Waiting for God in Wasted Time

Ministry and Secularity in Root’s Ecclesiology

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About the author: Henry Walter Spaulding III serves as professor of theology and Christian ethics at Indiana Wesleyan University. He is the author of several books including Iconoclastic Sex: Christian Sexual Ethics and Human Trafficking and the forthcoming Between Two Gileads (Cascade). He has also published several articles in journals such as the Wesleyan Theological Journal, Review and Expositor, and the Journal for Literary Imagination. He is also the Senior Pastor at Hope United Methodist Church in Columbus, OH.

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In Churches in the Crisis of Decline, Andrew Root offers a deeply theological engagement with the condition of secularity, not as a problem to be solved but as a cultural condition to be faithfully inhabited. Root's contribution is especially important for how he builds upon Charles Taylor’s account of the secular age and incorporates the sociological insights of Hartmut Rosa to interpret the ecclesial crisis not merely as institutional decline but as a crisis in how time, resonance, and transcendence are experienced in late modernity.

The Secular as Acceleration

Root frames much of his argument through Rosa’s concept of “social acceleration”—the ever-increasing speed at which life is lived and meaning is generated, leading to exhaustion, disconnection, and burnout. This sense of exhaustion shapes how congregations and pastors experience decline. The solution offered by many churches is technical: adopt new strategies, marketing techniques, and leadership models to stabilize or grow again. But for Root, this only compounds the problem, further entrenching churches in a secular logic of performance and relevance.

Rather than targeting institutional decline as the problem, Root encourages pastors to reflect on the loss of “resonance”—Hartmut Rosa’s term for a meaningful connection to the world and others.¹ Churches are no longer spaces of deep resonance but are often places of anxiety and disappointment. Root contends that the true crisis is spiritual and existential: a disconnection from the presence of the living God in time.

A Theology of Time

One of Root’s most theologically potent interventions is his diagnosis of how churches inhabit time. He draws a stark contrast between “chronos,” or clock time, and “kairos,” or God's time, where divine presence breaks into human experience. In a secular age, time has become what Root calls “thingified”—a resource to be optimized for maximum efficiency and growth. Church leaders often find themselves enslaved to calendars, visioning documents, and success metrics, all in the name of institutional survival.

In contrast, Root proposes a vision of “ministering in the middle of time,” a posture of openness and attentiveness to God's action in the ordinary and even amid decline. Ministry is not about controlling time for growth outcomes but about receiving time as a gift in which God still acts. Pastoral work, then, becomes less about managing and more about bearing witness to the divine presence already at work.

The Problem of Ministry as Strategy

Root critiques how the ministry has become colonized by managerial logic. Instead of waiting for God’s movement, churches try to manufacture it, transforming ministry into a set of deliverables, goals, and metrics. This, he argues, is a theological error as much as a strategic one. Ministry that operates entirely within the immanent frame (Taylor’s term for the secular closure to transcendence) cannot access the true source of life: the living God.

Root critiques church growth strategies that prioritize relevance and marketability over fidelity and theological imagination. He likens these to forms of “religious entrepreneurialism” that drain pastoral energy and reframe ministry success in corporate terms. This critique extends to both mainline and evangelical churches, revealing a shared captivity to secularity’s logic of acceleration and mastery. The church, in such a system, is just one more institution trying to survive in the free market of meaning.

Karl Barth and the Ministerial Imagination

Root’s theological resistance to this secular captivity is deeply indebted to Karl Barth. Barth’s insistence on revelation as divine self-disclosure, not human insight, provides Root with a theological framework for resisting the reduction of ministry to method. Barth’s vision of God as the one who speaks, acts, and gives Godself in Jesus Christ reshapes how ministry is conceived.

In Barthian terms, the church does not produce the presence of God; it waits and bears witness to it. This posture of humility and expectation anchors Root’s call for a return to theological—not merely technical—leadership. The minister is not a manager of divine goods but a theologian of the event, someone who attends to the surprising and unplanned irruption of God into time.

Barth also helps Root articulate a critique of religious technique. Just as Barth rejected the “religion” of cultural Christianity in favor of the scandal of revelation, Root pushes back against the church’s obsession with effectiveness and branding. Barth’s insistence that dogmatics remains open to the sovereign freedom of God becomes, for Root, a mandate for pastors to recover patience, vulnerability, and courage. In this sense, Root’s Barthianism fuels a prophetic critique of both contemporary ministry culture and the systems that sustain it.

From Decline to Resonance

Root’s reframing of decline is among his most compelling moves. Decline is not merely a failure to innovate or adapt; it is a revealing condition that opens the church to rediscover its theological vocation. Rather than treating decline as a technical problem to solve, Root invites churches to see it as a moment for rediscovering resonance with the living God.

The church does not need to fabricate experiences of meaning. Instead, it can become a space of shared vulnerability and waiting—what Rosa calls a site of resonance and what Root calls “a space where people might encounter the living God in their midst.”² This approach is neither nostalgic nor triumphalist; it is marked by theological realism. The way forward is not easy. It involves embracing loss, suffering, and the limits of human agency. But it also involves hope—hope that God is still at work in the world and that the Spirit still animates communities, even small and struggling ones.

Root’s Unique Voice

Andrew Root’s work stands out because he bridges theology and sociology without letting either flatten the other. He reads Taylor and Rosa with insight, but always through a pastoral and theological lens. He is not interested in merely describing the secular age. He wants to show what faithful ministry might look like within it. And crucially, he does not call for a retreat from secularity but for theological depth within it.

He resists both accommodation and anxiety. The church needs not imitate secular institutions, nor should it panic over its marginalization. Instead, it must do what it has always been called to do: wait, witness, and wonder. Root’s invitation is thus deeply Barthian—to attend to the God who acts in time, not on our schedule, but in grace.

In Churches in the Crisis of Decline, Root does not offer a blueprint for church growth. He offers something more important: a theology for living well amid loss, and a vision of ministry that dares to believe that God still speaks.

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1. See Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (Polity, 2019).

2. See Andrew Root, Churches in the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age (Baker Publishing, 2022)