Some of this material has been percolating for a while, so I decided to use this forum to flesh it out a bit. We had a wonderful Easter service, and the people were treated to wonderful additional music by Greg Fletcher that included brass and percussion.Being a less than cheery sort, I found my thoughts shifting to the Sundays that are less well-attended. that led me to consider something percolating for some time: the decline of the older established Protestant denominations.I would bet that some of the proffered reasons, a more liberal theology linked to staid liturgy and culture may be part of it.
I wonder if the older, established denominations have brought some of the decline on ourselves.First, for years pulpits have emphasized the importance of the heart over the head and spirit in worship. We have downplayed the importance of worshipping together. So we hear about individual experience replacing worship, such as the egregious I feel close to God on the golf course. Still, that response is reasonable in the face of being told repeatedly that one’s emotional response to worship is the critical factor in religious life. In so doing, we have permitted an intellectual erosion in grasping the content of the faith. Indeed, religous scholarship is derided more than respected.
Second, our organizational form seems to take its cue from the business community on matters of structure.”The church needs to be treated like a business,” we have heard in countless dreary meetings. A recent letter in the Christian Century criticized seminaries solely on the grounds of not teaching business principles but was silent on church history, theology, pastoral care, and the Bible. We picked up the anti-institutional bias of the culture. So, we have raised a generation of people who seem to think that church organization should be present, but they bear no responsibility toward its preservation and upkeep.
Third, we slipped into the church being merely part of other social service organizations.In part, this is part of a churhc’s mission: to offer space for acts of compassion. Too often, those worthy programs seem to be substitutes for the core value of the church in the care of keeping body and soul together. At the same time, we subject ourselves to withering self-criticism and mocking our members by comparing them to the collection of saints we imagine should help form the church. while some criticism may be helpful and healthy, when it does not provide avenues for improvement and a constant drumbeat of criticism, it saps the energy of any group of people.
Fourth, the older denominations are just too nice. They have been sullied over and over by other churches, and we have not responded. Our faith commitments have been placed into question, and we have remained silent. We have hired folks from other denominations into our parishes and permitted them to use their position as a springboard to split a church or try to have it leave their traditional assembly.We have expected others to be as sweet and polite as we have been and then are shocked that they do not play by the same rules.
Lately, I have heard two different folks give a life cycle theory of churches as an explanation that we are at the hospice point of our existence as religious organizations. that may well be true, but it is a grave error to see a model as always reflecting reality. I do not hear the Catholic Church being mentioned in life cycle terms.The older religious groups can find new life again. To see their passing away is to say goodbye to a powerful mixture of voice and action, of aspiring to the best we can create, not settling for the lowest common denominator.
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