The most notable aspect of this moment in history is unending crisis. We have entered a season where there are so many crises that our reptilian brains are shifting into overdrive. Church as we designed it (for the much more stable world of 2019 and earlier) is now not only boring: it is (quite frankly) ridiculous.
People have been slowly checking out on us for decades. And yet our status quo has continued: shrinking crowds in over-sized buildings. We blithely continue to tweak our inherited paradigm of church-in-a-building, offering comforting ritual and therapeutic life coaching on Sunday mornings. The decline in Britain (where Epicenter Group does about 40 percent of our work) has run ahead of North America by at least two decades. But now suddenly the American church is playing a fast game of catch-up!
And given the fact that the political and social crises are arguably greater in the USA presently, we may soon pass them up in the utter irrelevance and tone deafness of our inherited ministries.
Meanwhile the world has moved on. And it has gone mad.
The crisis now burns in every direction. It is economic. It is culture war. It is renewed racism and xenophobia. It is police officers utterly lacking in emotional intelligence. It is a war in Ukraine that at any moment could go global and nuclear. It is climate: a hail storm of Exodus proportions across Nebraska earlier this summer… fires, drought and oceans about to rise several feet and to submerge Miami and New Orleans. It is automatic fire arms, so widely distributed in America that the strongest gun legislation imaginable would not stop the mass shootings for many years. It is housing costs, so out of step with common wages that millions of American families will have to either explore communal living or live in squalor. It is debilitating student loan debt from which there is no escape. It is children running wild while parents work their second jobs. It is artificial intelligence, stealthily advancing and poised to take away half of those jobs. It is rising hunger. It is addiction. It is a pandemic that doesn’t want to end.
All of it has melded into a single giant firestorm.
Out of such a season, there will be revolution. That is a given. The world as we have known it is passing away. America as we have known it, the same. And the church… ditto. Public education, we could go on. Nostalgia will not save us. Giant-ass TVs and self-driving cars are useless to save us.
The lovely town in which we live now has more marijuana dispensaries per capita than churches - and most of our residents would say the dispensary is more relevant to their current life conditions than the church.
Forget church revitalization. Wash that unhelpful word out of your mouth! We can’t tweak our churches to the places God calls us to go, bringing Gospel hope to a time like this! Nothing short of revolution is helpful from here forward.
Where do we go next?
I have a few ideas. But I just turned 60 this summer. My formative years did not prepare me for the scale of creativity and imagination required to lead us into the promised land of a vital and relevant 21st century church. However, the youngest among us, the Gen Z folks, who are coming of age in these new life conditions- I believe they will have the audacious holy imagination necessary to create new institutions, new alliances, new life paradigms, possibly a new US Constitution! And they will birth an amazing new church. They will figure out the weird dance between digital reality and ordinary space and apply their wisdom to all of this.
In the short run, I am going to do the following.
(1) Recognize that the world I knew is slipping away. I will name it and grieve it. Denial is not my friend, nor my church’s friend. In the chaos, a lot of people are moving backward into what Spiral Dynamics labels as the red zone - I am required as a pastor to meet them there, not to scold them for responding to their life conditions with defensiveness. Think: ministry in a mental war zone.
(2) Pray for young people. Mentor young people. Hang out and dream with young people. I would love to be able to coach (or at least cheer for) a few of the folks who create the new order.
(3) Gather around tables and fires with people of good will. Break bread and tell stories. Humans have done this in every age. Holy Communion is just the Christian twist on something deeply elemental to all of human life across the millennia.
(4) Shift to a more expansive understanding of discipleship. We disciple people to release them with power into the world, not into church leadership. We have dynamic resources to help people find their best lives!
(5) Embrace humility and shift into a mode of deep listening. Invite all sorts of voices into my heart space. Listen. Pray. Meditate on Bible. Listen some more.
(6) When, in the listening, I hear a word that sounds like God, I will test it with others so that my hearing might be further refined.
(7) When others hear a word, I will stop what I’m doing and give them my full, hopeful attention.
(8) When I’m pretty sure it’s God’s voice, I will act in an instant. No ten-year study committees. I will try things. I will risk failure. I will prototype crazy ideas. And I will seek to partner with young people at every step.
(9) And as for me (and my house) we have chosen to still hang out at the church house on Sundays - but only in churches where we find bright eyes and hearts attuned to discover God’s next Things. I refuse to waste good energy in a dead church from this point on.
That’s my new “best practices” list for a season of crisis.
A blessed summer to each of you!
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