(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Bonhoeffer & Bulletin Boards”, originally shared on September 13, 2023. It was the 276th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
The Church is mostly in decline in the West.
Why? And what can we do about it? Today, we’re going to find out.
It seems like vandalism has been in the news
a lot lately.
·
A
British man thought it would be romantic to carve his and his fiancé’s initials
into the almost 2000-year-old Colosseum in Rome.
·
Standing
stones put in place 7,000 years ago were demolished to make way for a
do-it-yourself store in France.
·
A
Chinese couple bulldozed a section of the Great Wall of China built 2,000 years
ago in order to save some time while working on nearby construction projects.
The word “vandalism” comes from The Vandals,
one of the uncivilized tribes that lived north of the Roman Empire and, the
hoards that challenged and eventually sacked Rome, making the word “vandal”
known for needless destruction, especially of art.
The Vandals had no interest in civil life.
And many people today, I suppose, also think of these same barbarians when they
see things like flash mobs, brought together by social media for the
grab-and-go robbery of a retail business.
But they would be wrong. These modern mobs
don’t arrive from outside of us, but from among us.
Rome declined from within.
If you visit a mainline church today, across
denominations, most of the people you see will be older. At the same time, poll
after poll finds that young people in general have very positive attitudes
toward Jesus, believe in God, and have many traditional beliefs about God.
Some say that the church has no relevance to
young people because of their perception of its social values. But if that were
true, “progressive” churches would be booming. They are not.
It’s not Jesus that is the problem. It’s us.
We offer little to the world, except our Church culture, our obvious desire to
attract new members to carry on our human traditions and maintain our massive
buildings, to carry on our legacy. None of these are what the world wants or
needs.
New people want, from Christianity, to be
engaged with something that offers real community, meaning and purpose, and
what we had to offer was the transformative power of God. They want to
be a part of receiving the real transcendent power of God that cannot be found
anywhere but through God’s Church, but the Church in the West shows declining
interest.
For example, when I retired, my family and I
spent almost a year as church nomads. We went to a different church almost
every week. Most were Lutheran churches, many were churches of Sally’s
denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)/UCC denomination, and
some were other kinds of churches.
In many of those churches I could see why
someone would want to join them. They had a great preacher, or a wonderful
small groups ministry, or a wonderful choir, band, youth program, music
program, school, or social ministry. But there was not one where I could see
how someone would come to faith in Christ. There were no expectations or
preparations for people to come from zero to faith. There were no mechanisms
for it. At all.
I thought of this recently when I read a
quote from Detrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and pastor who was
martyred by the Nazis during World War II.
He had visited the United States in 1930-32
and he made this observation about Christian life in New York,
"In New
York, they preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed,
or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely,
the gospel of Jesus Christ.... So what stands in place of the Christian
message? An ethical and social idealism borne by a faith in progress that – who
knows how? – claims the right to call itself 'Christian'. And in the place of
the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church
as a social corporation. Anyone who has seen the weekly program of one of the
large New York churches, with their daily, indeed almost hourly events, teas,
lectures, concerts, charity events, opportunities for sports, games, bowling,
dancing for every age group, anyone who has become acquainted with the
embarrassing nervousness with which the pastor lobbies for membership – that
person can well assess the character of such a church.... In order to balance
out the feeling of inner emptiness that arises now and then (and partly also to
refill the church's treasury), some congregations will if possible engage an
evangelist for a 'revival' once a year"
Have things changed much? I don’t think so,
except that Bonhoeffer’s observations about the New York churches of the 1930’s
have become true of mostly all mainline churches throughout the United States.
And, that one rarely hears of even an annual “revival” in, at least,
predominantly white mainline churches anymore, much less of an “evangelist”.
Today’s Vandals don’t come from outside the
Church, but the inside. And they don’t bring swords, they bring bulletin
boards.
Bonhoeffer saw the end of the Christian
Church in the United States almost one hundred years ago. Is that what we are
seeing today?
There are some in church leadership today
who, it seems to me, believe that the Church must be destroyed in order to save
it. At least that’s what I see. Will they rebuild the Church?
Some have expanded Bonhoeffer’s American
church life of the 1930’s to make the Church a social justice agency that uses
religious language. Pastors see themselves and are trained as community
organizers. Is that the answer?
Ross Douthat, a conservative op-ed columnist
for the New York Time, wrote a book a few years ago called Bad Religion.
In it, he outlined the decline of the Christian Church in the West and
expressed the opinion that most of the Church’s wounds had been self-inflicted.
At the end of the book, he observes that the
Church has found itself in decline and facing possible extinction several times
in the past, and two things have brought it back: the Arts, and holy living.”
Pastor Richard Halverson, a Presbyterian minister and former Chaplain of
the Senate, once observed, “In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men
and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece where
it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome where it became an institution.
Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to
America where it became an enterprise.”
How
does the Church move forward to being ‘a fellowship of men and women centering
on the living Christ” today? How does it come alive with the Arts and holy
living?
It will be hard, in fact it will be
impossible for human beings, especially when decline leads to fear, and fear
puts us on the defense. It can only come from God.
It will most certainly be something new. One
of the arguments for starting new churches has been that it’s a lot easier to
have a baby than to raise the dead. But what will those churches look like? And
who will lead them?
The Church is the Body of Christ and nothing
will prevail against it as a whole. I certainly don’t think that it needs to be
demolished and rebuilt. But it does need some fundamental renovation.
Some have said that it is good that the
Church is dying because God will put something better in its place. I wonder at
this, as we have seen other places in the world where the church has gone out
of existence, and what of all those people who have not heard the good news of
Jesus Christ?
If that doesn’t matter, why did Jesus send
his disciples out with the command to evangelize, in what has been known for
many generations as “The Great Commission”, at the end of the Gospel of Matthew,
in Matthew 28:18-20,
18And Jesus came and said to them, 'All authority in heaven and
on earth has been given to me. 19Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded
you.
I think that we’ll need to lose the Gospel
of success, the desperate “by whatever means necessary” approach, the
homogeneous unit growth principle approach including mono generational
churches, attractional programing, pandering to whatever’s culturally hot, the church’s
dependence on charismatic (small “c”) pastors, acquiesce to the dominance of
youth sports, easy black and white approaches to church life, and worship as people-affirming
entertainment.
In the Gospel reading that will be read in
churches all over the world this coming Sunday, Matthew 18:21-35, we
will hear the parable of the unforgiving servant. Jesus gives an example of a
slave who is forgiven an unimaginable debt to a king, but the slave refuses to
forgive a fellow slave for a small debt. That person will be required by the king
to repay everything.
At the end of this reading, we will hear
this, in Matthew 18:35,
35 So
my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your
brother or sister from your heart.”
Does this seem like an uncharacteristically
harsh Jesus, fully God and fully human being? I don’t think so. I think that
Jesus is describing the mechanics of faith.
As John writes, in 1 John 4:16-19,
16 So
we have known and believe the love that God has for us.
God is love, and those who abide in love abide
in God, and God abides in them. 17 Love
has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of
judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. 18 There
is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with
punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. 19 We
love because he first loved us.
We live from the living relationship with
the one true living God that has been given to us by Jesus Christ, through his
death on the cross, God’s ultimate display of sacrificial love for humanity. We
could not have been given anything greater.
We forgive because it is in our born-again
DNA. It is natural for we who have received so much, to give in turn to others.
We forgive because we know that God has forgiven us so much.
This is at the heart of what it means to be
the Church in the World. It is good news! It is what we must proclaim.
With it, we’ll need to move from the
professionalized clergy and democratized laity to something in between, to lean
church hierarchies that upend the pyramid, to promoting evangelism as something
specific that is built on the transformational relationship with the one true
living God for which we were created, living with paradox such as being both
saint and sinner and living under both law and gospel, living
from the inside out and not by an authoritarian leader. Worshiping in small
groups with simple indigenous worship and little to no marketing.
Church life needs to mean living as salt and
light and leaven in the world. Living as a holy priesthood, a people set apart.
We say much about our country’s polarization
but if our lives don’t offer a better option, but only mirror it, what do we
have to give? Look at the resolutions that are passed at mainline church
assemblies and conventions. What do they say to the world about the Gospel?
About the power of the cross? About the God-transformed life as a superior
alternative to the dangers of our time? We only offer our social and political
opinions, backed up only by our (declining) numbers as a coercive directive to
our government officials and legislatures. Raw power, not transcendence or even
a coherent world view.
The world needs, and we have been called to
live and proclaim, our message of faith and salvation, the words without which
prophecy is incomplete. The world needs hope, not our bulletin boards.
We have seen a lot of change over the past
decades, and some just write off the decline of the Church in the West to those
cultural forces.
I don’t agree. We have offered no
resistance. We have offered no alternatives.
We allow decline
without protest. We go along to get along; We mirror the world’s commercialism,
its materialism, its competitiveness, and its thirst for popularity and political
power. In some corners, we even mirror its violence.
We say we haven’t but, in practical terms,
we have lost our confidence in God to make us into something new, a new
Creation, a people set-apart who live full lives in response to the work of God
on the cross.
Instead, we have been called, equipped and
sent with a particular message that no one else has been so prepared to
proclaim. It is, as Jesus said to Martha, in John 11:23-26,
23Jesus said to her,
“Your brother will rise again.” 24Martha said to him, “I
know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” 25Jesus said to her, “I
am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they
die, will live, 26and everyone who lives
and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
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