Church Issues-The Disestablishment of the Church and Anxiety over Change

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 19^th 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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[1] Patrick Keifert, We Are Here Now: A New Missional Era (Eagle, ID: Allelon Publishing, 2006), 30.

[2] Ibid., 32.

[3] Ibid., 32.

[4] Ibid., 33.

[5] Richard L. Hamm, Recreating the Church: Leadership for the Postmodern Age (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2007), 20.

[6] Ibid., 28.

[7] Ibid., 38–40.

Church Issues-Declining Numbers and Some of the Reasons

When Mark Chaves, in Congregations in America, looked at the most up-to-date data on the church, his focus was to map out what was happening in congregations. He defines a congregation as a social institution in which individuals who are not all religious specialists gather in physical proximity to one another, frequently and at regularly scheduled intervals, for activities and events with explicitly religious content and purpose, and in which there is continuity over time in the individuals who gather, the location of the gathering, and the nature of the activities and events at each gathering.[1] He also notes that the number of people in the U.S. who participate in a congregation has declined from 40% in the 1960s to 25% in the 1990s, and at the same time people declaring themselves to have no religion has risen from 3% in 1957 to 14% in 2000.[2] What he found that congregations do is mainly to traffic in ritual, knowledge, and beauty through the cultural activities of worship, education, and the arts. What they don’t do is a significant amount of charity or justice through social services or politics.[3]

Chaves also looks at Wuthnow’s lens of the liberal and conservative civic religious divide and argues that it is present in every denomination but not cleanly as both groups exist to some degree or another in each denomination. I believe this adds to the negation within our culture. But at a denominational level, it means that denominations are becoming less relevant because they themselves cannot point a clear path beyond the liberal versus conservative divide. What Chaves does find that is interesting is that when asked, 59% of congregations (containing 53% of the regular attendees) view themselves theologically as “more on the conservative side,” 11% (containing 10% of the people) as “more on the liberal side,” and 29% (containing 38% of the people) as “right in the middle.”[4]

Chaves then explains that even though the conservative side of the church appears to be growing while the liberal side is in decline, the growth does not outweigh the overall cultural change, which is that people in the U.S. are down on religious participation, stable on religious belief, and up on thinking about the meaning and purpose of life.[5] That means that the preaching being done in the Church today is, for the most part, only helping to maintain a declining, aging institutional church.

In his 2008 book, The American Church in Crisis, David Olson looks at the most recent data possible on the church in an effort to map out for all Christians in the U.S. a truthful picture of what is happening so that Christianity as a whole can begin to move in a better direction.[6] Olson’s numbers are disturbing as he compares 1990 data with 2006 data. In 1990, roughly 52 million Americans participated in church regularly. In 2006, roughly 52 million Americans participated in church regularly. From 1990 to 2006, the U.S. grew in population by a little over 91 million people, 70 million of whom are under age 17. There were a little over 39 million deaths for a net growth in population of about 52 million people. This means that as the nation grows, the church is not keeping up with the population growth or in essence is declining in percentage of the population participating.[7] This also means that the church is, for the most part, functioning outside of where our nation is primarily growing.

Olson also deals with the reality that twice as many people claim to go to church in polls, than actually do go to church weekly, based on worship attendance records from churches.[8] Olson divides the church into three groups — Catholics, Mainlines, and Evangelicals — and shows that from 1990 to 2006 all three parts of the church showed decline in worship attendance. The Catholics have seen the greatest decline, followed by the Mainline churches, with the smallest decline coming from the Evangelicals.[9] Olson contends that if Christianity in the U.S. is just to keep up with the population growth, all denominations combined need to be planting 2900 more churches a year than we do now as a religion.[10] This also means that not only is the population growth outpacing the growth in the church, but also church attendance is declining, which implies that preaching in the church is not doing what it is intended to do along with other aspects of what churches are supposed to do and be.[11]

Anthony Robinson talks in Transforming Congregational Culture about five changes that the church needs to deal with in order to move forward. Most of these changes occurred in the U.S. during the 1960s. The first change was away from believing that attending church was an obligation. Church, public society, and government once supported going to church as the right thing to do for any good law-abiding citizen. What changed was a shift to motivation over obligation. People want to see the value or meaning in church first or they won’t come.[12]

The second change was a shattering of the trust society placed in the church. In the 1960s, people’s problems suddenly seemed deeper and darker than a simple set of rights and wrongs could express or control. Key social events shattered our confidence, such as the Vietnam conflict, the assassinations of Kennedy and King, and the civil rights and equal rights struggles. People started coming to church for healing, hope, and salvation for themselves and their families.[13]

The third change was from Christianity being pretty much the only religion acknowledged in the nation to a new influx of religions from all over the world. The key change was the shift in immigration laws that happened in the late 1960s, so that U.S. immigration moved away from European and Scandinavian countries to Asian, Middle-Eastern, and South American countries.[14]

The fourth change was that in the nineteenth century, mainline churches had wed themselves to the liberalism of modernity as seen in these values: reason, individual and human self-sufficiency, optimism, and a strong belief in progress, all of which came into doubt with the rise of post-modern critics of those values and the disillusionment in the country over the failure of many of the attempted cultural revolutions of the 1960s.[15]

Finally, churches assumed that they would always be relevant, important, and prominent in place. As a result, they came to believe that they could ignore the world changing around them and keep doing things the way they were taught to do them in the past. Unfortunately, society moved at an exponentially increasing rate of change in every aspect of people’s lives, leaving the church in the past looking very dated and irrelevant.[16] These five challenges combine to illustrate that the church’s preaching has, for the most part, been irrelevant, unable to keep up with the changes in our society in a meaningful way, and now we are at a place of crisis.

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[1] Mark Chaves, Congregations in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1–2.

[2] Ibid., 3.

[3] Ibid., 14.

[4] Ibid., 28.

[5] Ibid., 35.

[6] David T. Olson, The American Church in Crisis (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008), 17.

[7] Ibid., 35–36.

[8] Ibid., 28.

[9] Ibid., 36.

[10] Ibid., 120.

[11] Olson points out some other interesting things as well. First, churches of 1–49 members are growing as well as churches of 1000 plus members. Every other sized church is shrinking. Second, the higher the percentage of females to males, the faster the church is likely to decline. Churches with over 50% males are growing. Third, rural, small and large town churches are shrinking, suburban churches are showing zero growth or decline, and urban churches showing a slight growth based on zip code location. Finally, based on 1999 census data, churches in neighborhoods with household incomes over $50,000 a year are growing, and churches in neighborhoods with a yearly household income of less than $50,000 are shrinking. (Ibid., 82–89).

[12] Anthony B. Robinson, Transforming Congregational Structure (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2003), 4.

[13] Ibid., 5.

[14] Ibid., 6.

[15] Ibid., 8.

[16] Ibid., 10.

Church Issues: Civil Religion and the Separation of Church and State

Robert Wuthnow’s book, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II, was published in 1985 and studied what he perceived to be a significant restructuring of the church that began to develop after World War II. The restructuring is in the civil religion that functions as the moral and spiritual backbone of the country and significantly influences society. Wuthnow observed that in the United States, up until World War II, there was a single civil religion that all Americans adhered to and thought of as Christian in nature. After WWII, there developed two distinct civil religions, one favored by religious liberals and one favored by religious conservatives.[1] They had a set of core understandings in common. First, they believed that religious values were the key to morality and a healthy society, both privately and publicly. Second, they believed in the importance of transcendent values in relation to which the nation would be judged. Third, they believed in the relevance of certain biblical principles such as compassion, equity, and liberty. Finally, they believed in and drew upon a common heritage of Judeo-Christian symbols and stories.[2]

Where the liberal civil religion differed from the conservative civil religion was in a far more universal and not concrete understanding of what is a church. The focus of the adherents shifted to the actions of good people to roll back bad social conditions. The adherents usually became involved with protest activities, antinuclear coalitions, holistic health groups, positive thinking seminars, and therapy groups. They developed the belief that change is brought about through quick direct action that affects the structures and rules of society, which in turn will change the hearts of the people. They began to believe that Christians needed to meet the needs of the people first in order for them to be able to hear the good news. They understood that morality was socially derived but framed in the private realm for individuals. Their focus became people across the U.S. believing that they have a global role to play because of the country’s resources and that it is a God-given mandate to build the global community over any specific nation.[3]

The conservative civil religion adherents developed a very different set of core understandings. They emphasized a belief that the kingdom of God and the second coming of Jesus needed to be understood literally. They believed that the spiritual world is separate from the concrete world. The adherents usually became involved with healing ministries, prison ministries, bible study groups, charismatic groups, and groups concerned about world hunger. They believed that change is brought about through slow deliberate action geared at changing the hearts of the people so that they themselves begin to change the structures and rules. They believed that people needed to hear the good news and save their souls because we may not be able to meet their immediate needs in time. They framed morality in a public context; morality was God given and absolute. Finally, they believed that the U.S. has a special place in the divine order of the universe.[4]

Wuthnow argues that two key things happened as a result of the development of two civic religions. First, how we worship and our role in worship changed. The corporate body became subtly transposed into a service agency for the fulfillment of its individual members. The church shifted its language from corporate language to personal language putting the emphasis on the individual over the group. How to empower the individual to be morally committed was more the issue than how to construct moral community itself. Fellowship was seen mainly as a byproduct of individual devotion, and its role was mainly derived from individual needs to ensure the individuals’ freedoms and imbue them with inner conviction.[5]

The second important development was that the two civic religions began to negate each other in the public eye, allowing what Wuthnow saw as a developing third alternative to replace the liberal and conservative civic religions. He saw this new civic religion functioning as a non-religious alternative driven by progress and technology. As long as life is getting better because of our technological progress and life is improved for everyone in general, our advancements become the justification for what we do rather than using religion as the means to justify our culture.[6]

David Tracy gives a better insight to what this new civic religion is doing without directly naming it in his book, On Naming the Present: God, Hermeneutics, and Church. He describes what is happening to our culture as a reduction of the project of modernity into simply another tradition as techno-economic concerns become our primary focus regarding all levels of life. What we are doing is privatizing everything that is not beneficial for technological or economic advancement. We are replacing the ends with the means and no longer asking why we are doing what we are doing. This means that “we have seen our lifewords, in all their rich difference, increasingly colonized by the forces of a techno-economic social system that does not hesitate to use its power to level all memory, all resistance, all difference, and all hope.” He responds that in order for Christianity to move forward, we will need historical subjects with memory, hope, and resistance.[7]

In The Empty Church: Does Organized Religion Matter Anymore?, Thomas Reeves builds on Wuthnow’s idea of two civic religions. For Reeves, the key issue is the privatizing of religion that resulted from the divide in the civic religion. This resulted in a secularization that is growing throughout our culture, which negates all religions, including Christianity, and leaves them as private, irrelevant personal matters. The key turning point for this came in an intentional attack on the constitutional idea of the separation of church and state. Reeves argues that, “Numerous national figures, including Supreme Court justices, have taken the position that the First Amendment commanded not only the separation of church and state but the separation of religion from public life.”[8]

Reeves states that the U.S. courts have helped this secularization to take place in this way: Since 1982, the Supreme Court has followed “the endorsement test” on church–state questions. In the words of the legal scholar Gerard V. Bradley, the principle “holds that public authority may do nothing that might be construed as a sign that religion is a good thing, that religion is a component of human flourishing in a way that something else (assuredly comparable, which the justices call ‘nonreligion’ or ‘irreligion’) is not.”[9] In other words, Reeves says that the U.S. courts have argued consistently that if you are a public figure in authority, you should never say anything that would imply that religion of any kind is a good thing for people. He sees liberals on the Supreme Court as wanting to make government a relentless engine of secularization.[10] Reeves’ argument is that this privatization of faith and secularization of public space is hurting the church by trying to make our public life a place where God is not necessary, needed, or wanted. The result is that as Christians, we do not know how to talk about our faith publicly or how to engage our culture in a meaningful way guided by our faith.

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[1] Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 13.

[2] Ibid., 257.

[3] Ibid., 62-63, 69, 131, 212-213, 219. Wuthnow describes the differences in contrasts throughout the book, I pulled them together for a simpler summary and comparison.

[4] Ibid., 62-63, 68, 131, 212-213, 219. Wuthnow describes the differences in contrasts throughout the book, I pulled them together for a simpler summary and comparison.

[5] Ibid., 55-57.

[6] Ibid., 286.

[7] David Tracy, On Naming the Present: Reflections on God, Hermeneutics, and Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 8–11.

[8] Thomas C. Reeves, The Empty Church: Does Organized Religion Matter Anymore? (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 37.

[9] Ibid., 47.

[10] Ibid., 47.

My Struggle with Grace

One of the hardest struggles of my life has been with the grace of God. Or more specifically God freely loving me and forgiving me without requiring anything of me but to embrace that love and forgiveness. For me this is not an easy thing to do because it requires me to let go of everything. What I really want is for God to look at my behavior throughout my life and say to me, “You were more good than bad, so I am going to let you into my kingdom. Well done.” But what this really shows is my own weakness, that what I really want is to be in control and be able to prove my value, my worth to God. More than this, the control is not about a power over but rather a desperate cry to keep anyone from knowing the truth that I struggle with believing I am someone that God would want to care about.

My inner shame wants God’s law to be my salvation, if I live God’s law well enough then people will see I am Godly and God will see and have to accept me because of what I have achieved in my faithfulness to God’s law. The problem is that the more I understand God’s law and the more serious I take it, the more I realize how sinful I really am and how far I really am from fulfilling it. Or to look at it another way, if there was a law that could save me, as Paul says, then Christ died for nothing.

What frustrates me in this is that the right side of the church, in general, usually yells to me that if I have the correct personal moral values and live them then God will be happy with me but does not seem to notice that this implies that law can save me or that this makes the cross irrelevant. And the left side of the church, in general, usually yells to me that if I have the correct social moral values, “social justice,” then God will be happy with me but does not seem to notice that this implies that the law can same me or that this also makes the cross irrelevant.

What really bothers me and reminds me of my struggle with God’s grace than anything else is God’s very word. When I read the Bible and encounter the stories about God’s grace I struggle because they push me in directions I don’t really want to go. Like take for example this story by Jesus, (Matthew 13:44), “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”

The part of me that doesn’t like God’s grace, that wants to prove myself reads this story and says, “Well the man was a hard worker, or tended the field, or was out looking for the treasure.” It is kind of like when we say, “You can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.” Which implies that if you buy a ticket you deserve to win. So if you buy a thousand tickets should you deserve to win more than someone who bought one? But the story doesn’t say this, it only says he was walking along in another person’s field and stumbled across it. All of his actions happen after he finds the treasure and hides it. In other words, he never bought a lottery ticket yet he still won the lottery.

The unfairness of this aggravates my desire for law. The man did nothing to deserve the treasure. And this is precisely why this story is one of good news. The treasure belongs to God who hides it away for people to just stumble upon it. In other words, it is God’s to give away as God pleases and that is what God does. And the part of me that is beginning to get and truly embrace God’s grace realizes in this story that what God has given me through Jesus is God’s love, acceptance, and forgiveness.

It is the treasure, the good news, God’s love, acceptance and forgiveness, that forces me to let go of all the things I cling to, to try and please God instead of just trusting in God’s grace. And my hope for you is that in this story you find the joy in the hidden treasure, which is God’s love, acceptance and forgiveness for you.

Spiritual Friendship

Brian McLaren, in his book, More Ready Than You Realize, presents a different way of thinking about evangelism when he uses the term spiritual friendships. Brian believes that many people are seeking God and are open to God but stumble at the old modern understanding of God presented to them by too many churches and Christians.

These people often react against: an uptight God who is about black-and-white easy answers and brittle, rigid logic and law. They react against a God who is encountered through systems of abstractions, propositions, and terminology. They react against a God who is controlling, cold, analytical, and mechanistic in nature. They react against an exclusive God who favors insiders and is biased against outsiders. And they react against a tense God who prefers people to become judgmental, arrogant, and closed-minded. For many of them, they are either uninterested in the church or have walked away from the church having be wounded.

What they hope God is about is many faceted truths, self-sacrificing love, compassionate justice, and profound relationships. They hope God is encountered through amazing stories, intense poetry, beauty, experience, experiment, and community. They hope God is a master artist and lover who is passionate about good and evil, justice and injustice, beauty and desecration, hope and cynicism. They hope God is a God of scandalous inclusion, amazing mercy, and shocking acceptance, who blesses insiders so that they can extend the blessing to outsiders, thus making everyone an insider. And they hope that God wants people to become humble, open-minded, and teachable.

Unfortunately many of these people looking for God to be this kind of God don’t believe they will find God in the Christian church and are looking elsewhere for God. What Brian suggests in response to this is to see ourselves as being called by God as Christians to be spiritual friends with those we encounter. This is a radical shift in how we think. Instead of seeing ourselves as being the ones with the correct answers from God, with the spark of God’s love in us, instead we see everyone as having the spark of God’s love in them. This means seeing God at work in every person around us. This makes our job not that of giving people God’s spark but rather fanning the spark that is already in them so that it can take flame.

The starting point for becoming a spiritual friend is in serving others. We have to see, like, approach, and serve people if you want to become their spiritual friend. We earn the right to be heard by serving, listening too, caring, smiling, or doing something to show ourselves to be a friendly, safe person to talk with. We don’t have to have all the answers because sometimes the shared questions are just as import as any answer. What people need to know is that we are safe, that we will not judge them and will give them the room to struggle and grow.

I myself grew up in a time when many ministers believed that it was better to scare someone into heaven than risk them ending up in hell. The problem with this is that God’s love is lost and it pushes people to put their faith in their ability to behave correctly for God rather than in Jesus and his saving word done for us. The reality is that spirituality cannot be decided by coercion-physical, political, spiritual, or even interpersonal. Just like you cannot make someone love you, you also cannot make someone love God. If as the author of I John says in the New Testament, “God is Love,” then there is no way God would want to connect with us through any other means than love.

Church Issues: A Three Church Typology for Understanding

Jackson Carroll and Wade Roof in their book, Bridging Divided Worlds: Generational Cultures in Congregations, give a wonderful typology that helps us to understand the three basic congregation types in the US and how they function. The three types are the Inherited Model, the Blended Model, and the Generation-Specific Model.

The Inherited Model is a church where the programs and practices of the faith community are inherited from the past. These churches usually have multiple generations present and the leadership is aware of some of the generational differences but the church, as a whole, does nothing specific for any given generation. The assumption is that, “This is how we do things here.” People follow the past practices without questioning them. There can even be an unspoken assumption that what we do worked for my parents, grandparents, and great grand parents so it should work for my kids, grand-kids, and great-grand-kids. The focus is about maintaining the traditions as they focus us on our faith.

The struggle for Inherited Model churches right now is that cultural mobility and constant change have de-emphasized the importance of tradition and so most of the churches that represent this model are aging because younger generations simply do not care enough about tradition and so are uninterested in these churches.

The second model is the Blended Model in which churches intentionally develop ministries and programs that appeal to each generation present within their faith community. The goal is the spiritually feed each generation in a way that makes the most sense to that generation. Worship becomes one of the places where this diversity is seen the most, especially in the styles of music and types of liturgy used throughout each service. The goal is to try and provide enough spiritual sustenance to sustain all present knowing that there is no way to fill a specific generation up without sacrificing the nutrition of another generation.

These congregations usually contain the most conflict because each generation wants a bit more that they are getting. It is a difficult task to keep all the ministries as balanced as possible and a second difficult task is transitioning ministries as the older generation dies and a new, different generation is born.

The third model is the Generation-Specific Model in which a church makes its primary focus ministering to a single generation. In these churches, the ministry programs, worship style, musical choices are all tailored to appeal to a single specific generation. This does not mean that other generations are not present or that the church does not appeal to people from every generation. The core of the church is a single generation with everything pointing to that generation’s interests and understandings whether it is a church focused on the Baby-boomers or Gen. Xers.

The primary struggle for this model of church is that as the specific generation ages so does the core church membership and at some point the church will either need to slowly decline and die out with its generation or change what generation the ministries appeal to at the risk of alienating the original generation that founded the church.

So why is this typology important? Because it reminds us that God is present in every church and no one-way of doing and being church is the correct way. Churches are to point to God and not be a thing in and of them selves. Churches are always both divine and human and we need to make sure we don’t loose site of one over the other. To transition from one model to another is extremely difficult and is usually derailed by not fully understanding the model one is moving out of or into. All of these models fail when they loose sight of the living God behind each called group of believers.