Tag Archives: Inherited Church

When GOD Gives Conflicting Instructions

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On her blog yesterday, the Rev. Susan Russell announced a Celebration of Equality.  It is a really special event in the life of her Pasadena congregation and I’m sure is going to be an awesome sight.  In the midst of this celebration is a “sneak preview” of a new documentary about the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, whom she describes as “the first openly gay bishop in the high church traditions of Christendom”.  The film is called Love Free or Die.  It says on the poster:

LOVE FREE OR DIE is about a man whose defining passions the world cannot reconcile: his love for God and for his partner Mark.  Bishop Gene Robinson will not give up on either.

I for one am eager to watch what is certain to be an engaging documentary with a subject that is so close and relevant to our recent Christian history.  But the film brings up a greater question to me than simply how does Bp. Robinson reconcile what he has been taught with what he feels, which makes for an engaging film, but there is something more fundamental than that.  How do we reconcile being taught things that are in conflict with each other?  In this case, the specific teaching by modern churches of the incompatibility of homosexuality with the conviction of loving anybody generously as demonstrated frequently in the form of loving those we’re taught (often by society, but also often by our church) to despise.

The wholly inadequate response of “love the sinner / hate the sin” shows neither such a clear division of action or any of that supposed “love”.  Similarly, the drive on the part of many to ignore one teaching while supporting the other rings hollow and false to most people, Christian and non-Christian alike.  In my own sandbox of Christianity, the supposed “listening process” that was begun in the late 1990s to determine the mind of the church on homosexuality was a farce.  Not because there weren’t a large number of Episcopalians and other Anglicans wrestling with the theology of homosexuality (as many did), but because this was a political attempt to sweep it under the rug and stop the rising tide of support for equality; and therefore not listen.

My own views on this have evolved over the last decade, and thankfully continue to evolve. But this can only happen if we engage the challenging bits of our faith.  Like not necessarily reconciling two teachings that are at odds with one another.  Perhaps one of our teachings is wrong.  Perhaps one of them is less right than the other.  Perhaps one is for us to worry about and the other is for GOD.  Perhaps we should take a more mature reading of Scripture than we normally take.  Perhaps Scripture shouldn’t be used as a dividing line in any event.  Perhaps it isn’t GOD that screwed up, but us.  Perhaps current teaching is based not in good exegesis but in faulty human tradition.  Perhaps Scripture never actually said what we think it says.

That is where Christ meets the world, after all.  In those spaces of human abuse and rejection of our brothers and sisters is the place where Jesus appears, feeding, clothing, comforting, liberating.  And where we, in our ivory towers of certainty, erected by a self-righteous belief in our own systems of separation find ourselves further and further from those in greatest need of Christ like a Babelish tower reaching toward GOD and departing from the people GOD calls us to serve.  From this spot, we wrestle.  Wrestle with these great questions of our faith.  Or like Jacob, we wrestle with the very figure of our God.

 

Just Cut the Church Programs

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For several weeks I’ve been writing about engaging different groups in church.  Then I wrote about dealing with time constraints and what it means for planning.  Now, I am making a personal appeal for an entirely different approach: it is time to get rid of our programs.

As Phyllis Tickle adeptly outlines in The Great Emergence, the post-war world of the 1950s led to a curious new development in church life that has remained intact ever since: churches full of programs.  The roots of this development are quite simple at the macro-level, but remain entirely unexamined at the micro-level:

  • In the late 1940s, as soldiers came home, new communities were created to mimic
    Sunday school class, Manzanar Relocation Cente...

    Image via Wikipedia

    the ones soldiers and their spouses lived in before the war.  Suburbs grew and many churches were founded in the center of these communities.  Parishes built big parish halls and community centers to serve the wider community.

  • Women, who only years earlier, had left the home to go to work full-time, were itchy to get out again and began extensive volunteering at church, providing leadership for much of the church programming.
  • As that generation aged, Boomer women went to work and most Boomers left the church entirely, leaving all of those programs behind.
  • Their parents, now seniors, became the first generation able to retire with time left on the clock, so many seniors pick up the volunteering slack.
  • With each decade, the influence of seniors grows as they are able to retire earlier and live longer.
  • We have essentially maintained this same arrangement of senior volunteerism since the late 1960s.  Boomers, and the succeeding generations (including Gen X, Millennials, and the next generation) have much less church experience than their parents and grandparents had, making senior seniority even greater.

What we are left with in 2011 is an overall decline in Christian attendance, participation, and capacity to join meaningful Christian communities across all denominational groups: some hit more than others.  Rising costs make institutional church archaic, as a huge percentage of the annual budget is tied up in buildings and staffing.  These areas have costs growing much faster than giving, making the current arrangement in most churches unsustainable.  As the fiscal costs to maintain the system go up, so do the social costs.  Maintaining existing levels of social engagement in the church programming is taxing the aging volunteer base and causing real stress on the social makeup of our congregations.

Given the above challenges there is only one clear solution.  Ditch the programs.

I’m not saying that we stop delivering food baskets or offering opportunities for the church to act like the church.  But many of our churches are living into a church model that is inappropriate for their size and makeup.  The average church has an Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) of about 70. This means that the vast majority are a “pastoral-sized church”.  They would have to more than double their regular attendance to begin moving into a new model, triple it to make the transition.  The next model is appropriately named “program”.

Most churches should simply stop using the word “program” at all.  It comes from a different model of church.  It isn’t yours.  Just stop calling things programs.  They should also stop seeing the arrangement as “programs” being what we “offer” to our community.  Instead we should embrace what we as the community value together.  This simple shift in focus more accurately embodies the dynamic most churches are rather than what they were or believe they are supposed to be.

St. Swithin’s in the Swamp with 75 on a Sunday “offers” Christian Education in the form of Sunday School to differing age groups, with 2-3 children per class during their 10:30 am worship service.  They then have their different fellowship programs during the week, which are sparsely attended, and occasional Outreach events in which the same dedicated volunteers come out and work for two straight days, making a herculean, but rewarding effort.  All of this is commendable and wonderful.  However, it causes incredible strain on the community.  The people don’t know what else to do.

This really is quite simple.  Stop.  Just stop.  Then figure out what you’re good at, what you value, and how you are called to live.  It doesn’t matter how much you “offer” since it will never be quite enough and isn’t the panacea we’ve all taken it for.  Christians aren’t only doers and believers: we’re be-ers.

The mythical St. Swithin’s is better off sharing in spontaneous intergenerational formation and worship together, and engaging Bible Study, faith formation, and preparation in natural groups.  The mission of St. Swithin’s is lived out in corporate participation in direct community needs as one, tackling needs evident in their neighborhood or brought to the congregation by individuals within it.

This isn’t just a difference in words, but a fundamental difference that can only happen by living out a different way in all aspects of congregational life.  Otherwise, the pursuit of programs will kill our congregations.

Using My Time’s Gonna Cost Ya’!

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Yesterday I wrote that when we claim we don’t have enough time for church, it is really code for “I don’t want to”.  Today I’ll say that living in the U.S. right now is like living in a time-sucking vortex of anxiety and despair.  Or maybe that’s just what it feels like when I get 30 minutes of uninterrupted silence to write in my home office.  And there is no way that we have enough time for anything, really.

My wife is in retail management, which means her hours are inconsistent and all over the place.  Last week she opened a bunch.  This week she’s closing.  Last week I had time at night to run off by myself.  This week, I have to steal late morning time against my wife’s preference for help staying sane.  I have virtually no time to hang out with my other dad buddies because they work jobs in the city and get up at the a-crack of dawn.  Getting any of us to go to something on a weekday night at church?  You better be offering free lottery tickets along with a babysitter and good beer.  Or at least Chinese food.  I miss that.

There isn’t time.  We’re exhausted all the time.  Planning and playing, working and cleaning; there really doesn’t seem like there’s enough time to even chat with my wife, let alone set aside time for church.

Ah, but we would if we really wanted to.  If it were truly important enough, we’d do it.  My wife would plan for Wednesday nights off.  We’d get a babysitter.  And since we don’t, what does that say?

I met a parishioner, something like nine months after starting at one of my parishes.  She happily professed that she comes to worship monthly.  And after nine months, I was just getting the chance to talk with her.  I understand busy, and I understand the challenge that is getting the family out of bed and over to worship, but monthly?  I’m not trying to be critical or snarky, because this was a nice woman, but we can’t consider something important if we miss it 75-80% of the time.

My plea is that we act how we wish we’d act.  We go where we wish we’d go.  Instead of having church be a distant third, at least make it a closer third.  You know, within sniffing distance.  Throw it a bone that says, yeah, this is important.  And while you’re doing that, get the church leadership to stop complaining that nobody ever shows up.  I guarantee the problem really isn’t time, it’s how you think you have to spend it and how you are asked to spend it.

And that can be changed.

 

© 2011 Drew Downs.  All rights reserved

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Not Enough Time

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In church, we make the excuse that we don’t have enough time, but what we really mean is, “I don’t want to.” I don’t want to volunteer or I don’t want to miss my son’s soccer game or I don’t want to put one more thing on my plate. I don’t want to contribute. I pledge; I show up every other Sunday. Leave me alone.

When we don’t want to do something that we know we should, we feel bad and we make excuses. We don’t simply say that we don’t have enough time, we say…

…I’m swamped at work…

…My family needs me at home…

…I did my time…

…and we pretend as if the entire church can go on without us.

But it can’t. And deep down, we know that. That’s part of the reason we feel guilty. The other is that one time we stole a pen from the office administrator because she always gets those great blue gel pens that write so smoothly. Otherwise it’s that we know that we’re needed.

The issue isn’t so much that we don’t have enough time, its that we have other things prioritized ahead of church. And we think that’s the right thing to do. We love our kids, so we go to all of the soccer games, all of the practices, even the inter-squad scrimmages and we think that’s what great parents do. But we’re making a choice. A choice to be at all these scrimmages rather than be at church. And we only feel a small twinge of guilt.

So we have a two-step program:

  1. Admit we put all this other stuff first.
  2. Then do something about it.

It really is that simple. We have to decide whether to do all of those things we think are “necessary” or do we make church one of those necessary things.

And after we make the decision and (hopefully) we want to be at church, step two comes in and we have to figure out what we can do about it. But that’s easy one. The first step is the toughest. It is so very simple, but so hard to admit. To admit that we are the problem.

Why I Hate Announcement Time

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Sunday Service at St. George's Episcopal Church

Image by samdessordi via Flickr

My least favorite part of any worship service is the announcement time.  There are so many things wrong with it and there are so few ways to actually fix it.  I’m starting to think we should do away with the whole enterprise.

Many Episcopal churches place the announcements in the middle of the service.  Honestly, there’s nothing funnier than getting about 45 minutes into a 60 minute service and have someone say “Welcome!”  Oh, but if you put it at the beginning, the latecomers will miss all of this really important information.  Plus it doesn’t set our minds appropriately for worship.  We also can’t put it at the end, because everybody is trying to get out of there, so they aren’t listening anyway.  Besides, nothing says “go do ministry!” like 20 minutes of horrible improv.  And just so you know, we did cover this in seminary!

I hate announcement time.  I hate it, whether I’m up front or in the pew.  I hate it!  And it always has at least three invitations: Continue reading →

6 Keys to Engaging Seniors in Church

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The lighthouse located in Alpena Michigan

Image via Wikipedia

Growing up, my favorite people in church fell into the “senior” category.  They were the most engaged in my life and were so happy to see me.  I wasn’t a nuisance, even when I was incredibly embarrassing to my parents.  I was so profoundly loved by the seniors at Trinity Episcopal in Alpena, Michigan.

This category, for our purposes may be considered retirement age (whatever that is today).  AARP sends you stuff at 55.  Sam Portaro in his talk, started it at 60.  Like everything else, you know it when you see it.  I also hear that you know it when you feel it, but that is something else.

With the rising average age of Christians in the United States, it is pretty easy to consider that the average member of a church on any given Sunday is actually a senior.  For many, this is wonderfully homogenous.  We might hear:

This is so much easier when we’re all the same!  We all have the same needs and expectations!

For others, this is absolutely terrifying.  We might also hear:

Oh crap!  Everybody looks like me!  How can we have a future when I don’t have a long one!

Excuse my caricatures, but you get my meaning.  There is both comfort and discomfort with having the most numerous group in church being older.  There are also real assets.

Calmness

Portaro highlights the primary benefit of aging is a sense of calmness.  Seniors have seen everything already.  They have survived turmoil and thrived in boom times.  Their entire lifetimes serve as a history book that informs their next steps.

Continued Service to Others

Perhaps its wisdom or experience, but many seniors have developed a strong sense of service through that individual (and shared) history.  And, in retirement, new-found time and opportunity to express that service.

Portaro also considered adding an additional grouping.  His original model was 60-80 was named (less falteringly) “old age” and 80+ was “advanced old age”.  But for our purposes, as he did for his talk, it seems appropriate to consider all of our seniors together.

6 keys to engaging seniors in church:

  1. Seniors are still learning.  Perhaps  it is wisdom and calmness, but many seniors take real pride in “not being done yet”.  One of my favorite people in this group really only engaged his faith in any demonstrable way in retirement. Many discover along the way that the only true way to learn is through teaching.
  2. Encourage teaching.  Just like Mid-Lifers, Seniors need to be mentors, teachers, and guides.  But seniors have the added advantage of no longer being so “in it”.  There is less risk and much greater reward in sharing those life lessons, particularly to generations that have grown up away from grandparents.
  3. Be surrogate grandparents.  One of the generational differences we are living into is the Silent Generation (approx. those between 65-80 today), along with the WWII generation were the first generations of Americans to not live in the same place as their kids.  Boomers left when they could or Silents and WWII parents retired in sunny Arizona or Florida, far from their kids.  Gen Xers and Millenials have, as a generation, grown up without grandparents nearby.  This means we have a whole bunch of children, youth, and young adults that need grandparents to spoil them on Sunday mornings and invite them over for brunch after church.
  4. (Don’t) Take advantage of the free time.  Let’s face it, seniors are the only ones with the free time.  At least as a whole.  Yes, I’ve heard many seniors tell me that they were busier in retirement than they were the entire decade before.  I buy that.  But a big part of that busyness is church stuff.  Here’s the cutting edge.  Because seniors are the only ones with any real free time, they are called upon to do the brunt of the work.  But they also feel as if they are always doing all of the work.  We need to find a solution, which I will tackle in a near future post.
  5. Help seniors share the church’s future.  One of the challenges of having a majority senior population is dealing with catering to the needs of those that are in the pews and those that we wish were there.  We often don’t think we can do both.  It is incredibly important that we move immediately toward a model of shared responsibility.  The wisdom of seniors is an asset, only when it is not the dominant voice.  Each generation needs to have a seat at the table, and seniors are in the best position to send out those invitations.
  6. Challenge seniors to keep it up.  Perhaps this one actually scares us the most, but we need seniors to find value in numbers one through five.  We all know those, who upon retirement, actually quit everything.  They stop supporting the millage so that schools have running buses, stop leading formation programs because they’ve “done that” and “had their turn”, and sometimes stop showing up to anything at church at all!  It is far too easy for all of us to lean on the wisdom of age as a replacement for honest Christian discipleship.  Seniors need to be pushed to keep moving and growing.

This is the final age-group post in my “Engaging” series, but I have another one planned to summarize with an eye to the future and another tackling the issue of “enough time”.

When those are written I will come back and add links in this post.  For links to the other posts in this series, find them in the post: “Engaging Everyone In Church“.

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Bad Science, Infant Cereal, and Church Tradition

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Cap'n Crunch regular flavor cereal

In her post, “Why Ditch The Infant Cereals?” KristenM at Food Renegade makes a compelling case for not giving cereal to babies before they are one year-old.  The case is made of two important arguments: 1) What is developmentally and biologically appropriate and 2) There is no “traditional” basis for it.

Against these two arguments, one can only feebly make up something like “well, if it weren’t OK, then it wouldn’t be in stores” or “it’s just a little wheat–what’s the harm?”  You know, the best debate champions in their clique.

So powerful are these two arguments, and so counter to what my friends and relatives are doing, that it leads me toward that strange existential crisis of fighting with my own mind.  Normally, we settle these fights with a pretty obvious question: could I send this to my sister and get a positive response?  Or is she simply going to say “What a quack”? And we normally let that question govern our decision-making.  What will others think of me if I followed this?  And the answer is usually go with your gut because your friends and family are wrong.

Knowing that my friends and family are no doubt reading this, I will say that you aren’t always wrong. And I trust you with my life.  You never steer me wrong.

However, our friends and family are more interested in your not being weird and outcasted than they are in discovering scientific truths about child-rearing.  Except my Mom.  But she’s a little weird, herself.

This also seems incredibly relevant to churches and all people of faith.  How does current practice match up to those two questions: 1) What is developmentally and biologically appropriate and 2) What is the traditional basis for this.  Or better yet, when faced with new ideas, how do they match up?

Our philosophy is to ignore the stats and make up the difference.  We paint in the space between the our beliefs and the truth with the detail of a Thomas Kinkade print.  But really, Catholic or Protestant, our worship is not biologically or developmentally appropriate to the average participant, let alone to our youngest members.  Nor are many of our practices historically traditional.

Like those experts who fail to recognize the biological development of babies before encouraging new parents to stop nursing and start popping cereal in their mouths as soon as possible, many Christians fail to recognize how untraditional our current practices truly are.

And in the end, what is more important than raising healthy children?

 

What are your thoughts?  What is the place of innovation and tradition with raising our children?  And with raising up the church?

 

© 2011 Drew Downs.  All rights reserved

5 Keys to Engaging Mid-Lifers in church

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One of my good church friends is Jimmy*.  Jimmy is a Baby Boomer, served in Vietnam, runs a small business he owns.  He, like many of his generation, grew up going to church and spent the middle twenty or so years not.

Jimmy and I would talk about what matters… Continue reading →

The parable you never knew

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Two of the most recognizable parables sandwich a poor, misunderstood parable in Luke’s gospel.  A parable of revolutionary proportions, often mistaken for an afterthought.  A small, instructive parable that speaks today in the volume of a whisper with the effect of a hand grenade.

Before we get to that parable, it is useful to talk about what is around it. Continue reading →

Renegades of Funk (Monday Mixtape)

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Now renegades are the people with their own philosophies

They change the course of history

Everyday people like you and me

We’re the renegades we’re the people

With our own philosophies

We change the course of history

Everyday people like you and me

As I said in my homily yesterday, the stuff that got Jesus killed was rebellion.  He was a renegade.  He didn’t simply tow the line and pretend that everything was hunky dory.  He also didn’t go about tearing the system down with his own hands all by himself.  He was crucified, the torture/murder device reserved for those that rebel themselves or insight rebellion against Rome.  He was getting others to do it. Continue reading →