Recently our local church, The United Methodist Church of Palm Springs, California, employed Gary Dexter as our first Bridge Builder. A Bridge Builder is a leader focused on a certain demographic or subset of the community, looking for opportunities of partnership and new programming that will build bridges between the church and community residents. The position applies community organizing practices in the quest to re-root a church with local people.
As we approach Thanksgiving 2024, that most American of holidays, the America that raised most of us has come to an end. There are different ways to look at it, ranging from Rome being sacked by the Vandals (a rather dreary comparison) to simply a nation being reborn at its 250 year marker, as occurred in the 1860s and again in the early to mid-Twentieth century. About every 80 years we transform. As the incoming administration takes a wrecking ball to government, for all that will be lost, there will be something fresh to rise from the rubble. It might be really good. Like New Deal-good! That 1930s fresh movement brought my family out of poverty.
I have written on this metaphor before, but it is a big enough deal that I am returning to it this month, as I zig zag back and forth working with churches and leaders across Britain. I am on a Saturday evening train Birmingham to Cardiff as I type this, on my way to preach at Radyr Methodist Church in Wales tomorrow.
One of the familiar refrains I hear as I coach pastors across North America and the UK is about how difficult church folks can be when asked to process change. It is easy to denigrate the people who are backbones of our churches as selfish, as thinking more about what they like personally than what would be effective in our mission.
For at least three generations now, the majority of mainline Protestant youth have left their churches by the time they reach adulthood. In each generation, a notable minority of these young persons choose to reactivate their participation when they become parents, usually in a congregation that has a strong children’s ministry. This tide now comes back in with diminishing force. Across 75 years, the overall decline has greatly cooked down the numbers of active younger people in mainline churches. The decline is further exacerbated by the fact that the minority who do return often don’t return to their home congregations at all. They congregate in a few places where minimum critical numbers of young families remain. Thus, most mainline Protestant congregations today have no active children remaining, and little promise for finding any.
The 2020 United Methodist General Conference, delayed four years, finally happened. From 2019 to today, the narrative of this denomination has been stunning in multiple ways. Historian Erik Larson could spin quite the page-turner if he ever decided to tackle this story. (Which he won’t!)
Among the facts:
First, what has been observed and noted widely: the losses churches sustained during Covid. That story is out.
Last year, my colleague Beth Estock pointed me to a Richard Rohr piece about Edge-walkers. This prompted me to go searching the use of the term, and to discover a 2006 book entitled Edgewalkers by Judi Neal. The reason for our fascination with the term: we both have become convinced that there is a new breed of leaders, who are especially helpful in this era, who walk with one foot in the established institutions but with another foot into the world beyond. These characters become bridge builders, prophets, instruments of renewal and more.
