Photo by Sarah

Here’s another sobering riff on the theme of “18 years“.

Last week the Office of the General Assembly released the 2012 statistics for the Presbyterian Church (USA). The numbers aren’t good, more signs of our rapid decline (and the similar decline of all mainline Protestant—and even evangelical—denominations).

• Our membership has dropped to 1,849,496.
• This represents a decline of 102,791 members. About half of these are due to transfers.
• 86 churches were dissolved.
• 110 congregations were dismissed to other denominations.
• While losing these 196 churches, we only organized 13 new congregations—quite a bit short of the 1001 goal we’ve set for ourselves.

I’ve said it before: this is simply not sustainable.

Our losses were slightly greater last year than in recent years, but if we continue at this rate, the PC(USA) has about 18 years left. (I realize, of course, that the math isn’t that simple.)

So when we celebrate my newborn son’s 18th birthday in 2030, we’ll also be marking the death of the PC(USA)—if we haven’t already.

Can anything be done to change this trajectory? Should anything be done? Or are all forms of American Protestantism dying an inevitable death as something new is born?

Photo by Kyden

Several weeks ago I had coffee with a woman whose wisdom and insight I greatly respect. She is the mother of three children, one of which is in high school, one of which is in college, and the oldest of which is out of college.

We were talking about youth ministry and the types of questions I spend most of my time thinking about. How do we do youth ministry effectively in our post-Christendom context? Why should youth ministry—or church in general—matter to young people and families today? How can we communicate the value of what we do to busy families who have a lot of options when it comes to how they spend their time? How can we retain more of our youth after confirmation?

Several times during this conversation she said something that has really stuck with me: “You only have 18 years.”

Her point is that even though parents will in some ways continue to influence their children when they become adults, we basically have until they leave high school to have our greatest impact. And since 18 years goes by so quickly, this is precious time that we can’t afford to waste. We need to think carefully about choices we make and how we spend our time. We need to think carefully about what is truly important and what our priorities are.

If the church has anything of value to offer young people and families in this post-Christendom world—and I believe that we do—then we need to remember that we only have 18 years.

It’s a sobering, humbling, and inspiring reminder.

Image by Sean MacEntee

Reading: Acts 10:1-33

Reflection
In college I was introduced to the historical and critical study of religion. As it applies to my own Christian faith, this approach has helped me realize that religion is never static. Rather, religion is always dynamic and changing.

Such thinking would have been considered heretical in the conservative churches in which I grew up, and many Christians would vehemently disagree with my belief that God (or at least our understanding of God) and the ways in which we relate to God and each other are constantly changing.

But today’s story, and the larger narrative of the birth of Christianity, is all the proof you need that even major elements of our faith change. If God and/or God’s way never change, then Gentiles (like me and most of those reading this devotion) would not be considered part of God’s covenant people. Or if we were, we would have to first convert to orthodox Judaism and–among many more significant lifestyle changes–would not be allowed to eat shellfish or pork.

So unless we want to practice the kind of Second Temple Judaism that Jesus and his ancestors practiced, let’s not fool ourselves about the ways in which our faith and religious practices have always changed and, guided by the Spirit, will continue to change in ways as unthinkable to us as eating unclean food once was for Jesus’ faithful disciple Peter.

Prayer
Open my heart and mind, O God, to the changes you are bringing about in the world and the church. Amen.

This was published last week as a Fourth Church Daily Devotion.

Photos by Joann Lee

This past Saturday, my friend and colleague Hardy Kim and I put on an East vs West BBQ throwdown as a fundraiser for our friends Kurt Esslinger and Hyeyoung Lee, who will be serving as PC(USA) Young Adult Volunteer site coordinators in Korea. The fine people at Declan’s Irish Pub hosted us, providing space for our cooking and gathering.

All around, the event was a great success. It was a fun way to say goodbye to Kurt and Hyeyoung and send them off on their mission. We managed to raise a lot of money for their work. And the impromptu commissioning and laying on of hands on the sidewalk at the end of the night could not have been more perfect.

(I should reluctantly note, of course, that Hardy beat me this time, which ties us at one win each, with at least two more of these cook-offs to go. So far we’ve raised over $15,000 making BBQ.)

This event also confirmed for me that my BBQ church idea is a solid one. During the 8 hours I spent smoking beef brisket on the sidewalk patio outside of Declan’s, numerous people stopped by to ask what I was doing. How great it would have been to invite them to come back for a BBQ feast and communion service later that day. And the natural way that our party slipped into a prayer service was simply beautiful.

I also realized that this concept could get started without a building or an actual BBQ business, which has been my thinking thus far. All you really need is an establishment like Declan’s that is willing to host a BBQ church service on a Sunday afternoon or evening to make this work.

But I also have another idea. The next day, I took Sunday morning off from church and preached at our afternoon jazz service, which I hadn’t done since August. With the morning off, my family and I did what an increasingly large number of families do on Sunday morning. We had brunch at a local diner and enjoyed time together at a park, which was full of families doing the same. As I watched these families having fun on the playground and in the park, I wondered what it might look like to have a church service in this setting. What if a group of families decided to spend Sunday morning enjoying sacred time together in this way, playing and having fun, and incorporate into this a simple communion service that recognized the presence of God in all aspects of our lives? Would others be interested in such a thing? Would it create a dialogue about what church is or could be?

In my mind, this kind of playground church, along with BBQ church and tailgate communion, are ways to respond to the shifts in church participation happening in our post-Christendom world. If we accept the reality that many people are simply not going to come back to traditional Sunday church services, why not think about creative ways of meeting them where they are? Why not stretch our understandings of what church is and can be?

Beyond the ideas I’ve mentioned here, what are some other settings in which we could experiment with post-Christendom church?

Photo by Vik Nanda

I preached this sermon on Sunday after taking a DMin course at McCormick Theological Seminary called “Why Church Matters in a Culture of Narcissism” with Lillian Daniel. The text for this sermon was 1 Peter 2:1-10. Some of this repeats things I wrote last week and things I’ve been thinking and writing about for some time. This represents a preliminary answer to the basic question of the course.

Once or twice a year, a pastor colleague of mine in Elmhurst takes a Sunday morning off and does what an increasingly large percentage of our nation does on the first day of the week. He sleeps in, reads the newspaper, watches the morning news shows, and enjoys a simple breakfast. He considers it a reminder of what the church is up against each week in our post-Christendom world.

I did my own version of that today. My wife and I slept in as late as we could with a four year old and a five month old whose biological clocks don’t differentiate between weekday and weekend mornings. We walked down the street to enjoy breakfast together at a local diner. We walked to the park and joined dozens of other families, just like us, enjoying the beautiful morning with their children. It was really nice, the first Sunday morning I’ve taken off since our youngest son was born in December. If I didn’t have to finish this sermon, I would have taken a nap with the rest of my family this afternoon.

It’s convenient, of course, that we have this afternoon service, which allows us to enjoy Sunday morning with the rest of the world and still get in a worship service. But in a city like Chicago, there are plenty of other things we could be doing right now. We’re here because we want to be. There’s no obligation. There’s no longer a cultural expectation to go to church. We’ve made a conscious decision to take an hour out of our Memorial Day weekend to gather together for this strange activity we call worship.

Why? Why do we do this? Why does church matter for us?

In a situation many pastors dread, Lillian Daniel found herself outed as a clergy person while sitting next to someone on an airplane. He proceeded to describe to her why he is “spiritual but not religious.” Instead of going to church, he finds God in sunsets, and mountaintops, and walks on the beach.

Her response? “Stop boring me!”

“Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating.”[1]

Throughout the United States, “spiritual but not religious” is becoming more and more common. Surveys of Americans show that the fasted growing religious group in the country is the group that claims no religious affiliation, people often referred to as the “nones.” In a much quoted study, about 20% of Americans fit this category, the largest this number has always been.[2] It’s even larger for young adults, apparently the least religious generation in the history of the United States.

Why is this the case?

Conservative pundits will have us believe that progressive mainline churches like ours have lost our way theologically. Our non-literal approach to scripture, liberal theology, and embrace of LGBT people has turned off faithful people interested in more traditional beliefs and practices. And while it is true that mainline churches have suffered significant losses in membership over the past several decades, progressive churches like our have actually managed to grow and expand.

At the same time, it is also true that more conservative and evangelical churches are now experiencing similar declines in membership. And research shows that many people now consider these churches too political, hypocritical, judgmental, and homophobic.

A broader and more shared explanation for the so-called “rise of the nones” and the decline of both mainline and evangelical Protestantism is the phenomenon known as post-Christendom. For centuries, Christian religion and culture dominated the Western world. This was especially true in American culture up through the middle of the 20^th century. But this is no longer the case. Christianity in general—and, for Americans, Protestantism in particular—is no longer the definitive center and shaper of culture. “Christendom”—the triumphal reign of Christianity in Western culture—is over.

Those who were always on the periphery of the church or those who only came because of a sense of obligation or cultural expectation no longer come at all. As I was reminded this morning, Sunday is no longer sacred time in American culture. There will always be numerous activities and institutions vying for the attention and commitment of church-goers. The church will always need to demonstrate its relevance in a pluralistic and secularizing culture that no longer affords it pride of place. While church used to be taken for granted, now we must have an answer to the question, “why does church matter?”

It seems to me that there are at least two important ways to answer this question. One is internal and the other is external.

The internal response highlights the intrinsic value of community. Back to Lillian Daniel, who has this to say: “Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn’t interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff or, heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.”[3]

One of the two core creation stories in Genesis indicates that human beings were created in community, and both stories assume that it is better for humans to not be alone. From pre-biblical times, through ancient Israelite religions, through various forms of Second Temple Judaism, through the Jesus movement and early church, all the way through pre-Enlightenment Christianity, religion—indeed, life in general—was always a deeply communal affair. It is only recently in human history that autonomous individuals have become the basic unit of human culture.

This is especially true in the United States. I think it was President Herbert Hoover who popularized the phrase “rugged individualism,” which became almost synonymous with the American spirit. Over 25 years ago sociologist Robert Bellah described how this individualism was manifesting itself in privatized religion grounded in the unique beliefs and practices of individuals.[4] Nearly 20 years ago Robert Putnam first advanced his ideas about the decline of “social capital” in American society and the rise of the phenomenon he described as “bowling alone.”[5] Civic engagement and participation has sharply declined. Rather than a great community, we are a nation of individuals.

This way of being is sharply different from what we Christians believe about not only the communal nature of humanity but also the communal nature of our triune God. It is a significant departure from the ways in which our communities of faith have organized and understood themselves for millennia. As the apostle Paul once said, the church is like a body. An arm can’t go off and do its own thing as an arm—it won’t live very long on its own and the rest of the body will suffer its loss.

So being together as church in community is a way for us to re-engage this vital element of human nature. Living together in community is a way for us to remember that we are better together, even though community is always more difficult and frustrating than going alone. In fact, even the struggle of being together in the midst difference and conflict is a valuable spiritual exercise that can potentially offer a compelling witness to the promise of community. In our polarized world we need experiments and models of healthy community. If churches got their acts together, we could in fact help the world see that it is possible for diverse people who do not agree on even fundamental beliefs to live and work together when gathered around a common cause.

Yet perhaps this is our greatest problem: we don’t know what our common cause is. You see, the second, external reason that church matters has nothing to do with us at all. In fact, endless obsession about ourselves more often than not gets in the way of what God has truly called us to be.

In all honesty, I’m growing weary of church navel gazing and conversations about how to build a better church. Jesus didn’t give us the church in order to give us something to do. (In fact, you could argue that Jesus never intended to start “church” at all.) I think we have long forgotten that church is a means, not an end. Church is a tool or an instrument that enables us to accomplish the sharing and enacting of Jesus’ good news and participate in the emergence of God’s kingdom.

In the passage of scripture I read earlier, the writer is discussing what it means to be church. “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people who are God’s own possession. … Once you weren’t a people, but now you are God’s people.” It’s beautiful imagery about being chosen by God to be a special people in the world. But it’s not simply for the sake of being together. It’s not to keep us busy. It’s not to build institutions that need maintenance.

Rather, we have been chosen for a purpose: “You have become this people so that you may speak of the wonderful acts of the one who called you out of darkness into his amazing light.” We have a mission: to proclaim in word and deed the good news of God’s redeeming love in Jesus Christ.

In numerous and profound ways Jesus calls us to be a part of God’s emerging kingdom. The world as we know it is being transformed. Each of us as individuals, yes, but collectively as God’s people we are called to participate in this radical transformation.

Church doesn’t exist just so we can practice living together in community. Church doesn’t exist so that we can build big buildings and denominational structures. Church doesn’t exist to simply meet the needs of religious consumers. No, church exists because through us God is doing something remarkable in the world. Church matters because for whatever mysterious reason—and on some days the wisdom of this choice boggles the mind—God has chosen us to help change the world.

Amen.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

As an Eagle Scout and as a Christian pastor, I am thankful for yesterday’s vote for an (almost) open and inclusive scouting organization. I think it is a huge step in the right direction to allow openly gay boys to participate in this institution that was very formative for me and I hope will be important for my own two sons. Scouting is a vital American institution through which young men learn how to be good citizens of a pluralistic society. What a betrayal of our principles it would be to exclude boys from this opportunity.

I disagree with the decision to keep the ban on openly gay adult leaders, though I suppose I can see the political reasons behind this and understand that change happens slowly in traditional institutions. But this split decision is an inconsistent and hypocritical position. If we confer the rank of Eagle to an openly gay boy, will he suddenly lose the gifts of leadership we have recognized in him when he turns 18?

As a pastor in a denomination that is divided when it comes to understandings of human sexuality, I appreciate that yesterday’s decision will put many troops and their chartering organizations in a difficult position. As I have argued elsewhere, I think it is okay for different troops to maintain different standards on this issue. I suppose we’ll see how this plays out.

I was not surprised to hear this morning that the Southern Baptist Convention, noting that many Baptist churches charter Boy Scout troops, is disappointed with this new direction. One SBC leader, Richard Land, has even said this: “Frankly, I can’t imagine a Southern Baptist pastor who would continue to allow his church to sponsor a Boy Scout troop under these new rules.”

If your Boy Scout troop finds itself in the position of losing the support of its chartering organization, I encourage you to simply find another sponsor. There are numerous Presbyterian, UCC, Disciples of Christ, an other churches who will happily support this new BSA policy. You may even find a growing number of evangelical churches that are adopting progressive understandings of faith and human sexuality who will welcome your troop. Or, find a chartering organization that is not faith based.

I’m proud to be an Eagle Scout and I am grateful for the direction our organization is moving.

Sincerely,

The Reverend John W. Vest

Photo by zzpza

I’m past the half way mark of the DMin class I’m taking with Lillian Daniel this week on “Why Church Matters in a Culture of Narcissism.” While I’m still not sure that we’ve articulated an answer to the question of why church should matter to those who would prefer “spiritual but not religious,” some thoughts are gelling for me.

I can’t help thinking that justifications for or defenses of church as important are essentially still Christendom conversations that assume the existence of the church. Lillian and others provide numerous examples of the goods we experience in church, but you have to be there first in order to experience them. Community is vitally important, but church is not the only place people can experience community. In fact, the reality is that people may find better and more healthy experiences of community elsewhere.

I’m growing weary of church navel gazing and conversations about how to build a better church. Jesus didn’t give us the church in order to give us something to do. (In fact, you could argue that Jesus never intended to start “church” at all.) I think we have long forgotten that church is a means, not an end. Church is a tool or an instrument that enables us to accomplish the sharing and enacting of Jesus’ good news and participate in the emergence of God’s kingdom.

I believe that community is central to God’s nature and the nature of humanity as the image of God. When we’re stuck in the muck of church, we come to appreciate it as an opportunity to work in community and be together. These are all important ways of being. But are these endeavors worth the amount of time and energy it takes? Do we need to create complex systems—maybe I’m mostly thinking about denominations and denominational structures here—in order to practice being in community? Is this God’s mission in the world?

Now, I struggle with this because I think that in our polarized world we do indeed need experiments and models of healthy community. If churches got their acts together, we could in fact help the world see that it is possible for diverse people that do not agree on even fundamental beliefs to live and work together when gathered around a common cause. (Yet in our post-Christendom context, perhaps we should be more interested in how we will live in the wider world of diversity, rather than how we live in our own faith communities.)

Maybe this is the problem: we don’t know what our common cause is. For centuries it was sacraments and salvation—the church was the place where people had access to God’s grace. For many conservative evangelicals, the common cause seems to be right belief and behavior. For many liberal mainliners, the common cause seems to be social justice, which may or may not be articulated with rich theological language. For a variety of reasons, these are no longer compelling for growing numbers of people.

Perhaps if we had better clarity about our mission—what it is that Jesus calls us to do and be in the world—we would have a better understanding of what church is and how it functions as a tool toward that end.

Photo by Jan Lee

This week I’m taking a DMin course at McCormick Theological Seminary called “Why Church Matters in a Culture of Narcissism,” taught by Lillian Daniel. This is a class that I’ve been looking forward to for quite a while. It’s the kind of class on contemporary Christianity that I think is really important for a DMin program.

Based on the thread that connects the narrative vignettes and essays of her book, When “Spiritual But Religious” Is Not Enough: Seeing God is Surprising Spaces, Even the Church, I anticipate that Lillian will be more optimistic about the vitality (and perhaps necessity) of traditional church in our post-Christendom context than I typically am.

She signaled this a bit in class today with a short lecture on the differences between the “Yale School” of post-liberal narrative theology and the “Chicago School” of correlational theology. She describes the Yale approach as invitational and the Chicago approach as translational. Her implication, I think, is that the Yale approach is a better response to post-Christendom than the Chicago approach, though she acknowledges that most of us operate with a bit of both.

Trained at the University of Chicago, whereas Lillian was trained at Yale, I tend to think that the opposite is true. While my Baptist past and longtime passion for the Bible make the narrative theology of the Yale School attractive, the cumulative effect of my college education in the critical study of religion, my biblical and theological training at a divinity school deeply influenced by Tillich, and my general approach to post-Christendom position me squarely in the Chicago camp.

Maybe I’m influenced by some degree of resignation, but twelve years of professional youth ministry with young people raised in decidedly post-Christendom contexts has convinced me that it is highly unlikely that mainline Protestants will reclaim any sense of the cultural centrality that the church enjoyed in Christendom, at least within my lifetime. And instead of fighting a battle we are unlikely to win, my instincts tell me that a better approach is to adapt the gospel to language and practices with which young people are already familiar rather than struggle to teach them a language that is growing increasingly unfamiliar, a language that is no longer reinforced outside of Sunday morning church gatherings. The correlational model seems to me to provide a better invitation to conversation than an approach that essentially requires post-Christendom natives to first learn the language of Christianity before they can understand what we are talking about.

Rather than defend church as we’ve known it, I tend to think that what we need most is a radical rethinking of church for our new post-Christendom realities.

I’m looking forward to being challenged and stretched in this course.

Image by deux-chi

Reading: Luke 12:32-48

Reflection
The simple message of this passage is this: be ready when Christ returns to usher in the kingdom of God.

When considered in the context of the early church, it becomes more complicated. Most of the New Testament writers expected Christ to return within their lifetime. They spoke in urgent and immediate terms about what they believed to be impending apocalyptic events. Nearly two thousand years later, it is clear that what they believed would take place never did.

Does this call into question the truth or relevancy of these early Christian writings? I don’t think so, though it does demonstrate the fallible human elements of our sacred scriptures.

I tend to think that what Jesus talked about as God’s kingdom has been emerging slowly over time. The “return of Christ” that the early Christians anticipated and that many subsequent Christians have waited for seems to me to be a metaphorical concept. As Easter people, we speak as if the risen Christ is present with us already, and I believe that to be true.

Rather than wanting us to wait for Christ to return in some apocalyptic endgame, God is, I believe, waiting for us to fully realize our calling as the body of Christ in the world. The simple message still holds: be ready. Even more, be attentive and alert, because God’s kingdom is already emerging around us.

Prayer
Help me be ready, God, for what you are doing in the world. Amen.

This appeared as yesterday’s Fourth Church Daily Devotion.