Saturday, February 29, 2020

LESSONS FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM


I spent the better part of January in the UK, as a part of Epicenter Group's coaching work this year with 26 British pastors. From London to Wales to Scotland and down again to Cornwall and Norfolk on the southwestern and southeastern coasts, Beth Estock and I saw almost every kind of ministry setting. People have asked what we learned. Here are some observations: 
 
(1) The cultural similarities between the USA and the UK are clear: the biggest difference is that the British are about thirty years ahead of us in terms of secularization. (I define secularization simply as life lived without much regard for organized religion.) The relevance of organized religion to Oregonians and to people in Down-east Maine is about the same already as what you see in the UK. They are also about as multi-ethnic as we are in the USA, but with a different ethnic mix of people.
 
(2) This felt like a trip to our Future: I first traveled to London with my dad nearly four decades ago. At that time, we found churches in decline but still with a lot of pulse. Spurgeon's Tabernacle (Baptist), for example, still gathered 200 people for Sunday night service back then. Southwark Cathedral Vespers on Sunday gathered a good crowd of neighborhood people and a youth choir. The British church then was a lot like the American church now. Fast-forward, and the churches are closing, one after another. Only about one percent of young adults relate to any church. Methodist churches once grew large in the UK, larger than the Church of England in many communities.   Today those big buildings are decrepit and being sold off. As they grew older and smaller, the churches formed ever-larger circuits, so that today a pastor might have seven congregations in order to provide one pastoral salary. One or two of the seven might have 30 or more in worship, with the rest in single digits. The average age in these churches is often past 80! Not a misprint. Obviously this cannot go on much longer, before it all collapses. Perhaps half the churches the UK will close this decade - and there would be even more closings were there not endowment to pay for clergy to run empty buildings in many places. UK 2020 is where most of the historic American denominations will be in the year 2050 based on current trends.
 
(3) Some current British faith leaders wish they could have taken a trip to the future back in 1980 and seen what was coming in order to shock the status quo and to have taken action to create more relevant ministry. They are glad that we Americans have a chance to learn from their experience and to lead differently than they led.
  
(4) The church still works for a small fraction of people in the UK in two kinds of places: first, in the places where there has been less demographic change, such as their heartland (which they call the Midlands). Many churches have closed in the Midlands, but it seemed to be one part of the country where new churches have a decent chance to take root and thrive. The other place is any neighborhood with first-generation immigrants from countries where church was an important part of their lives.   Many London suburban churches are virtually all black, with cultural roots in West Africa and the Caribbean.   However, these latter churches are rarely growing as their adult children secularize and the communities around them change.   
  
(5) In the past decade there has been notable renewal within evangelical circles of the Anglican communion and other groups in the UK, but this renewal has not nearly been able to keep pace with the people dying and leaving the church. The Fresh Expressions movement started in England, as did Alpha and other initiatives that are currently finding some traction in the USA. But memo to American church leaders: Fresh Expressions and Alpha did not change the death spiral of the British church.
  
(6) Clear away all this bramble of institutional church, and you will see green shoots coming up virtually everywhere! In fact, the green shoots tend to do better when the old church breathes its last - so that the culture and anxieties of yesterday's church no longer blocks the way of the new! In so many places, we saw innovation happening, and new ways arising for gathering, serving, worshiping and partnering in community.   It became clear to us that the massive energy steered toward helping the existing institution survive into its late geriatric years has sabotaged new forms of ministry for many years. We can hope that as the old thing collapses that the work of innovation and birthing new ministry may grow a bit easier.  

(7) Laity run circles around clergy as nimble innovators. As a rule, they are less bought into the dying ecclesial regime and a bit more independent of clerical oversight and the endless meetings required of clergy. This reminds me of what the Chinese church learned after Chairman Mao shipped off all the pastors to prison camps in the 1960s. They learned that a church, freed from a clergy-centric addiction, thrives!
 
I came away from the trip with a sense that some sort of Spiritual Awakening is coming to the West, perhaps in my lifetime - and with a deep sense that it will be very different than past awakenings. In Spiral Dynamics terms, think forward to Turquoise, rather than looking back to double down in Blue.
 
What a marvelous and interesting season to be in ministry!
 




 
 
 
 
 

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