Patrick Keifert, in We Are Here Now: A New Missional Era, tries to describe where we are as the church in North America in the hopes of developing more helpful models of what it means to be church. He starts by talking about what he calls three disestablishments of Christianity in the U.S. over the past two hundred years. He defines Christendom as the fusion of Christianity with the civil kingdom, the completion of which came around 800 A.D. when the Pope crowned a new Holy Roman Emperor. This meant that the church provided most of the basic needs for society and determined what was and was not acceptable in society. If you wanted to become a doctor, lawyer, warrior, teacher, artist, politician, etc., you went to the church for your training and authority.[1]
Keifert argues that Christendom dominated western culture from this point into the modern era when three disestablishments of the church took place. The first was the desire to try and end religious wars that were ravaging Europe by grounding political life upon pure reason and objective facts over irrational dogmas of religion. This became known as the separation of church and state; the idea’s full effect was only realized in the early 19th century.[2]
The second disestablishment affected primarily protestant Christians, who for the most part, ran public schools. Catholics gathered in mass in a community and maintained a sort of folk church that functioned as an establishment church without really being one. The Catholics refused to send their children to the public schools because of the Protestant influence and instead built a strong parochial school system that served to disestablish the Protestant church.[3]
The final disestablishment began in the mid 1960s in the U.S. as immigration patterns changed, bringing in people from new parts of the world with other religious backgrounds than Christianity. The result is a continual growth among Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist believers, to name a few, as well as an increase in the ethnic diversity within the country. Enough large groups now represent religions other than Christianity that they must be taken seriously, which removes Christianity from being the only key religion in the country. The result of these three disestablishing occurrences is that the church is no longer privileged or guaranteed growth simply by existing within our culture.[4]
Richard L. Hamm’s Recreating the Church: Leadership for the Postmodern Age, adds to the cultural picture of what is happening by pointing out that after World War I, the belief in science as the ultimate provider of truth and the answers needed to live our lives rose to the forefront of the American consciousness. Add to this a mass migration from the country to the city, which dislocated people’s spiritual identities, and the result was a major cultural shift away from the importance of Christianity to our culture.[5]
Hamm adds to this that all organizations follow a pattern of development from peak to decline unless they are continually in the process of reinventing themselves to remain relevant. He argues that our churches have not remained relevant and are now on the decline side as organizations. “The Challenge is that bureaucracies, like all human systems, have a natural tendency to become self-serving, mired in obsolete methods (ruts), and preoccupied with control instead of with serving the mission for which they were created.”[6]
Finally, Hamm sees our cultural anxiety and our anxiety within the mainline denominations as one of our greatest challenges. At a societal level, we are anxious because we built our nation on risk taking and entrepreneurialism, and right now this base is trying to change at a pace at which we all struggle to adjust. At the same time, since 9/11 we are now facing a shadow enemy who is using our technology against us, further raising our anxiety. The mainline denominations, not wanting to face the decline in numbers and now the decline in income, have refused to see the problem and become missional and have instead turned inward to a survival mode, which is a sign of anxiety. This led churches and denominations to become places of anti-change to abate the anxiety precisely when they needed to face change head on.[7]
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