Letter to my bishop--or how not to advance my career (Sunday Reflections for May 17, 2009)

I recently wrote our synod bishop to express my frustration with his “Turnaround Synod Initiative” (TSI), a plan to assist congregations to reverse their loss of members. There are few details at this point (those are promised for our convention next month), but what is obvious is that it is yet another attempt to patch our leaking boats with no more prospects for success than any of our previous efforts. Here is what I had to say:
 
Dear Bishop Miller:

I have been thinking, speaking and writing about the church’s decline for quite awhile. I am very aware of the challenges churches are facing and understand the inclination and even the sense of urgency “to do something”. In a crisis situation, however, that is often not the best first step and I think that is true in this case. “Doing something” implies we understand the problem when, in fact, I don’t believe we do. As a result, the “Turnaround Synod Initiative” (like similar previous efforts) will fail to achieve its goals, resulting in wasted resources, discouragement and frustration.

As I know you are aware, the decline of the church in the US has been long in the making. Membership in mainline denominations peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Both the ALC and LCA were shrinking prior to the merger forming the ELCA and reversing this was one of the hopes for the new church. Instead, the decline has continued with hardly a pause. The recent ARIS report showed that the number of self-identified Lutherans (of all stripes) has declined 25% in less than twenty years. By most measures, that would qualify for “falling off a cliff” status.

There is nothing to indicate these trends will change in the foreseeable future. Indeed, things may get worse. ARIS showed 30% of Gen X/Y young adults claiming no religious affiliation, the highest percentage ever recorded. The mortality rate of our congregations’ members will only increase as their average age continues to climb and we have little prospect of balancing that, let alone improving on it, with new younger members. The well publicized ARIS and Pew reports show this trend is nationwide and, to varying degrees, across the denominational spectrum.

As a result, I don’t see how TSI is going to be anything but an exercise in frustration. Your letter’s words about how every congregation “is a potential mission outpost” and many “are ready and willing to rise to the challenge” and “unleash the energy for mission” intend to stir enthusiasm but sound to me more like whistling past the graveyard. I fundamentally disagree that giving our congregations “some help and encouragement” will reverse or even stop the slide so many of them are experiencing. This kind of thinking serves only to enable us to hide from unpleasant realities and avoid dealing with real problems. Where is there any evidence that this situation is now changing? What have we learned that we didn’t know before, that we can now apply and which would make a difference? Setting ambitious goals and providing leadership training, coaches, consultants, and “resources” are the types of things we have been trying for decades. This is a classic example of “If it doesn’t work, do more of it” thinking.

The obvious rejoinder to this is: Well what would you do? In regards to our shrinking membership, I don’t know that there is anything we can do. I believe there are cultural forces at work here that are beyond our control. That does not mean, however, that the church will simply evaporate. It does mean that the church is going to be a different institution and play a different role in our society. We can influence that transition but only if we work at it. Efforts like TSI, however, prevent such planning and action by maintaining the illusion that fundamental change is not necessary and that if we all just work a little harder we can get things back to where they were before. That dog just won’t hunt.

Therefore, one of the most important things to be done now is to stop the denial that is going on at every level: churchwide, synods, and congregations. I believe this is a real leadership need, to name the situation clearly and honestly and to acknowledge that it is unlikely to change anytime soon. Engaging in this denial is resulting in frustration, anger, blaming, and guilt. Parishioners, pastors, bishops, and national church executives and staff all engage in finger pointing accusing each other of being lazy, incompetent, unfaithful, unimaginative, etc. Such behavior only serves to make the situation worse. To counteract the denial we need instead healthy doses of honesty and empathy.

We need to be talking at all levels about what should be done now to manage our shrinking resources. What kind of national and regional church management do we really need and can we really afford? Can we honestly expect to continue operating eight seminaries as we do? Can we continue to maintain the model of full-time professionally educated clergy in the face of higher seminary costs, rising student debt load, and the declining number of congregations able to afford a full-time pastor? Can we continue to maintain the model of the stand-alone congregation, with its own staff and its own building? Are there other ways to do ministry? What ministry ought we to be doing? In short, how can we think about new ways of “doing church”?

While I grew up when American Lutheranism was at its peak, my ministry has been during the years of decline. I have seen an unending parade of proposals, from the sublime to the ridiculous, to “fix” our problems. I have been in countless conversations with the theme of “What we really need is . . . a new pastor, another pastor, a youth director, a new building, a new hymnal, more Bible study, air conditioning, a new organ, guitars and drums, free child care, an elevator, more liturgy, less liturgy, better stewardship, more advertising.” And the list goes on and on. We’ve all been there. And now comes TSI to continue this unending and fruitless search for a panacea. When will it occur to us that we are barking up the wrong tree? That we are asking the wrong questions? That we need to think about the church and the world in which we live in a new way?

Right now, at a minimum, we need to be talking to each other. There is so much pain, anger and frustration among pastors and congregations as they try to manage the continuous loss of members and resources. We need our leaders to publicly and honestly recognize our difficulties and admit we really don’t know what to do about them. This sounds simple but I don’t think it will be. Denial has a very strong grip. That grip needs to be loosened, however, before we can move forward. We need to let go of what was and isn’t coming back before we can recognize and reach out for the new opportunities before us. In other words, there needs to be some dying before there can be a rebirth (John 12:24).

I know I have been blunt but that has only been because I see us trapped in an endless loop of stale thinking and fruitless endeavors. We need to shake ourselves out of our stupor. To take a genuinely new direction will be a long and difficult project which we haven’t even begun yet. This is my appeal for us to get off the treadmill and actually start moving, or at least shoot the starting gun.

I will post his reply and my thoughts about it in a couple days.

Sunday Reflections for March 15, 2009: "More signs of the end of religion as we know it"

“None.” That’s the identifying label for people in the fastest growing religious group in the country. This is one result from the massive (over 50,000 responses) American Religious Identity Survey (ARIS) 2008 released this week by Trinity College in Connecticut. This is the third such survey, with previous ones done in 1990 and 2001.

Now making up 15% of the population, the “no religion” group is the only one that increased in size in every state and now ranks third behind only Roman Catholics and Baptists. If those who didn’t know or refused to answer the question were added to this group, it would rise to second place. The number of those declining any religious identity has doubled since the first survey in 1990.

The ARIS survey puts hard numbers to trends that have been growing increasingly obvious. Americans’ religious affiliations are changing in a hurry. Some examples:

• The number of white Catholics is declining, especially in the Northeast and Midwest. Nationally, however, Catholic membership remains basically steady because of the growing Hispanic population, particularly in the Southwest.
• Evangelical denominations, like Baptists, seem to be declining in favor of non-denominational churches.
• Mainline church memberships (Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, etc.) continue to be in near freefall, declining by a third in less than twenty years.
• In fact, in the time since the first survey no denomination or religion grew by more than half a percentage point. As a result, the number of those identifying themselves in some way as Christian fell from 86% in 1990 to 76% in 2008, with the resulting movement almost entirely to the “no religion” category.

Another interesting result is that the only Christian identities showing any significant increase are those that are the vaguest. Among these are responses like “Christian”, “non-denominational Christian”, and “Evangelical/Born Again.” Groups often thought to be growing (Assemblies of God, Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses) actually just held steady, thus growing only relative to other declining religious groups.

And finally, closer to home, Lutherans (of whatever brand) declined by 25% from the 1990 to 2008. This is a little better than the average for mainline denominations but is nonetheless an astonishing drop for such a short period. Some of this decline seems to be among those who had already ceased being actual church members but still identified themselves as Lutheran. Even now the survey reports more Lutherans than are actually on church membership rolls. We might guess that many of these have switched to calling themselves “Christian” or “Protestant”, and some certainly are saying “none of the above.” In any case, this fits with a 30-year decline in official Lutheran denominational statistics.

ARIS indentifies some causes for these trends. The significant drop in Roman Catholics in New England is certainly due in part to the clergy sex abuse scandals. This is very similar to what happened in Ireland. Also, the Northeast now has the largest number without a religious identity (displacing the Pacific Northwest from that spot). ARIS speculates that the drop in those identifying as Christian in New England and elsewhere may be because that label is increasingly identified with conservative political and social views. It has been true for some time that when “Christian” is added to “radio, music, books, lifestyle”, etc. it almost always means evangelical or fundamentalist.

For a number of years, a common view was that formerly “establishment” or mainline Christian denominations were losing members to more conservative evangelical churches. While true in part, this survey confirms that this is only one aspect of a larger trend away from organized religion altogether.

Mainline churches are straddling a shrinking middle ground which, like a fault line, is moving in opposite directions. Increasingly their members either join more conservative churches or stop participating in church at all. These Protestant churches, with their roots in the Reformation, are finding it more and more difficult to make the case for their moderate theology and traditional worship. They’re viewed as too modern for some and not modern (or postmodern) enough for others. And ARIS shows something similar is happening in Catholicism.

For the Protestant mainline these changes are coming with breathtaking speed. Congregations are closing by the hundreds each year. Denominational administrative offices go through successive rounds of budget cuts and layoffs. The current economic upheaval will undoubtedly cause more staff and program trimming in congregations and church bureaucracies. And the traditional model of a highly (and expensively) educated fulltime clergy will likely soon be unsustainable, as rising student debt loads collide with stagnant or declining clergy salaries.

Remarkably little of this is being discussed publicly in these churches, though it is the frequent topic of private conversation among clergy and church leaders. For the moment, the response has been piecemeal and ad hoc, shrinking and closing existing institutions as necessary.

This certainly won’t work indefinitely. The challenge now is to have the courage to honestly admit the new realities. Then, and only then, can the church take up the necessary task of thinking creatively how to reimagine itself for this new time when, for more and more people, religion has ceased to be a necessary or even meaningful measure of one’s identity.