms. Every attempt we would try, we have to push against the grain of a faith phrased in the language of independence.

In this unique time, I believe God is beginning to birth something new: he is positioning the world for a new reformation, but this time it will be an interdependence reformation. This, I believe is the kairos moment that we are living in, and moving towards an interdependence reformation is the assignment I know the Lord is calling me in to. Do I have all the answers? Of course not. Will I figure it all out? I can't imagine I would. Will I join hands and do it with others? I'm not sure how it could be interdependent if I didn't. But all of those layers are things I can't yet see, and at this point I am constrained to what I can see. I can see that my assignment is to be part of the new thing God is birthing in our day.