Letting go (Sunday Reflections for June 6, 2010)

Jim Stuck is the retiring bishop of the ELCA’s Indiana-Kentucky Synod. He recently penned a farewell message to members and congregations of his synod. While he concludes hopefully, his feelings about the church and its future are nonetheless troubled and ambivalent. Bishop Stuck is distressed by the state of the church and, by his own admission, grieving the death of the church he grew up with. While last summer’s dramatic ELCA churchwide assembly brought all this into focus, he recognizes the church’s troubles began much earlier.

And as I prayed about this and meditated on what was happening to my church, I began to realize that this death of the church was not something that started with our decision last August. The church has been dying for many years. The church that I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s is gone. Our pews are half full. We have fewer and fewer young people. Many congregations no longer have a Sunday School. As our facilities age, the cost per person to maintain and run them is becoming prohibitive. It seems that fewer and fewer people are being called upon to do more and more of the work of the church. Many are feeling over worked and under appreciated. How long can we sustain our congregations, our synodical ministries and the wider church with all its ministries?

The church Stuck grieves for is the church I grew up in as did most in the congregations I have served. After World War II, churches of all kinds grew dramatically and sustained that growth for about 25 years. In the late 60s and early 70s, however, those same churches began a long steady decline that continues to this day. Most of these denominations have now lost a third to a half of their membership. In addition, the current membership is older, more female and more Caucasian than the general population.

On pretty good lutherans, the blog where I first read Stuck’s statement, some comments criticized him for being too revealing of his grief. I applaud him for it. Unfortunately I think there has been a lot of denial throughout the ELCA about its true state. One thing we have learned in dealing with dying people is that we do them no favors pretending their condition is something other than what it is or talking endlessly about the next therapy, treatment or drug to be tried. In reality, such avoidance is more about protecting the sensibilities of family and friends rather than the welfare of the patient.

Over the course of my ministry, I couldn't count how many sermons and speeches I’ve heard, workshops and conferences I have attended, and books and articles I have read about renewing and reviving the church. Regardless of what was said at the time, the primary motivation for forming the ELCA in the 1980s was to stem the losses occurring across American Lutheranism. In spite of all that, nothing has changed. In truth, there are forces at work in our culture and society that are simply beyond anyone’s control.

By talking endlessly of “renewal” (and without ever being clear what that really means), we ignore the thousands of congregations (probably a majority) for which this is not going to happen. As a result, they feel ignored, abandoned, and guilty over their apparent failures. They often become consumed with internal bickering and finger-pointing trying to find someone to blame for their state. They engage in liturgical and programmatic contortions trying to appeal to their mysterious and unidentified “neighbors” in hopes of getting a few new members to help pay the bills. Relations and resources are strained. Members become frustrated and exhausted, often causing more loses and accelerating the decline.

Hopefully, and correctly I think, Stuck see the church’s decline as a process leading to something new.

We know that God is up to something. This is God’s church and God is doing something great to renew and transform the church. God is working on us to prepare us for the future mission we are called to do. What this mission will look like we don’t yet know. What the church will be in the future is yet to be revealed. But what we do know is that it will not be the same.

Stuck goes on to interpret this experience as any good Lutheran would, in terms of the cross. Lutherans have always emphasized that renewal and new life necessarily involves death. Teaching it, however, doesn’t make it any easier to experience first-hand. The church we knew is going away and something new is coming. We just don’t know what that new thing is yet.

Yes, we will never have our old church back. Many of our dreams for the church have vanished. They probably needed to vanish, because they were our dreams and not God’s. We are being called back into prayer, study of scripture and discernment in order to allow God to lead us into this new future. By the power of the Spirit, we are being called to let go of the church and place it in God’s hands.

My personal expectations are probably less conventionally Christian or even religious than Stuck’s but I don’t know that. I haven’t talked with him. When I was in the IK Synod (before he became bishop), my impression was that he was pretty astute so perhaps our thinking is not so far apart. In my view, the world is undergoing dramatic and unprecedented social change and something very different than what has gone before is going to be needed to meet our spiritual needs. And honestly, I don’t see what that is going to be.

In any case, Stuck and I agree that now we are being called to let go of this church and its future. While painful and difficult, we do it knowing we really have no choice. What will happen, will happen. The future is out of our control. And to that I think Bishop Stuck would want us to say, “Thanks God!” For from death will come genuinely new life, for a future we cannot see and for a world about which we can only dream.

Saving Jesus (Sunday Reflections for May 16, 2010)

Jesus’ primary mission was to expose the world’s sinfulness and then die on the cross so that the sins of those who believed in him would be forgiven, enabling them to go to heaven. He was not especially concerned about people’s daily lives, except for sexual impurity which he strongly condemned.

Attending many churches today or listening to many TV preachers, one who could easily believe such a statement summarizes the importance of Jesus. This Jesus, however, bears almost no resemblance to the Jesus we meet in the gospels. In the gospels, Jesus talks A LOT about people’s lives, especially their relationships with other people. He talks about the use of money and material possessions far more than he does about sex. Jesus says very little about “getting to heaven” and (with the possible exception of John, the last gospel to be written) does not interpret his death in those terms.

A group in our congregation has been reading a book by Oklahoma City pastor and author Robin Meyers. Its provocative title is Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus.Meyers’ contention is that within a few centuries of Jesus’ death, the church effectively “declawed” Jesus (my term) as a result of its agreement with Constantine to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Jesus stopped being a radical voice for change in human relations and in society. Instead he became an object of worship and, through the clergy, the sole official dispenser of tickets to heaven.

Over the past two centuries, modern biblical scholars have been attempting to re-discover the Jesus of history and it is this Jesus that Meyers is trying to promote. The world has changed—for the better—so that now people have little interest in a Christ to be passively worshiped. Today people are looking for guidance in dealing with the challenges and complexity of their lives and so instead the church needs to be presenting a Jesus to be followed.

Not everyone in the church endorses such a shift, of course. Clergy, especially, are reluctant to relinquish their “keys of the kingdom” power even if fewer and fewer people are interested in the door those keys supposedly open.

A recent article by Luther Seminary professor Gracia Grindal, a leader of ELCA dissidents, says that people traditionally came to worship to “hear the Word of God, to be reproved by it, not to be affirmed; to be cleansed of their unrighteousness.” Abandoning this tradition is what has led to the ELCA’s dramatic drop in worship attendance, she contends. Yet this ignores the fact that a church which presumably has kept this tradition, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, has declined at the same time and just as fast at the ELCA.

The church as “morals police” is another role hard to let go of. Speaking this week in Fatima, Portugal, Pope Benedict declared that abortion and gay marriage are some of the most “insidious and dangerous” threats to the world today. Hearing this it’s hard not to recognize that an obsession with rooting out evil only leads to a complete distortion of one’s view of the world and of reality—and of Jesus. Ecological destruction is not a threat, even as a runaway well is dumping thousands of gallons of toxic oil into the ocean? Nuclear terrorism isn’t a threat, even as weapons multiply, their control weakens and global tensions increase? Economic injustice isn’t a threat as millions lose jobs, despair for their future, and the world’s wealth shifts ever more to the industrial titans at the top of the financial pyramid?

When in the 4th century the Roman Emperor Constantine formally embraced Christianity it was for one purpose: to find a new social glue to hold his tottering empire together. Sadly, the church’s leadership enthusiastically embraced this role and the prestige and power it gave them. In the centuries since the church has continued to view itself in this way, even as political and economic powers have found new and much more affective means for achieving Constantine’s goals.

The church’s pretense to either earthly or heavenly power now simply looks pathetic. It’s no wonder people today walk by the church’s door bemused and shaking their heads, if they notice it at all. What Robin Meyers and many others have recognized is that Jesus would be among them. The church established in his name has become exactly what Jesus himself railed against, an institution that is irrelevant when it’s not being oppressive.

As I wrote a couple weeks ago, however, people and the world still have real and important spiritual needs. Religion still can and should serve a genuine purpose, such as the five functions I quoted by Philip Goldberg. Such religion can’t be engaged in turf battles with religious and secular rivals. It can’t be obsessed with controlling people’s morality and personal lives. It can’t be distracted by theological disputes over words and rituals.

Rather, religion must do what Jesus did nearly two thousand years ago. It must take seriously people’s individual lives. It must help us see and understand two things: our lives and our world as they really are and how they could and should be. It must lead us to care for one another even as it leads us to a new appreciation of who we ourselves uniquely are.

Meyers quotes the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart: “This then is salvation: to marvel at the beauty of created things and to marvel at the beauty of their Creator.” For the “Jesus movement” to regain any value or relevance, it must return to the very beginning and affirm the Bible’s understanding of our world and everything in it. In the first chapter of the first book, God looks on everything he has made and proclaims it all “very good.” In the second chapter Adam and Eve are placed in the garden to “till it and keep it.”

This world is indeed a beautiful marvel and we are the ones responsible for caring for it, which includes caring for each other. Reminding people of that and challenging those who failed to do that, especially those with power and authority, was Jesus’ message and mission. It is also what Jesus asked his followers to do. For the sake of the world, the church needs to get back to following that Jesus.

Death throes or birth pangs? (Sunday Reflections for April 11, 2010)

For years The Lutheran has been the country’s largest circulation denominational magazine. It may still hold that rank but, if so, today it is in a much smaller field. Print media in general is in decline and then being tied to declining institutions is a double whammy. In recent years several church magazines have closed (some replaced by online versions) as have some non-denominational religious journals.

Circulation for The Lutheran has certainly dropped. One thing that used to keep it up was the congregational subscription plan whereby churches, at reduced cost, could subscribe for all their member households. Many churches have dropped these to save money and most were not replaced by individual subscriptions.

As with the church in general, The Lutheran has had trouble figuring out its purpose or identity. Early in the ELCA’s life it was reporting regularly on the denomination’s struggles to get going. Many synodical bishops criticized all the “negative press” implying the magazine was somehow being disloyal. The message got through and ELCA news was reduced while more articles were devoted to congregational and personal life issues.

The result was a magazine that became increasingly bland and repetitive. I’ve heard it described as a Lutheran Guideposts or even Readers Digest. Many clergy I know say the only things they look at are the obituaries. The one section most often criticized is the Letters to the Editor. Ironically as the articles became “happier” these letters became angrier, sometimes vitriolic. Given the selection that was printed I can only imagine the tone of those left out.

According to Editor Daniel Lehmann, the current April issue has a “Cover story full of risks.” In his editorial he acknowledges that for the past four years The Lutheran “tamped down” its coverage of the ongoing debate over gay clergy. Supposedly ending that embargo, this issue’s feature story reports the fallout to date over last summer’s Churchwide Assembly actions. To avoid any appearance of bias, the magazine contracted the story out to Lutheran Chicago Sun-Times reporter Sandra Guy.

Lehmann needn’t have worried. In his editorial he says that past reporting was “straightforward news” of “official actions” limited mostly to “he said, she said” accounts. For whatever reason, this almost exactly describes this issue’s story. Guy provides almost no personal analysis but rather strings together dozens of quotations of lay members, pastors and bishops. The views of proponents of the assembly action, opponents, as well as those on the fence are all reported.

The article has nothing surprising to report. Many are happy, many are sad and/or angry, and many are unsure what to make of the acceptance of gay clergy. A few congregations have voted to leave the ELCA and more may follow but thus far the numbers do not look significant. Contributions are down but the biggest cause for that may be the recession. Opposition is strongest in small town and rural congregations, especially those which were formerly ALC. Support is strongest in synods with predominantly urban and suburban memberships.

Much more interesting is Guy’s article which follows the cover story, based primarily on an interview with ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson. Basically Hanson says the church needs to move on: “I’m patient with the process of decision-making, but I’m not putting ministry and mission on pause in the meantime.” While last year’s assembly action is still important to process, Hanson says there are bigger issues which the ELCA has been confronting long before this:

The changes of our demographics didn't begin with the Churchwide Assembly. We have been becoming a smaller church body in membership, increasingly older than the U.S. population, and a predominantly white denomination in an increasingly multiethnic and multicultural world. So in the larger context, what does it mean to be faithful, evangelical Lutherans in this changing context? Those questions will continue to be foremost.

While Hanson’s analysis is largely accurate it is also somewhat disingenuous. Many would argue that the decision to allow gay clergy was exactly the kind of step the church needs to make to be more relevant and connected to the contemporary world. The problem, of course, is that a lot of people don’t want to make that connection. What would it mean for the ELCA to draw in new, younger, more ethnically diverse members? How could it not mean making the ELCA a dramatically different church which very likely would alienate many of its current members?

This, of course, is exactly the dilemma faced by countless congregations of all Christian stripes, even those thought to have figured out how to be “relevant.” For years the Crystal Cathedral was seen as a model of a new way to do church. Started by Robert Schuler in the 1950s, his new essentially non-denominational church reached out to the young post-war families pouring into southern California. His stunning glass church seated thousands and came into the homes of millions more through its TV ministry.

It is now reported that the Crystal Cathedral is $55 million in debt, has a list of unpaid vendors as long as your arm, and was forced to cancel both its epic Christmas and Easter holiday shows (the Christmas show would have been its 30th anniversary). The church has been unable to find a successor for the now elderly Schuler. His son was kicked out as the church’s new pastor when his leadership was deemed inadequate. Yet this is surely a symptom of the larger question of what direction to take the church now that the demographic it appealed to originally has largely disappeared. What if the new people really don’t like all that glass?

Prior to the ELCA’s formation, and when he was still a skeptic of the proposal, the ALC’s last Bishop David Preus said Lutheranism’s biggest challenge was that “the boats have stopped coming.” By that he meant the biggest source of new American Lutherans had been immigration, and that was now over. Thirty years later American Lutheranism still has not figured out how to create a new identity and purpose for itself.

As much upheaval as last summer’s assembly action caused it may be only a start. If Lutheranism is going to have a future it may take many more such changes for the church to transform itself into something relevant and appealing to contemporary people. In other words, to quote Jesus (and only somewhat out of context), this may be only the beginning of the birth pangs. Whether the church has the commitment, energy, and the stomach for more such wrenching course changes only time will tell. Given how rapidly and dramatically our culture is changing, however, time may not be something we have much of.

Not so many Methodists

There has been a lot of speculation on whether the ELCA’s current financial woes are the result of the approval of gay clergy at last summer’s churchwide assembly. The other explanation, of course, is that it’s the result of the country experiencing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Supporting the latter view is the report this week from The United Methodist Church that both its income and its membership have dropped significantly. National church receipts in 2009 were 84% of what was budgeted. This accelerated a trend from the previous year. Spending in local congregations dropped 3.63% in 2008 (the most recent year available for local data). UMC officials attributed the drops to the recession.

Of perhaps bigger concern is the full percentage point drop in membership in 2008, the largest since 1974. UMC membership has dropped from a peak of 10.8 million in 1968 to the current 7.8 million—a 28% decline in forty years.

An interesting category the UMC tracks are the number of people considered “constituents,” people somehow affiliated with UMC congregations but who are not members. This figure increased 1%. Church executive Scott Brewer interprets this (correctly I believe) as evidence of the growing number who are involved with churches but are reluctant to become church members.

I think he goes awry, however, when he concludes that this increase means “the picture may not be as bleak as the membership data alone indicates.” There is no reason to see an increase in “constituents” as a prelude to increased membership. Rather, it simply confirms the trend experienced by most churches that people’s relationships with churches are increasingly distant and temporary. Younger adults, especially, choose selectively among church activities and move in and out of church as they choose. The life-long church member is becoming a very rare breed.

One other statistic of interest was membership changes at the extremes of congregation size. “Churches with memberships of 100 and less reported a decline in membership of 2.25 percent, while churches with 3,000 and more members increased membership by 1.9 percent.” Small congregations have, until recently, been the backbone of mainline churches. One of the legacies of the Great Recession may be to permanently change that makeup. Not only are small congregations not competitive in a time of cafeteria Christianity, they are now financially unworkable, absent a large financial endowment. It seems almost certain that mainline denominations will increasingly be made up of fewer yet larger congregations.

Holy crap

The chorus is growing of those calling for major rethinking and restructuring of the American church. I’m not aware yet of people within denominational structures issuing such calls but they surely must be hearing and reading them. Those calls must be hard to hear, though, since the conclusion of many is that such denominational structures need to experience some of the most radical transformation and downsizing.

One recent essay comes from Walter Russell Mead, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also the son of Loren Mead, an Episcopal priest and founder of the Alban Institute. For many years Alban has provided critical reflection on the deteriorating state of mainline Christianity in the US.

In “The Holy Crap Must Go” Walter Mead argues for a drastic downsizing of congregational and denominational facilities, structures and staffs. He parallels this with Luther and the reformers’ campaign against (among other things) the ridiculous accumulation of holy relics around the church and the absurd understanding of Christianity they facilitated.

Mead makes the now obvious case that churches simply cannot afford the parish buildings, professional clergy, seminaries and regional and national church bureaucracies that mainline Christianity (and others) have built up over the past century and more. The world has changed but churches have not kept up:

[T]hey are in trouble because they are trying to address the problems of the twenty first century with a business model and a set of tools that date from the middle of the twentieth. The mainline churches in particular are organized like General Motors was organized in the 1950s: they have cost structures and operating procedures that simply don’t work today.

This is an important observation and Mead is right that many/most institutions in society are struggling with these changes. In his brief description of a downsized church, however, he seems to be making a virtue of necessity. It just isn’t clear that after clearing away all the “crap” there will be much left to the church that will be of real interest to many people. Laity-led house churches will appeal to some (as they do now) but somehow it seems this is just acknowledging a trajectory already well established. “Church” will just be one of countless options people have providing opportunities for socializing, spirituality, service to others, and personal support. How well will church compete with the heath club, yoga class, 12-step meeting, or book group? How well does it now? It’s not hard to imagine future historians seeing this as the time that “the church” came to an end, even if Christianity somehow continues perhaps as a life-stance not unlike Buddhism.

Mark Christianson responds to Mead at his blog, Theological Oddments, that the church is having an “identity crisis, not [a] structural crisis.” I think he is right in putting the emphasis on identity but I am not sure the two are ultimately that different. I don’t think he or Mead realize how much of mainline Christianity’s identity is tied up in its structure, or to what degree that structure was created to support that identity. This is more obvious with Roman Catholicism but Protestantism is not nearly as different as it might present itself to be.

Christianson is commendably honest in admitting he doesn’t have an answer to the church identity question. In that admission, however, he points to why church leaders have been so reluctant to take it up: they don’t have an answer either. The result, as both Christianson and Mead realize, is a church that spins out endless programs, projects, experts and layers of administration, all to ensure that “things happen.” (When I questioned my bishop recently about a new synod congregational renewal program which has little if any prospect for success, he responded, “Well, we have to do something, don’t we?”) There is no basis for evaluating them or for promoting some while getting rid of others. Chaos results when the money runs out, as is the case now.

The reality is that over a century of critical biblical scholarship and theological reflection have chiseled away virtually all of the church’s pre-modern identity, and no modern or post-modern reconstruction has emerged as a convincing replacement. On top of this, dramatic cultural changes have eliminated or provided alternatives for most of the social needs met by religious communities, regardless of theology. The unspoken fear of church leaders is that if we get rid of the “holy crap,” there may not be anything left.

The bottom line is that Americans by the tens of millions have voted with their feet. Church is now something a majority of people simply don’t need or want, at least on any frequent basis. And the church cannot make the case, with real honesty or enthusiasm, why they should.

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.