There’s a consistency to our talk of decline. What to blame. How to fix it. Talk and action. Still missing the point.
Einstein’s analysis of the world revealed a truth we refuse to accept. Everything in nature is growing or declining.
We do accept this, in a sense. But only by half.
We understand growth and decline, but we continue to also demand there bestasis: that sense that things are the way they are and stay that way.
Our sense of reality is shaped by a sense of an eternal present that longs for stasis.
So think about the fight going on inside our brains all the time! On the one hand, we know things are either growing or declining. And we can observe it as our kids grow up and our parents grow older. But on the other, we think things today will look exactly like yesterday.
We live with a constant cognitive distortion about life itself.
We also have a “success” bias.
Our observations about the world and our distorted sense of object permanence are bad enough. Now let’s throw something else on the pile.
We expect organizations, economies, cultures, to behave differently. So, for instance, we expect our economy to grow by about three to four percent every year…forever. Growing at one or two percent is treated as failure.
Never mind the idea that no nation in history has ever managed to sustain permanent perpetual growth. We are convinced such a thing is possible.
While our yearning for the fountain of youth has shifted from discovering it in nature to building it through technology, we are utterly convinced that an economy can keep growing forever, regardless of the evidence.
And yet, even if the theory were to hold, is it not necessarily missing a certain other factor? Namely, every other economy in the world? Perpetual growth is, of course, limited by scale.
The catch-22 of talking about decline.
Talking about decline is necessary to “fix” our “problems”. It also generates new ones.
I have long named the catch-22 for church leadership is based on our success bias.
Talking about decline often accelerates decline.
Most often because we associate success with permanent, perpetual growth. And our cognitive bias toward an expectation of stasis convinces us that we can always stay as we are. So the things we did before will always work. But when they don’t, we believe there must be another reason.
We don’t treat decline as inevitable, natural, or part of the life cycle of our institutions. And therefore, we also don’t see the natural processes for rebirth and renewal.
We think quick fixes, silver bullets, and magic beans will get us out of this mess. Or we blame leadership, so we switch out one leader for another. They must be the problem.
And yet the examples of this thinking actually working are quite few and far between. We are, instead, surrounded by examples of the opposite. If changing leaders was so effective, the Cleveland Browns would have a bunch of Super Bowl rings.
Success Bias encourages lying.
If talking about decline often accelerates decline, then there is a perverse incentive to never talk about it. And worse: discourage any talk of it.
Most of the stewardship talk in The Episcopal Church over the last decade encourages us to talk about the positive things. The idea being that people will give more when they are grateful for the work the congregation is doing.
In short, people give more when they feel like things are going well.
This doesn’t just create an incentive to make sure things do, in fact, go well. It creates a disincentive to share when things do not.
This is particularly perverse when congregational decline leads to decreased funds. The tendency will be to potentially give less when times are tough; a sort of individualized punishment for not demonstrating sufficient “success”.
Stewardship growth in an era of decline
The last decade has demonstrated an interesting counter to this catch-22. The Episcopal Church has shown increased giving during a time of membership decline. As silver linings go, this may seem insufficient. But as counter-indicators go, it is a particularly important one.
Why? Because it suggests the success bias is not as in control as we imagine.
Much like the economic conditions in the 21st Century have debunked the governing orthodoxy of the late 20th Century, we are now seeing that certain “truths” we’ve long taken as necessary are really mirages.
The obvious reality
Of course, there are also two colliding issues we rarely talk about. One is that the Baby Boom led to growth and decline. Precisely because it was a bubble generation necessitating growth at the birth end and decline when the succeeding generation was half its size.
We really want there to be a mistake so that we can plan for how to fix it.
The other is that, for the whole United States, the economic conditions for everyone outside of metropolitan counties is in decline. Literally everywhere. And has been for the last half-century.
And yet we are convinced that we should expect to grow, even when everything else is declining. There is literally only one way that happens: stealing and consolidating.
Much like the top 0.1% have funneled almost all economic growth of the last twenty years to themselves, individual churches are seeking to funnel all the decreasingly Christian population to themselves. This is how some individual churches can be growing while there is universal decline among all denominational groups.
These aren’t conditions in which willing our leaders to “do more” will stem the tide. Nor do they particularly match the mission.
This, ultimately, is the true curse of decline. It makes us fear the death of our institutions through the loss of their influence. And we therefore see ourselves as protectors of the institution.
But our mission is not to protect an institution, or an ideology, for that matter. And it certainly isn’t to protect Christians from cultural death.
Our mission is to love.
And this is what always gets lost in our conversations about decline. Because we certainly ought to talk about our challenges and we ought to work toward “success” (whatever that really means). But these things always eclipse our sense of the work we’ve been commanded to do.
The work that we are commanded to do first.
Most of the talk around decline never truly gets to this point with any satisfaction and clarity. Because we can’t resist putting the institution first. Or our sense of conviction first. We put our desires first or our analysis first or our sense of winning first.
If we are to be known by our love, then the public competitiveness, shame, and incessant bickering is making us known for something. But following Jesus isn’t it.