Tag: Mainline Decline
1 Kill the Church
Last night I finished reading Lisa Bodell’s book, Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution. Back when I was a young, know-it-all elitist (hey, I’m not young anymore), I looked down my nose at business and leadership books. They were secular, shallow, consumerist and not theological I sneered.
Of course, that was before I realized:
A) mainline seminaries do an atrocious job of preparing pastors to…you know…actually lead, vision and fundraise for an organization and
B) the mainline churches those mainline seminaries aren’t preparing pastor to lead are in desperate straits, in desperate need of leadership and change.
So I’ve reassessed and have read a good number of book’s like Lisa Bodell’s. Some are good, some not so much- just like theological books. Kill the Company, is in the former category; in fact, it’s like a kick in the pants/splash of cold water/wake up call/epiphany sort of good.
Bodell’s basic premise is that what hold companies back and leads to failure isn’t their inability to dream big, identify the right next step or sketch goals. It’s their inability to let go of the status quo in order to achieve those dreams. Weighed down by the demands of the status quo, and all the internal processes, procedures and loyalties that come with it, employees never have the time to get to the vision thing. And after a while they cease believing change is possible.
Here’s the thing.
You could pretty much go through the entire book and just scratch out the word ‘company’ and in its place put ‘local church’ or ‘denomination.’ Her assessment is spot-on for what ails churches.
For example, here’s this from page 6:
In fact, too many
CEO’sDenominational Officials andexecutivesLaity refuse to see that what has generally been accepted as the undisputed path to success and profits is in many ways holding theircompanieschurches back. They have forgotten that greatbusinessministry is not just about improving on what you’ve got; it’s about inventing something different and better. So they insist thatemployeespastors try to build on bad things rather than allowing them to tear down the bad and do something new.TheyDenominations, Boards, Conferences et al implement supposedly innovation-enhancing programs that create additional layers of process, making it so difficult just to get things done thatpeoplepastors, staff and lay leaders no longer feel that they have control over their work. This leads them to resign any dreams they might have of making a real difference to thecompany. They become complacent zombie workers, repeating the same thing day after day, lacking any incentive to be innovative.The penalty for taking a risk is greater than it is for not taking any risk. Yet by definition, an innovative
companychurch is a place that embraces and rewards (smart) risk. It’s one where people are encouraged and, yes, paid to think. And question. And challenge. And experiment.
0 By the Power Vested in Me by this Mouse
I’ve often thought the NY Times wedding pages are a good harbinger of the trends to come. Long before ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ died a relatively quiet death and well before a seeming cultural consensus settled about homosexuality, the NY Times posted wedding announcements celebrating gay couples like they we just ordinary couples.
That’s not a comment on the rightness/wrongness of the issue; it’s just a comment that the Times foreshadow future trends.
So here’s another trend.
Those same wedding pages this week wrote a story about the ever-increasing trend of couples getting friends, duly vested in made-up online religions, to preside over their ceremony.
As much as I refuse to pimp myself out to marry couples who are just treating me in the same way they do the caterer, it’s also depressing that an increasing number of people prefer to circumvent any faith element in their wedding altogether.
This is the cultural climate in which we’ll need to figure out how to do Church into the future.
Here’s the article…and before you get your friend to perform your wedding after a few minutes on Google make sure he/she is legal.
IN the days leading up to their August wedding at the Ram’s Head Inn on Shelter Island, Kinara Flagg and Paul Fileri chose Andrew Case, a friend and former law school classmate of Ms. Flagg’s, to officiate.
In the eyes of the couple, Mr. Case, who had become a Universal Life minister through a quick online ordination, was the right man for the job. In the eyes of the law, however, Mr. Case, who was not a part of an active ministry, was officiating in the wrong county.
An increasing number of couples are steering away from traditional religious and civil wedding officiants in favor of friends and relatives who become ordained through online ministries. But many couples are unaware that while New York State recognizes marriages performed by those who became ministers by the power vested in a mouse, there are five downstate counties where such officiants are not technically legal.
Ms. Flagg and Mr. Fileri, who knew that Suffolk County on Long Island, which includes Shelter Island, was among the handful of no-online-minister zones in the state, obtained their marriage license in Monroe County (where Mr. Fileri grew up and which recognizes online ministries), making their wedding a legal union after all.
“It’s surprising that Suffolk County does not recognize these online ministers,” Ms. Flagg said.
Neither do the counties of Nassau, Westchester, Putnam or Dutchess, owing to a 1989 ruling by the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court in a case involving a Suffolk County couple who were then embroiled in a divorce. In that case, the court ruled that the couple’s marriage and prenuptial agreement were void because their officiant was a Universal Life minister.
Though Ms. Flagg speaks for many married couples when she says “we wanted a friend to marry us, someone who could speak about us to our friends and family, rather than a person who doesn’t really know us and recites a lot of formulaic vows,” it remains that Connecticut, Alabama, Virginia, Tennessee, a part of Pennsylvania and (of all places) Las Vegas do not necessarily recognize the credentials of officiants who were created, for better or worse, through such online ministries as the Universal Life Church, the Church of Spiritual Humanism, Rose Ministries and the Temple of Earth.
For many years, New York City also did not recognize online ministers, but in 2006 began allowing them to officiate at weddings in the five boroughs. But the appellate court’s ruling still holds for the other counties. (In September 2007, a couple in York County, Pa., who had been married two months earlier by an online minister received a call from a county clerk who told them that a judge had ruled that ministers who do not have a “regularly established church or congregation” cannot perform marriages under state law. Their marriage, they were told, might not be valid. Representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union advised them to seek help from the organization if the legality of their marriage was ever challenged.)
New York Assemblywoman Sandy Galef, a Westchester County Democrat, who has been trying since 2005 to pass a bill in Albany that would give online officiants legal power to marry couples throughout the state, said, “We need to change the law so that people everywhere can be legally married by online ministers.”
“I have had lots of conversations about this issue with the Judiciary Committee staff in Albany, and everyone knows something needs to be done,” Ms. Galef said. “I’m not quite sure what is blocking this bill. Is there opposition from priests, rabbis and other clergymen who see this as both a competitive and economic thing? I just don’t know.”
The Rev. Kent Winters-Hazelton, who once served in a no-online-minister zone at the United Community Church of Wantagh on Long Island, in Nassau County, and is now pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Lawrence, Kan., said that he understood why some states still do not recognize online ministers.
“In some places, there is still an understanding that certain qualifications have to be met by a minister or a justice of the peace before they are legally able to perform marriages,” he said. “And I agree with that.”
Here’s the rest of the article.
1 Do We Need to Make the Gospel Understandable to Modern Culture?
And are United Methodists now reaping the bitter fruit of having done so a century ago?
I’ve been reading Tim Keller’s new book, Center Church, the past week. In it, Keller gives much attention to the task/question of contextualization; that is, how we do communicate our message to the given context in which we live.
Keller notes that it’s not really a question of whether or not we should contextualize.
We can’t avoid contextualization unless we’re willing to avoid communication altogether. Every time we paraphrase a scripture passage, every time we extrapolate a point or a meaning, every time we settle upon what we think is the ‘plain sense’ of scripture we’re contextualizing BECAUSE, after all, we’re also a part of the culture and formed by it in ways we don’t always know.
Just ask Harrison Ford in Witness, Christians can’t avoid being in the world and we never really cease to be of the world either.
Preaching, then, is just a simpler term for contextualization.
So the question isn’t if we should translate the Gospel to culture but how.
Keller argues that Mainline (liberal) Christianity in the early 20th century sought to make Christianity palatable to the modern world by redefining orthodox Christian doctrine in naturalistic terms– terms stripped of a reliance upon revelation and the supernatural.
The result was a Christianity redefined thus:
The Bible is filled with divine wisdom, but this doesn’t mean it’s inerrant. It’s a human document containing errors and contradictions.
Jesus is the Son of God but this doesn’t mean he was preexistent or divine. He was instead a great man infused with God’s Spirit.
Jesus’ death is not a cosmic even that propitiates God’s wrath at Sin. It’s an example of sacrificial love that changes us by moving our hearts to follow his example.
Becoming a Christian, then, doesn’t entail the supernatural act of new birth (conversion prompted by grace). It means to follow the example of Jesus, follow the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount.
You can agree or not with Keller’s point of view, but there’s no question the breakdown above quite simply IS the dominant articulation of Christianity among most United Methodist (and other mainline traditions) churches and clergy.
This is what makes most mainline Christians ‘liberal’ even if they think of themselves as conservative politically.
Here’s Keller contention:
You can’t make such adaptations to what scripture is, who Jesus is, what the Cross does and how you become a Christian without creating a religion that is entirely new and alien to Christianity.
The Mainline/Liberal effort to reconcile Christianity to the modern world of the 20th century (the naturalistic world), Keller says, results not in an adaptation of Christianity but in an entirely new religion that contradicts orthodox Christianity.
Even if you would quibble with Keller’s characterization, his next question remains TNT:
By adapting the faith to the norms of the ‘modern early 20th century world’ did Mainline/Liberal Christianity back the wrong horse?
Mainline Christians a century ago assumed that what was ‘modern’ for them would remain so- that those who clung to a revelation-based, supernatural understanding of the faith would be judged to be on the wrong side of history.
Keller says this was a category mistake.
Late modernity and postmodernity, he notes, has rejected modernism’s confidence that science and reason can ultimately answer all our important questions and that technology can solve all our problems.
In other words, 100 years removed from Methodism’s capitulation to culture, that culture has shifted out from under the Church.
In other words, Mainline Christianity wedded itself to what is now a fading, obsolete view.
And since adapting its faith claims to the culture a century ago, Mainline Christianity has experienced steep decline; meanwhile, Pentecostalism (the least modern- Enlightenment based- form of Christianity) and Eastern Orthodox Christianity have grown exponentially in the past hundred years.
So its a cautionary tale.
The how of contextualization should refer more to our mode of communication than to the content of our confession.
0 We Must Not Speak His Name Speaks Again
HeWhoMustNotBeNamed speaks again. Apparently, I misread the gmail account.
And, apparently, HEWHOMUSTNOTBENAMED@gmail.com was already taken because the address is: <mustnotbenamedhewho@gmail.com>
My bad..
Here’s the latest anonymous message.
Nice try in outing me on your website.
1 Who is HEWHOMUSTNOTBENAMED@gmail.com?
As some of you may know, HE WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED is the moniker I sometimes use in sermons to protect the anonymity of a certain short-red-faced-bushy-eyebrowed-falls- asleep- before -the- doxology-generous- with- his- money- and- his- criticisms- parishioner (bless his heart).
Hilariously, now, one of YOU has taken this mantle and taken to emailing me cryptic, quasi-threatening emails from- yup- hewhomustnotbenamed@gmail.com
Here is an example:
Rev. Micheli,
1 My Plea to Churches: Take Down Your Lame Signs
Every day, two freaking times a day, I have to drive by one of those church signs with the individual letters you can move around like magnet poetry to create- supposedly- witty, catchy, thought-provoking, chicken-soup-for-the-vanilla-soul kind of messages. And on swim practice days, its 4x/day.
You’ve seen the ones.
‘Christianity: Some Assembly Required’
‘Life is fragile, handle with prayer.’
‘1 Cross + 3 Nails = 4Given’
‘America bless God’
‘One in the hand is worth two in the…just kidding.
Call me cynical (if you haven’t already) but I hate these signs. I’m sure some of you love them and think I’m cold and callous, but I think they’re lame.
My problem isn’t that these don’t communicate.
My problem is that I fear they communicate very well.
They say to anyone who’s never wanted to go to church before: ‘Stay away. We’re exactly what you thought we were.’
They say:
We’re not going to challenge you.
Our religion is the sentimental kind that will have about zero application to your life.
You don’t need to be here because the paradoxical message of Christ can be summarized in this lame Christian koan.
And this isn’t just me being cranky. In the book, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church, David Kinnaman notes that one of the most frequent reasons cited by young people is their impression that the Church is shallow.
So you see churches with lame signs only appeal to people inside churches not to the people who’ll be driving past your church come Sunday morning off to some other way to spend their time. Meanwhile, your sign conforms to all the impressions out there that Church isn’t a place of depth, unexpectedness or adventure.
Thus my plea…take down your lame sign.
And then there’s this sign, which has even more depressing suggestions of lameness (I mean…how did NO ONE in that church think that might be a double entendre).
0 Jesus Didn’t Help Everyone
I get calls all the time to my office from people shaking me down for money. Admittedly some of the calls are from people with a legitimate, sudden need where the church can be a helpful one-time help. However, working as a prison chaplain made me pretty good at recognizing a hustle.
On those days, when I decline to help the caller and instead direct them to one of our partner agencies in the community who are in a better position to assess their needs and route them through county services, it’s not uncommon for my refusal to help to be met by an angry rant about me being a Christian/pastor and I’m obligated to help everyone.
To which I sometimes reply (but always think): Jesus didn’t help everyone.
And he didn’t. Indeed for many an encounter with Jesus seemed to ruin their life not make it better (see: Young Man, Rich).
It can be shocking for readers of the Gospels to realize, perhaps after reading them straight through, that Jesus didn’t offer a miracle to everyone who needed one. He didn’t heal everyone who crossed his path.
His path to the cross was more important.
That the previous sentence will strike many of you as callous/conservative/dogmatic is revealing. I mean isn’t it telling that in many United Methodist churches the terms ‘mission’ and ‘outreach’ refer exclusively to works of mercy for the poor and refer not at all to professing our core conviction?
Richard Stearns’ is correct that oftentimes our definition of the Gospel has a ‘hole’ in it, yet the Gospel is still a bigger piece of our calling than is the hole.
I think we often lose sight (and I count myself guilty here too) that we serve the poor not because it’s a good thing to do (the Red Cross takes care of that), and not because Jesus told us to and we feel obligated (that would make us just as joyless and duty-bound as Pharisees).
We empty ourselves on behalf of the poor as an expression of our worship of the one who made himself poor so we might become rich. In turn, because Jesus made himself poor we serve the poor with eyes expecting to find him among the poor-who accordingly are actually rich- thus, engaging the poor, is no different than bible study. It’s how we grow more deeply in Christ.
Because mission and service are means of discipleship for us, it’s all the more important that how we engage those ministries reflects and is consonant with our confession about Jesus Christ.
Here’s how a post from Relevant Magazine puts it:
Christianity is about self-sacrifice, but if it’s not for the purpose and glory of Jesus, there really isn’t a point. We would love to tell others we believe it’s all about Jesus. Yet, our actions say we don’t. It’s obvious in how we give. We often give without researching the organizations we’re helping. And when we do research, our focus is often fiscal—what does my dollar accomplish?—not on Christ-inspired outcomes. We must ask, “How are lives being changed?”
For Jesus, the most important outcome possible is the glory of God. When on earth, He profoundly understood that everything should serve this purpose. He also understood that the connection to God’s glory came through His work on the cross, as the savior for God’s people. When we realize this, Jesus’ reasoning for allowing a woman to spend an entire expensive perfume flask on Him makes sense. Those around Jesus scold the woman, because the perfume could have been sold to help the poor. Jesus rebukes them, saying, “For the poor you always have with you, and you can do good for them whenever you want, but you do not always have me” (Mark 14:7). Jesus is foremost.
This is not to say that justice and mercy cannot be brought through non-Christian organizations, because it certainly can. Life change does that; life change also involving the good news of Jesus, though, is even better.
Click here to read the rest of Relevant’s Post.
4 One 20-Something’s Thoughts on Churchianity
As part of our God-Sized Vision sermon series, I’ve been pointing to the findings from the Pew Trust Survey’s data on religion and young people.
Here’s one 20-something’s (a friend) feedback on Church and Christianity. Write it off all you want. A handful of years and your church will be sending him/her mailings, promotions and wondering what you can do to get them interested in your church.
1. Church is decreasingly relevant to my life. Throughout my college career I have slowly become less involved (to not at all) and any thought that goes into faith is usually in discussion with others or in well meaning debate. I enjoy reading and talking about it, but don’t attend church regularly.
2. I associate the word ‘worship’ with very emotional-hands-in-the-air-bad-music-contemporary services, and general discomfort about being surrounded by that. I do like hymns….and bluegrass. The bluegrass worship on sunday morning blue ridge mountain radio is good. But generally followed by a fist-shaking, southern drawl infused, guilt trip. I think worship can be a positive, and have experienced that on mission trips.
3. My favorite part of worship has always been the sermon. I generally tune out to a lot of the other goings-on. I prefer digging in deep, and being critical in a constructive way. An hour of prayer concerns during a service does not make me feel more a part of the community – despite the small town sentiment I wish characterized the times I have had to listen to very gruesome descriptions of “my [insert distant family member]’s [insert personally revealing ailment]”
4. I think most people generally equate a lot of different ideas about christianity to stand true across the board. For example, if you are a Christian you don’t support gay marriage. Even though this is extremely ignorant, I don’t think it is uncommon. Also in college people tend to say that christians are very conservative, can’t have fun that isn’t team building etc. Formality and commitment seem to me to be big reasons why people I know are reluctant to become involved in a church setting. People are much more willing to consider issues/opinions/ideas around a table in the company of friends (with wine) than they are to have the same conversation in a church setting.
Don’t mean to sound so negative, but I figure a critical opinion will be good? Honest as well though. Hope this is sufficient.
0 No, United Methodists, the Gospel Requires Words
There’s a saying (cliche) that’s floated around the United Methodist Church for as long as I can remember: ‘Preach the Gospel. If necessary use words.” Despite how often people quote this, it’s stupid.
It’s attributed to St Francis of Assisi but frequency of citation has made it almost a Methodist slogan of sorts. And, like all cliches, there’s some wisdom once you dig to the bottom of it. In this case, our actions and way of life with others should be in concert with what we believe about the God who comes to us in Jesus Christ.
Sounds good and obvious, right?
However, it’s a cliche that depends upon bad, unhelpful theology. Tim Keller, in his book Center Church, points out that ‘Preach the Gospel. If necessary use words’ relies on the assumption that the Gospel is primarily about things we do to achieve salvation, in which case communicating the Gospel can be done without words.
But that’s not the Gospel.
The Gospel’s not a message of things we must do.
The Gospel’s a message about what we could /can not do for ourselves. The Gospel’s a message about what God has done for us, once and for all. And that’s not a message that’s self-interpreting or self-evident.
The Gospel requires preaching or, rather, proclamation. As scripture says, salvation comes by ‘hearing.’ Good works are the fruit of hearing the Gospel; they are not the Gospel.
Part of me fears Francis’ quote is so popular in the Methodist world because we’ve lost the ability and the boldness to proclaim, in pulpits and in every day speech, the Gospel. The cliche has become, for us, an excuse. (And part of me wonders if our denominational inability to communicate the Gospel is what has led to us being behind the curve in communicating via social media.)
But with all due respect to Francis, the message about the Word become flesh very definitely and even primarily requires words.
0 What the Church Can- No, Must- Learn from the Republicans
It’s nearly a week since election day. Most of us have settled back into our lives and Facebook is no longer a minefield of incivility.
In the past week there’s been considerable analysis of the Republican’s demographic problems. Politicos point out how the Republicans will prove incapable of winning national elections if they continue to rely on the vote of white Protestants, an increasingly shrinking piece of the electoral pie. Only 1/5 voters last Tuesday so identified themselves. If Republicans want to put together a national, majority coalition, observers have said often since Tuesday night, they need to adapt and reach younger voters, more diverse voters and religiously unaffiliated voters.
Some Republicans in the press have embraced this reality- always the first step to change- while others have denied it and posited other explanations for their defeat Tuesday.
Here’s the truly sobering data from Tuesday night. The Republican Party’s problems is the same problem the Church faces.
According to the Pew Trust Survey, released last month, nearly 20% of Americans identify themselves as ‘religiously unaffiliated.’
The stigma against religious ambivalence that was once so strong among the greatest generation, and even their children- which, no doubt, led to a degree of shallow, cultural Christianity off of which the Church has been subsisting decades- is no longer. People today feel free to identify themselves as unbelievers without concern that someone will look down their nose at them.
No surprise: many of the religiously unaffiliated are my age and younger and they’re diverse.
In a nutshell, the Church is facing the future holding Mitt Romney’s electoral strategy, which a week’s hindsight demonstrates is a losing bet.
And just as Republicans have been doing this week past, some Christians are willing to face the reality (and the challenge) and vision for the future while other Christians seem determined to deny reality or, worse, blame the culture, turn their backs on it and jettison the universal implications of their beliefs.
Interestingly (tragically), the convergence between the Pew Trust survey and Tuesday night’s results goes deeper. The Pew results found that very many of those who identify as religiously unaffiliated do so because they perceive Christianity to be “deeply entangled with conservative politics and do not want to have any association with it. As a result, many young Americans view religion as judgmental, hypocritical, homophobic, and too political.”
What’s more, 2/3 of the unaffiliated say the Church is too concerned with money and power (70%) and too involved in politics (67%).
In other words, the ’80’s and ’90’s may have been good for the Christian Coalition but the fruit they’ve reaped has not been good for Christians.
As Mitt Romney found out Tuesday, the college students who voted for Obama this time around aren’t the same college students who voted in 2008. Meaning, the trends are only going to continue and get worse for the Church unless we face facts.
The bad news in the data is that the Church has allowed our infatuation with the trappings of Empire to define how many perceive us.
The good news in the data is that most of the unaffiliated have bowed out for good reasons and not- thank God- because they’re not open to Jesus.