The Compassion Renaissance and the Return of the Prodigal Church
The Compassion Renaissance and the Return of the Prodigal Church
Richard K. Stephens - December 29, 2021
This article is a distillation of an illustrated long-form article on the applied neuroscience of compassion, “The Compassion Renaissance: Science, Mind & Spirit.”
1) Exactly What is Compassion?
First off, let’s define our subject.
What does it mean to have compassion? The component of action is what separates compassion from empathy, sympathy, pity, concern, condolence, sensitivity, tenderness, commiseration or any other compassion synonym. Compassion gets involved. When others keep their distance from those who are suffering, compassion prompts us to act on their behalf.
[Compassion International, website, n. d.]
Compassion is both proximate and practical.
2) The Current Church Crisis
In one of his famous BBC radio broadcasts given March 28, 1944, C. S. Lewis, later collected in Mere Christianity (1952), made a bold declaration denouncing what his contemporary, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, called “cheap grace.” Lewis asserted that –
“the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.”
Now, nearly eight decades after Lewis’s stern appraisal was delivered, the fruits of the Church having wasted much of its time – having neglected to make genuine disciples, having failed at “teaching them all that [Christ] has commanded” (Mat 28:20) – are painfully on display for the world to see. Church decline continues apace. Religious professionals wring their hands, while militant atheists gloat.
A Barna study in 2016 revealed that –
“Millennials are leaving the church. Nearly six in ten (59%) young people who grow up in Christian churches end up walking away.” Younger (18-29) who leave the church say that “churches come across as antagonistic to science.”
Many cite hypocrisy (and the excusing of it) as a reason to leave.
But secular culture is failing Millenials as well. A 2021 study released by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University surveyed Millenials, finding that “75% say they lack meaning and purpose in life.” This is a startling finding. This, along with the widely acknowledged mental health trends – society-wide loneliness epidemic, suicide and clinical depression – ought to spur a deep reappraisal of Christian leadership’s priorities in the way they communicate with, and behave toward, those outsiders (and those who leave the church) who find little enduring attraction to the forms the Church continues to expend its resources on.
3) The Compassion Renaissance Begins
Nearly a century ago the “father of modern neuroscience,” Santiago Ramón y Cajal, published a “settled science” statement that held sway as for three decades until Dr. Marian Diamond, “the mother of neuroplasticity,” began to chip away at the dogma. Ramón’s assertion was that once the adult human brain had reached maturity it was fixed in its capacities and could only decline, never improve.
Dr. Diamond’s groundbreaking work began with rats. She showed that their brains had the capacity for neuroplasticity: the ability of neural networks to change through growth and reorganization. Over the following decades, neurogenesis – the ability of the mature human brain to grow new cells – was also shown to be possible. The discovery of epigenetics – the ability for latent genetic capacities to be “switched on” by environment or behavior – followed.
Then came an unexpected turn in brain science. The invitation of the exiled Dalai Lama, who describes himself as “half Buddhist monk, half scientist,” to his home in north-east India, to Western scientists for the purpose of collaboration on Oct. 23-29, 1987 for the first Mind & Life Dialog. This was the origin of “Compassion Science.”
Out of this meeting of East and west came and a flood of groundbreaking scientific research that continues to proliferate with increasing frequency and scope. The Dalai Lama boldly announced his dedication to empirical examination, stating that “if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”
The most remarkable product of research, one of priceless practical value was the finding that the human brain is “hardwired” for compassion, but the compassion facility can atrophy and thus must be deliberately cultivated. Compassion, it turns out, is a learnable skill.
Compassion neuroscience has yielded a bountiful harvest. Secular compassion cultivation protocols were designed to train ordinary people in compassion cultivation were launched at Emory University in Atlanta (2004), Compassionate Mind Foundation in the UK (2006), Stanford University in California (2009), and Foundation for Active Contemplation in Portland, Oregon (2010).
4) A Christian Neuroscience-Informed Compassion Cultivation Practice
Where does Christianity stand in relation to the science of compassion?
In August 2008, three pastors Andrew Dreitcer, Frank Rogers, Mark Yaconelli, held a retreat is Sausalito where they hashed out ideas they had been experimenting with as professors. A Christian compassion cultivation protocol was birthed at that retreat. In 2010 the trio established the Center for Engaged Compassion (CEC) at the Claremont School of Theology in California, where they tested and refined their “Compassion Practice” protocol, informed both by neuroscience and by old practices from the early church through the 17th century that had been revived in the 1980s and given new life by Catholic monks.
The CEC began to apply its Christian compassion cultivation protocol in diverse contexts – in 2009 in post-civil-war Zimbabwe with “healing and reconciliation” workshops, in prison ministry in 2012, and more recently as a method to relieve empathy fatigue experienced by medical professionals and chaplains.
In 2016, Frank Rogers Jr., one of the CEC founders, published the comprehensive guide to the practice in a slim volume titled Compassion in Practice: The Way of Jesus. It remains the most complete neuroscience-informed Christian handbook on compassion cultivation available.
While new developments in neuroscience-informed compassion cultivation protocols have been, and continue to be, given a great deal of attention in the popular press, Christianity is always ignored in articles on the subject. In the twenty-first century, Christianity and compassion are no longer automatically associated with one another.
Mark Yaconelli, in his interactions with the neuroscience experts while developing the CEC’s compassion cultivation protocol, discovered that “a significant number of Western scientists have wounds from their own Christian upbringing that cause a kind of reactivity toward any conversation with Christian theologians.” He listened to their stories “of childhoods scarred by dogmatic pastors, shame-based churches, and Christian elders unwilling to engage real questions and doubts.”
So far, neither secular researchers nor churches (with rare exceptions) have given attention to the CEC’s Christ-centered neuroscience-informed compassion cultivation training.
5) “Church Growth” = “Bigger Christians”
It is today’s institutionalized religion – focused on “personal salvation,” on recruiting, and on petitionary prayer practices – that has failed to inspire, not the message of the four Gospels which record the astonishing three-year ministry of Jesus.
Yet Christianity seems to be uninterested in the burgeoning science-informed Compassion Renaissance, even though it offers both opportunity and specific direction for spiritual renewal and social flourishing. Compassion-cultivation, nevertheless, may be the perfect way to return to the Church’s roots in the living ministry of Jesus that rocked the first century world.
It seems obvious that a church that rigorously disciples its members in the cultivation of compassion – of Christ-imitation – is a church which radiates its founder's spirit and is one that attracts seekers of meaning. As the late Dallas Willard put it: “Church growth is not just more Christians, but bigger Christians, flush with Christ’s character.”
Before we can hope to collectively “save the planet,” to assist whole classes of strangers, to set out to end injustice everywhere and for all, we must, as individuals, acquire personally transformative skill in effective compassion. As long as professed Christians continue neglect those in our close proximity, within our home church even who are lonesome, displaced, long-term unemployed, or drop in seekers.
We are unready to cast our nets further afield. “Doing church” must not supplant apprenticeship in careful transformative practices.
Compassion cultivation training is a practical and inspired means to make disciples – in C. S. Lewis’s words, to make “little Christs” – who precisely fit the demands of the Great Commission (Mat. 28:20). The CEC’s Christian Compassion Practice, as laid out in Prof. Rogers’ book, teaches us how to focus on the here and now that is the true arena of compassion -- to let go of grandiose vanity, of vague generalized distant virtue-signaling, and do what exactly the Good Samaritan did: attend to what God has put directly in front of us, and attend to it appropriately and effectively.
And what of the crisis of church decline? The early church had the golden key to “church growth”: imitation of Christ. And Christlikeness is the best advertising there could ever be.
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NOTE: An article by Mark Yaconelli and Frank Rogers, “Is It Harmful to Tell People to Love Their Enemies If You Never Teach Them How?”, was published by Red Letter Christians on July 18, 2013.
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[34-4/6/22; 45-5/10/22; 102-1/11/22;129-8/5/23]
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