These are my thoughts prior to my attendance this Friday and Saturday at Annual Conference. I am hoping to add one or two pieces while I am there.
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This most certainly won’t be the last piece written about the future of and for the church. It is not the first time I have thought about it nor will it be the last either. But this is the week of Annual Conference and if there ever was a time when the future of and for the church to be considered, it is this week.
This is the first time that I will get a chance to attend Annual Conference. I am not going as a delegate nor am I attending the entire conference. Rather I am going for a series of events related to lay speaking and because of an invitation from the Bishop to all the lay speakers of the district to attend.
This invitation and this trip to Annual Conference comes at a time when the Barna Group has come out with new research (see “Americans Are Exploring New Ways of Experiencing God”) that quite possibly questions the future for the church. First, the good news is that 90% of those surveyed indicated that their own personal faith is a very important part of their life. But the rest of the story, as it were, does not bode well for the traditional and established church.
Forty-five per cent of those surveyed are willing to try a new church and 71% are more than likely to develop their own beliefs on their own, rather than follow the beliefs they may have been taught. Two out of every three adults are quite willing to seek faith experiences outside the traditional setting.
What I found interesting in this report was at the end of the article. Many people are now relying on marketplace ministries for the spiritual experience and millions of adults are becoming increasingly reliant on faith-based media (television, radio, and the Internet) for religious experience and expression. In addition, 7% of adults attend a house church; this is a seven-fold increase in the past decade. The first piece of information shocks me; the second one is not surprising.
I am shocked by any statement that states that one’s religious experience can be obtained through the media. It isn’t so much that I believe that you have to be with people in order to gain the experience but that much of what is in the media is, in my estimation, on the order of fraudulent and false teaching. People are searching for something and they are willing to look for it anywhere; they will accept as truthful anything that is in the medium that they trust. The research tells us that they don’t trust the traditional church (and why should they, with the history of the traditional church for hypocrisy and self-serving rhetoric?). So anyone who offers a message that makes someone feel good is likely to easily gain followers.
By the same token, does merely watching something through media qualify as an experience? Media-based services allow people to isolate themselves from others. They don’t have to be involved with the less-fortunate, those who are suffering, or those who are somehow different from them. Christianity has never been about simply observing what is happening but rather about being part of the process. But, for too many Americans, observing qualifies as “membership” and that’s all they want. It has long been noted that many of today’s “modern” churches have removed the symbols of the church because it makes the congregation uncomfortable. Christianity is not about making people uncomfortable but it should serve as a reminder of what we are call to do as Christians. But too many people don’t want that part of the process; they want to feel good about being a Christian and they want to make sure that they are not called to do anything.
Jim, in his answer to my comment to his post “Church Dropouts – Church not just important”, suggests that Americans feel that we can have it all and that we have fitted the faith to our needs instead of fitting into our faith.
But there are some who see the message of the television hucksters and charlatans for what it is and they easily cast that aside. They turn away from what is out there and look for what once was there.
Now, a house church is similar to what was the church two-thousand years ago and if anything is to be learned from the emergent church trend, it is that there is a movement to return to the roots that first fostered the growth of the church.
Perhaps it is easy to classify a house church as simple gatherings where the experiences are genuine and dynamic. The fellowship between individuals would be similar, I think, to the gatherings of two-thousand years ago, where people gathered together to share common experiences and rejoice in the presence of Christ in their lives.
Several years ago, I took part in a quality control seminar. It was my hope that I would learn something about quality control but I quickly learned that what was being taught was what I already knew (see “To Search For Excellence”). And what I know about quality control (or at least what I think I know) is that it won’t work unless everyone from the top management down to the bottom level of workers buys into the process and works for the process, the process isn’t going to work. And what we have going on in the church today is that the top management is safely ensconced in their offices and they are blind to what is going on outside the walls of said offices. And when they come out and they see dwindling numbers in the churches, they seek to apply quick and easy fixes to problems that have been deep and long in development.
I think that is one of the reasons why there was such an interest in mega-churches a few years ago. We had come to believe that big is better and if we work on making our churches bigger, then all will be well. But the big church model will not work (if, in fact, it ever did) if there aren’t sufficient people to build a “big” church.
The problem for the traditional church (and by this I mean one that meets in a church-type building on a Sunday morning and is independent of denominational definition) is that it has the same problem that many of our traditional businesses (read automotive or steel, for example) face. The old methods don’t work and insisting on maintaining the old ways can only lead to ruin.
There are those who long for the “good old days”, the days before the Renaissance and the development of free-thinking, when the church was the authority and the arbitrator for all of life. No one questioned the church in those days and there are those who want the church to have the same sense of authority today. There are those who perhaps are a little more liberal in their thought but they don’t want anyone messing with their concept of church because church is a block of time on Sunday that is not to be messed with; once that time is over, they can do whatever they so desire for they have met the requirements they believe they must meet to qualify for a good life and its subsequent rewards.
And there are some who seek that moment in time when they can re-establish that connection with God through Christ and the Holy Spirit that gives meaning to their lives in a world devoid of meaning for anything but greed and self-interest.
I would like to think that I am going to see more of the latter than I am the former views when I go to Annual Conference. But I have read the reports of past Annual Conferences and I don’t think that will be the case. And when I leave from my short stay at Annual Conference, I do not know if it will be seeing the future of the church or wondering if the church will even have a future.
That is not an optimistic way to end these thoughts so I will leave you with something I wrote about being a lay speaker. Lay speaking, to me, is more than a few hours spent on a Sunday morning. It is part of your soul, planted and nourished by the Spirit. It is about designing a worship service so that the Spirit is present and people come away feeling revived and renewed by the time they spent in worship. It is about answering the call from the Lord to spread the good news through one’s words, one’s deeds, one’s thoughts, and one’s actions. The answer can never be found in a traditional “bottom line” sense but rather in that one individual who comes to you afterwards and tells you that what was said and done that day helped them through a rough time.
Regardless of what happens this week in Annual Conference and regardless of what happens in the United Methodist Church in the remainder of this year and the years to come, I will work to make that moment possible. That will be the future for the church.
