Typically, I work with leaders and churches who are motivated to strive toward new realities. This creates something of an illusion for me in terms of how bad the crisis is in most churches. However, in the last year, I started working more with judicatories, where churches are assigned or suggested to Epicenter Group. In these experiences I come to see things more the way the average Methodist superintendent sees things: where the vast majority of churches are late life cycle with a closing window of opportunity for renewal.
This past week, in conversation with one superintendent, I realized that there are four horses marching through many congregations. I am not counting old age - because I do continue to find very old people with beautiful disciple hearts. Old age correlates with apocalypse, but it is not a problem in and of itself. Nor am I counting secularism - though it is thinning out the ranks of young adults in organized religion more with each generation. Also, I am not counting whiteness - in the old line denominations, the membership is typically more than 90 percent Caucasian. This also correlates with much of the trouble I am about to unpack, but I can show you plenty of white people who are not defensive about race and who are embracing what it means to live in a pluralistic society.
Here are the four horses:
1. The Pandemic (obviously). It disrupted life big time. A lot of churches did not have the energy, creativity or nimbleness to adopt new approaches quickly in the spring of 2020. Some just opened the building back up and pretended there was no pandemic. A few early adopters allowed Covid to kick them out of their rut into fresh strategies. But many churches simply under-functioned for a year and a half. Some offered neither live worship nor digital experiences for a significant length of time. In many churches, there came a point where every additional month they waited to begin gathering again physically resulted in more and more persons leaving their fellowship.
2. The national conversation on Race. Many of us become complacent after the Obama election. We were naive about the extent to which racist ideas and reactions still pulsed through our most those churches. Racism is the elephant still in many a room.
3. The never-ending controversy about Human Sexuality. Though largely settled in vast segments of our culture, it is still dividing many heartland churches. Both in the UK and in the USA, this issue carries more emotion than logic says it should. Talk about a trigger issue! For the left and the right, how churches respond to this has become the main litmus test of whether a church is moving with God. As denominations finally settle into their 21st century approaches to sexuality issues, idealists are seldom satisfied on either side of any question. People on both sides of the issues are wearing out and leaving.
4. Trumpism. This political phenomenon has politicized the first two horses - and made them much more damaging than they would otherwise have been. Churches are finding this divergence of political world view to be harder than anything they have encountered before. In parts of the USA where Trump won the votes in 2020, people have left mainline churches over all sorts of reasons - often tied to political rage.
A decade ago, we feared only horse number three. Now we have four horses running amok simultaneously. Hence, the declines have sped up mightily. Clergy are exhausted and discouraged.
Church growth is a joke now in many quarters - wishful thinking and beyond most pastors’ wildest hopes. Few signed up for this. Young people are more averse to institutional religion than ever.
This is a mess. Few churches will be able to pass through this era without losing folks. Those who do grow will be clear in their values and often align unapologetically with one side or another in the cultural food fights underway. The best outcome I see is churches finding clear vision even at the cost of losing a few more of their core folks - and then living boldly into a future that will look markedly different than the past. All of these horses have disrupted us - few churches can will themselves to rise about these disruptions - we are going to have to roll with them.
The 2020s are just going to be really different than the years that came before.
Programs, paradigms, benchmarks and expectations that were developed prior to 2020 are often going to cause more discouragement than help! Time for new approaches and for helping our leaders recover from this brutal season. God will show us new opportunities - but we are still living in the crisis - and it is important that we understand this. Denial will only make things worse.
We can look only to God as our help in such a time of trouble.
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