A congregation's hopes and fears

Many of my blog posts the past year have been about the contemporary trials and travails of the church and its congregations. So it seems appropriate that I reveal a bit of my own situation in that regard. The annual meeting of my congregation, Acacia Park Lutheran Church, is coming up. Here is a portion of my report for that event. I’ll comment more at the end.

As I wrote in my report last year, and as I have said and written on many other occasions, Acacia Park’s ability to continue to offer these opportunities [for ministry] is increasingly in doubt. In that we are not alone. Last spring, Metropolitan Chicago Synod Bishop Wayne Miller reported that two-thirds of synod congregations are losing members. Later, one of his assistants reported that the 15% of synod congregations that are growing are doing so primarily by transfer of members from other ELCA congregations. Very few genuinely new people are joining synod churches. Thus, most congregations are growing smaller and older, just like Acacia Park. This story is repeated across the country and across denominations.

This situation has been developing and intensifying for at least forty years. Needless to say, people across the church have been trying to figure out why this is and what to do about it. Most responses have been of the type I first heard described by a Methodist minister: “If it doesn’t work, do more of it.” It is incredibly difficult for organizations to create really new ways to carry out their mission or to redefine their mission altogether (think General Motors). Churches are no different.

For tens of thousands of congregations across the country, this is a time of experimentation and trial-and-error. As is always the case, most such efforts don’t work. Every year an increasing number of congregations run out of time and resources for these efforts and close their doors. Yet some congregations do succeed, or succeed enough that they can continue this project of rediscovering what it means to be Christian communities of faith and service in 21st century America.

As we will discuss at this year’s annual congregational meeting, we are facing serious decisions about the future of the congregation. For many years, Acacia Park has been meeting some of its budget with reserve funds. That spending, plus the stock market’s fall in 2008, has significantly reduced those funds. As a result, the finance committee has proposed that the congregation cut its spending by no longer having a full-time pastor.

It may well come to that but I don’t believe Acacia Park is at the point where it needs to take such drastic action. To avoid this in the short term, the congregation will have to allow use of endowment funds to meet budget expenses. More importantly, however, we need to consider how we can re-make our congregation and its mission in order to become financially viable.

One possibility which I believe has real merit is to transform Acacia Park into a center for community service. In doing so, we would make better use of our under-utilized yet very functional building. Rent and building use fees would provide additional income to support our more traditional ministries.

To make this happen, we would need to explore as many ways as we can to offer programs that meet the needs of people in surrounding communities. These could involve children, the elderly, recent immigrants, those experiencing financial difficulties, providing family and mental health services, programs promoting the arts and education, and creating new opportunities for physical and spiritual health and wellness. We would contact community leaders, schools, and other organizations that are aware of local unmet needs. We would make use of church resources and organizations, such as Lutheran Social Services. We would learn from other congregations that have taken this path (Concordia Lutheran in Chicago has been a pioneer in undergoing such a ministry transformation).

Such a rethinking of ministry would enable Acacia Park to continue to carry out the traditional functions of parish ministry. At the same time, it would create a new mission of service to our community. At a recent pastors’ gathering, a colleague said that the key to the church’s future is for congregations to make themselves essential to their communities. The question then for us to ponder is: What do we need to do and to become in order that people in our community will say, “We can’t do without Acacia Park Lutheran Church?” Rather than succumb to our fears and anxieties, I believe the Bible calls us to be inspired by our visions and our hopes.


The heyday for Acacia Park (as for so many congregations) was in the 1950s and 60s: multiple Sunday services, bustling Sunday school, and active youth, men’s and women’s organizations. All that has changed. Many former members have moved to further out suburbs. The community has become heavily Eastern European (many first-generation), who are not traditionally Lutheran (though most don’t seem to be attending Catholic or Orthodox churches, either). Approximately half the congregation now is retired and many of those are elderly. Most mainline churches in our area are struggling as we are. Many have already closed.

The temptation for congregations like mine is simply to coast to the end. They want to conserve resources in order to offer the bare minimum of services as long as possible. People openly talk of wanting the church to last long enough for their funeral. Then: Last one out, turn off the lights. As I indicate in my report, it is a very common story.

My goal is to offer another possibility. The challenge for Acacia Park and the church generally is to re-imagine its role and identity. What I describe briefly above is one option: to become a community services center which also hosts a worshiping congregation. We have a pretty good physical facility and I think it could work.

The needs are certainly there—and growing. Just recently I read an article about the movement of poverty into the suburbs and how many of these communities are not well resourced or experienced to handle this. Knowing how popular it is in the city, I had been thinking yoga classes might worth a try. Sunday a member, who I would not have expected to hear this from, told me he had fallen in love with the yoga class at a nearby health club. The principal of the school across the street says there is a need for affordable after-school care. You get the idea.

Is this church? Does the tail start wagging the dog in such a scenario? Does it matter? These and other questions keep me puzzling and pondering. Right now, I think the answers are: Yes, perhaps, and no. The bottom line, as I say in my report, is that we would be making ourselves useful, finding creative ways to be of service to our neighbor. I think you can make a case for that being God’s work.

A meeting of magical thinking (Sunday Reflections for June 14, 2009)

I attended one day of the synod’s day-and-a-half long annual assembly meeting. The synod assembly has been shortened in recent years to save money and because of the difficulty in getting people to attend. Being so brief it’s hard to really accomplish much. It would be tempting to blame these bare-bones meetings as a cause of the fraying of church life but it is almost certainly more of a symptom.

On this occasion, the main event I was interested in was the report of our bishop. I especially wanted to hear what he would say about his proposal to reverse the decline of synod congregations, called the "Turnaround Synod Initiative" or TSI. (You can find my earlier thoughts about this in the Reflections columns for May 17 and May 31.)

Predictably, the language was traditional and tired. For reasons that completely escaped me, the bishop tried to invoke a kind of “old time religion” mentality. He consciously used the evangelical term “testimony” to declare that we should be telling our neighbors about our experiences with God and the church. Then he shifted to more recent language in talking about “sharing our story”. But recent doesn’t mean new. Nearly thirty years ago, the LCA (a predecessor church to the ELCA) produced a combined Bible study and evangelism program called Word and Witness which emphasized this. I can still picture its Venn diagram of “your story, my story, and God’s story”. In seminary we often joked about “sharing our story” and the intervening decades haven’t improved its value.

All of which is to say that the bishop was simply re-plowing old ground. His language often betrayed awareness that there really wasn’t anything new here. One of his more unfortunate tacks was to try to revive a church-world, us-them dichotomy. “The world is thirsty. We must believe we have something the world needs.” And so on. All we needed was a tent and some saw dust. In fact, to top it off, we closed by singing that 19th century evangelical warhorse, “I love to tell the story”. It is fun in a nostalgic way but it left no doubt that the hope really being proposed here was to turn back the clock.

As I listened to this revival of “tell what God’s done for you” style of evangelism (which Lutherans have never been good at), I wondered just how real it ever was. Do we know it even works? In other words, are people really drawn into the church by hearing about other peoples’ religious experiences? In the New Testament, especially in Paul’s letters and in Acts, the emphasis is on telling the Jesus story, i.e. the gospel. From what I can tell, it’s really not until the rise of post-Reformation pietism and evangelicalism that this “testimonial” style of evangelism takes hold. It parallels, of course, the modern era’s rise of individualism. But I wonder if it doesn’t also parallel the fading of the power of the Jesus story, the traditional message about incarnation and redemption. “I don’t really care what happened to somebody named Jesus umpteen centuries ago. I want something to happen to me.”

I also paid a brief visit to a “workshop” about TSI. I didn’t stay long because the presenter was basically repeating what was in the printed brochure everyone had received earlier. As I listened I was reminded again of the contradictions throughout this plan. On the one hand we are told that this is not a top-down program because only people in the congregations can really know what’s needed. Then we are told that a variety of outside consultants, coaches, experts and resources will be made available. It’s hard to see how both of these can be true—and actually neither is.

The first assertion is mostly politics. Congregations (presumably) don’t want to be told what to do by church authorities above them. The second promise is just wishful thinking. “Surely there is someone out there who knows what to do!” Yet there is no evidence that is the case. Obviously, if congregations themselves knew what they needed to do to “turn around” they would be doing it. As for the outside experts and resources: who/what are they and where are they coming from? The church’s decline in the US is happening in congregations of all types and across the denominational spectrum.

Despite all the seminars and how-to books available there is nothing to indicate anyone has figured out how to keep the existing church model going. Here in the ELCA, there are not more than a handful of congregations that are growing and which are not also in growing communities (usually with lots of young families). When hearing about learning from coaches and consultants who all come from within the church establishment, it’s hard not to think of Jesus’ warning about “the blind leading the blind”.

A question and a phrase keep coming to mind as I think about all this. The question is: Why is this so hard? It’s a rhetorical question really because it obviously shouldn’t be this hard. Religious fervor spreads like an infection. Everybody catches it. That’s how it starts and grows. Then when things settle down a religion is maintained by being built into the culture. It’s what everybody does. Now, neither of those is the case. Christianity has lost its fervor and lost the support of the surrounding culture. Which of these is coming back?

The phrase I keep remembering is from the title of Joan Didion’s recent book, The Year of Magical Thinking. In it she tells of her grief-induced craziness as she tried to cope with the sudden death of her husband of forty years. “Magical thinking” describes what I keep hearing from church leaders responding to the current crisis. And grief may well be what’s behind all these fruitless rescue efforts. The church’s heyday in the US was barely a generation ago, in the 1950s and 60s. It’s what I grew up with and I am stunned at how quickly the church has declined since then. We in the church are grieving the loss of that earlier time: the filled pews, overflowing Sunday schools, constant stream of baptisms, confirmations and weddings. Now suddenly that’s gone and as with the death of a loved one, we are all prone to “magical thinking”. Surely he/she/it is coming back? Well, no, but everyone’s too polite or embarrassed to say so.

The experts have taught us about the stages of grief. It follows a natural progression which shouldn’t be rushed. Yet it’s also true that people sometimes get stuck in their grief, preventing them from returning to a normal and productive life. I am not sure whether the church is still in “normal” grief or if we’ve gotten stuck somewhere. Institutions aren’t people and I assume different rules would apply. All I know is that American mainline churches, at least, have been in decline for forty years. If we’re not stuck then we must be pretty close. In any case, it certainly seems time to put away the magic and start dealing with reality.

Church of Sweden elects gay bishop

The Lutheran Church of Sweden will soon have it's first gay bishop. On May 25, Eva Brunne was elected Bishop of Stockholm. She will take office in November. Brunne is in a state-registered committed partnership with Gunilla Lindén, another priest of the church, and they have a three-year-old son. (Hat tip to Spirit of a Liberal for making me aware of this.)

Recently, ELCA ecumenist Rev. Paul Schreck said in a Lutheran op-ed piece (you may have to register to read the article online) that he was concerned about the church's possible adoption of a proposal to permit non-celebate gay clergy. He is afraid it will sour our relationship with Roman Catholics and other ecumenical partners and possibly result in the ELCA's expulsion from the Lutheran World Federation (LWF). Obviously, given the Church of Sweden's action, the ELCA wouldn't be alone. In fact, much of European Lutheranism is heading this direction and most of the American Protestant churches we are in fellowship with are also wrestling with these issues. I left a rather stinging response to Pastor Schrck's nonsense on the website.

Finding wind for the church's sails (Sunday Reflections for May 31, 2009)

Earlier this month I wrote to Metropolitan Chicago Synod Bishop Wayne Miller to express my doubts and even dismay about a new church renewal program he had announced, called the Turnaround Synod Initiative (TSI). I published that letter two weeks ago as my Reflections column for May 17. Since then Bishop Miller and I have had a brief email exchange and, as promised, I’ll share the gist of it with you here.

Bishop Miller did not dispute my assessment of the church’s predicament, saying he is “much more realistic about the plight of the church” than I might think. Nonetheless, he remains convinced that “the truth of the cross is a matter of life and death for the cosmos”. Therefore, the church must be revitalized but not in a way that simply keeps old institutions alive. “This is not about institution building for me. I am not the least bit interested in clinging to dead forms…. What I am suggesting is that resignation, apathy and passivity in the face of the challenge will absolutely guarantee death.”

In his second email he added, “I find that in the climate of this synod there is so much discouragement that it takes enormous personal energy to try to find some way to put some wind back in the sails.” Most of that energy will have to come from below (“up from the earth”), of course, but he believes he has “a modest role to play in calling that energy up and then giving it a bit of shape and significance.”

Whenever you are the head of an institution in crisis, it’s inevitable that many people will expect you to be the “answer man” and I know that is occurring in our synod and across the church. As I said in my letter, the urge “to do something” is understandable. But the questions remain, “Do what? And to what end?”

As I read and listen to what others are saying, more and more agree that there is no going back. The church of the future will not and cannot look like the church of even the recent past. And so Bishop Miller says he is not interested in “clinging to dead forms”. Yet, while more and more are agreeing it can’t be done, it is hard to see how TSI and other recent proposals are really trying to do anything other than prop up our existing churches and ways of doing things. I am afraid that even as we say our intention is not to preserve “dead forms”, when those forms are all we have known it’s hard to imagine what the alternative might be.

I have said before that the church’s dilemma is very similar to that of the automobile and newspaper industries. Young people, especially, don’t buy American cars, don’t read newspapers, and don’t go to church. Those aren’t coincidences but are part of a much broader phenomenon which is affecting our society, and indeed the whole planet. And that is probably the single most significant change, which is that we are in the beginning stages of the creation of a genuinely global culture.

Dramatic improvements in education, communication and material prosperity around the world are suddenly thrusting us all together with dizzying speed. The forces of this transformation are pulling apart the bonds of traditional religion from multiple directions—and that is true not just here in the US, nor is it true only for Christianity. People’s lives are changing the world over, and one of those changes is that increasingly they find that they don’t need organized religion, at least as it has traditionally existed.

Like Bishop Miller’s passionate belief that “the truth of the cross is a matter of life and death”, I often hear it said that there is something the church has that is essential to people’s and the world’s wellbeing. This is why the church and its mission “must go on”. Yet in reality, not only do people outside the church not believe this, fewer and fewer people inside the church really think this way. Much more common is the attitude that religious involvement is a matter of personal preference. Just because it’s good for me, I don’t assume it will be equally good for you, let alone essential. Even fundamentalist churches have pulled way back on their “believe in Jesus or you’re going to hell” rhetoric, though that may still be part of their official doctrine.

Bishop Miller accurately points to the difficulty of energizing the church—putting “wind in its sails”. But the reason we aren’t raising the sails is because we don’t know where we want to go. If we aren’t saving souls from hell, and we aren’t trying to preserve religious institutions (those “dead forms”), then what are we supposed to be doing? This is another one of those elephants in the room, the awkward reality everyone knows is there but no one wants to talk about. The church’s lack of energy is really a loss of purpose and most of our movement now is momentum leftover from our past which is rapidly running out.

My suspicion about TSI and similar efforts (like the Book of Faith Initiative) is that their real purpose is to help us avoid talking about these awkward subjects. TSI proposes to re-energize the church to carry out its mission when the real problem is that the church doesn’t know anymore what its mission is supposed to be. For similar reasons engineers at Chrysler and GM debate what the next season’s hot colors will be when the problem is that too many people don’t want their cars whatever colors they come in.

We don’t discuss the church’s purpose because we are afraid that there isn’t one anymore. That’s our bogeyman—if we don’t think about it maybe it will go away. We all know how well that works. I say, what have we got to lose? I had been hoping that perhaps the church was near enough to desperation to finally start asking the tough questions. When I read about TSI I (admittedly) went into orbit because it was yet one more round of “let’s pretend”. Let’s pretend we really know what we’re trying to do and that the problem is that we just need to do it better.

People everywhere continue to have spiritual needs. People continue to search for meaning for their lives and struggle to accept and deal with life’s inevitable limitations: time, randomness and death. And in various ways, people continue to want to come together to meet those spiritual needs with others as a community. But the more a person is connected to our expanding globalized, post-modern culture, the less likely are they to find traditional Christianity or any of the other ancient world religions a satisfactory place to pursue that spiritual quest.

The church won’t disappear but the radical transformation it must undergo won’t come from its official leadership or from programs like TSI. Rather, to use Bishop Miller’s phrase, it must come “from the earth”. And it will.