Seeking Balance

In case you can't tell, I really want this election to be over already.  I'm just tired, and feeling increasingly as though we are lurching towards one of the dystopian futures I used to read so much about in Orwell, Bradbury and Vonnegut. So, I'm picking very carefully what I really want to spend my time on vis-a-vis politics and such.  I was grabbed this morning by this article.  I was interested because it points out a rather glaring flaw in the rhetoric, not only of Clinton and Trump, but of most politicians.  I was also interested because the same flawed mentality exists in the Church: we want it to be like it was in 1950.
I'll admit, having a tenuous relationship with money, I don't find myself reading Fortune or magazines of that ilk very often.  There usually has to be some sort of cross over appeal.  I have heard the promises of jobs, jobs and more jobs from politicians for most of my life, but I have also observed the reality that technology fundamentally alters the economy in which those jobs must exist. The article points out that the industrial revolution shifted the economy away from agricultural production, which was 60% of the population in 1820, to barely 2% today.  I might join Wendell Berry in theorizing that one possible solution to our ills would be to try and reverse that trend somewhat, but outside of backyard gardening I don't have much of a hammer to swing on that project.  The idea that we could go back to the sort of labor intensive forms of manufacturing is a pipe dream that relies on the willingness of many Americans to long for the days (even though we didn't actually live in them) when the traditional nuclear family was king, Dad worked a solid, blue collar job, Mom stayed home baking bread and doing laundry, most families had one car at most and the house was a modest but solidly built piece of the American dream.
The stories of the factories, mines and mills closing is the tragedy of the second half of the twentieth century (I mean aside from the more or less constant warfare).  It is easy to lament the fact that two incomes are mostly compulsory to make it into the middle class, it is easy to grieve over the fact that wages have not kept pace with inflation and that, for the first time in a long time, children's economic prospects don't equal or exceed those of their parents.
Is the American dream dying?
Or is it just changing?
The world just isn't the same as it used to be.  There are lots of jobs, but not all jobs actually comprise making an actual living, which is really what the dream of 1950 is all about. Then a high school graduate could go work for GM or RCA, work their way up the pay scale and maybe even into management.  They had Unions to watch out for their interests, the world was set up in a way that allowed them to honestly, through hard work and persistence, get ahead.
In the church, we coincidentally long for the same era.  Because then we were the shot callers.  People went to church, people participated in church, no one ever questioned whether church was relevant or expected it to do much except talk about how sin was bad and God was good and give everyone an excuse to wear their Sunday best. Yeah, we may have gotten a little complacent in that model, and it probably is not any more likely to make a comeback than the manual assembly line.
Now we scratch for the spare time of the much smaller number of people who are even still inclined to want to sample our wares.  In our better moments, we have made peace with the idea that we are now in the service industry.  Our best function now is not producing entertainment or any sort of product, it is simply serving, helping, forming people who are a blessing to their communities.
It's important work, but it is small and slow, and it doesn't always bring in the numbers.  People still want to try and make churches into assembly lines, but Jesus didn't give us much of a model for doing that, he did however talk a bit about farming and shepherding, you know, pre-industrial imagery (way pre-industrial).
Just as many of the new generation is turning an interest to things like sustainable agriculture and responsible stewardship, by reaching back to the old agricultural practices, the church probably needs to forget it's brief and somewhat unfortunate hour of cultural and political hegemony and get back to following Jesus one step at a time.