Ideas for the church
One of the benefits of being a pastor and not being in a call is that I can think about the wider church and play with ideas without repercussion. I can propose ideas, some very radical in nature. I can question things that many people might hold very dear and have for a long time without fear of consequence. I can say stuff that people know, but they are afraid to say out loud.
I’m just playing with ideas because here’s the reality – the way things are is not working and has not been working for decades. And the church doesn’t seem to want to do anything about it. That’s what institutions do though. Institutions exist to maintain things they way they are. Institutions protect themselves. Although I’d say the institution is doing a pretty crappy job of protecting itself – people have been leaving in droves. Correction – in some cases people are fleeing because they feel very unwelcome or unsafe.
Here, let’s say the quiet part out loud – in many congregations, there is extra effort made to keep those who refuse to change satisfied so that they will keep giving – because they have been around for a long time and so many of our congregations are really bad handling conflict in a healthy manner. And in doing so, a message is clearly sent and received. The people who leave are the ones who look to make change, to make updates, to do the work. They leave. They hear the message loud and clear that they are not welcome. That is not a recipe for sustainability or survival. It’s a long, slow, painful death.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. It never does. We can do things differently. There are always other options.
Here’s my ideas. And before you jump on my ideas and critic them and blow holes in them, let me offer this. These ideas aren’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t even know how to implement most of them. They would be messy to transition in to. And yes, people would run away from them – So what? People are running away from the church now. It’s really just a matter of who would be running away. The idea here is that the status quo is not acceptable. And the fact that the church is doing literally nothing about it is beyond words. So, yes, I’m going to propose radical ideas in order to get conversation going. I want people to talk. I want people to get riled up about church. I want people to get angry about the fact that the church is settling for a slow painful death. I want people to debate. I want people to try things. I want people to explore. I want the church to discern vision for what it is called to. I want to see what resurrection looks like for the church. Because that’s where new life is.
So here’s my ideas.
Every church should have a life span. Pick a number. 25 years sounds like a good number to me. It’s a generation. At the end of 25 years, the congregation dies. That’s it. We proclaim life, death, and resurrection, but in reality we don’t actually believe it. We want our congregations to live forever. Nope. I think there is something powerful when we are intentionally thinking about death and are aware of it. We know we have a limited time and so we are serious about what we do with our time. We don’t fight over stupid things when we have limited time. We use our resources intentionally when we have limited time. Relationships become most important when we have limited time. And we aren’t ignoring death, like the culture does. We are embracing it and looking to what resurrection is all about. At the end of the life of the congregation, the congregation celebrates the fruit of faith, and either disperses or breaks up into new mission starts, or is a new mission start itself somewhere else. But the key is new. It can’t rely on the way it did things before. Everything would have to be new. New leadership, new pastor, new location, new technology, new way of worshipping, new community, etc. It is new. That’s what resurrection is all about – new life.
Every church should either not own property or if it does own property the main focus should be on using it for the community. One of the biggest challenges churches have is that they end up turning inward in focus – taking care of the property, taking care of the membership, etc. They turn into institutions that turn inward. The church is at its best when it is outward focused. This requires intentionality. Churches don’t need to own property. This will require them to be creative and turn on the creative and innovative juices to figure out how to be community and in the community. Maybe this means renting space, or meeting in homes, or using technology, or public spaces, or who knows what, or a combination of all that and things I haven’t thought of. If a congregation does own land, then use the space primarily for the community as the main focus. How can the congregation use the kitchen to feed the community as often as possible? How can the congregation convert it’s space to house people in need? How can the congregation make it’s space into a space where the community feels welcome and can use it for the community’s benefit? How can the church become the community space? It takes intentionality to think through this, and to build partnerships with the community.
No church should be an island. Churches should group together to do ministry together much more intentionally than they ever imagined. The days of a church having a single pastor with an office manager and their own musician are over, I hope. No one pastor is gifted at everything. Nor should they be. This is a recipe for a pastor being burnt out or abused. Instead, gather a group of 7-10 congregations together along with 5 pastors. Among those pastors, each is gifted in certain areas and between them, they can cover those congregations. Some pastors are gifted at pastoral care, while others are not. Expecting all pastors have an equal skill at pastoral care is ridiculous. The same is true of every other skill. Imagine pastors sharing responsibilities across multiple congregations? The impact would be enormous. Oh, I can hear the complaints – “But I wouldn’t have my pastor!” What’s this really about? Control? The world is changing and the church needs to change too, along with the expectations of the church and what is expected of the pastor and the congregation. We already established that maintaining things is not working.
This one is specific to the ELCA. The bishops need more authority. Recently one of the bishops sent out a letter to their synod offering words of support for the clergy in their synod. And, my interpretation, words to the effect telling congregations in the synod that they need to treat clergy better because abusive behavior of clergy has an impact on the clergy and word spreads and clergy don’t want to come to a synod where such things happen. There is something seriously wrong with our congregational structure when clergy abuse and congregational implosions and congregational power struggles that end in destructive and toxic situations seem to be the norm. I don’t know if this is something new. Something since the pandemic – a response the the anxiety and stress. I don’t know if it’s a combination of the pandemic and politics and economics and generational shift and more. I don’t really care honestly because regardless, it’s not ok. There is no excuse for it. And unfortunately there isn’t a whole lot that our hierarchy can do either beyond threaten to withhold pastoral candidates from congregations. As one colleague of mine recently described it, we swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction by making our denomination a congregationalist focused and empowered denomination. The argument isn’t to put all power in the hands of the hierarchy. There are problems with that too. But the current system is not working. All one has to do is observe.
That’s four ideas to get the ball rolling. I’d love to hear your ideas. Like I said, the point of this is to generate conversation. I don’t pretend to have all the ideas, or even good ideas for that matter. The ideas above are fraught with problems – I know this for a fact. But I also know that keeping things the way they are guarantees that we are set on a course for denominational death without any intentionality for resurrection because all we are doing is catering to and accommodating to the most stubborn and change resistant in the church. And I have no interest maintaining that.
About The Author
When it was promised that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church, it was not referring to St Luke’s Episcopal church in Mechanicsburg, my church. My church is not guaranteed that promise. Jesus’ promise is much bigger than that.
Amen! I think a lot of Christians confuse this. I have often reminded people that even Paul’s churches no longer exist. Yet, he was one of the greatest evangelists the church had and all the churches he launched are all long gone. Churches get launched, they serve a purpose, and they die. That is the circle of life. And then resurrection happens. Churches bear fruit and the faith continues elsewhere.
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No doubt as a product of my heritage, I want to “be biblical” (a phrase that would need to be unpacked since it can mean different things to different people), but I certainly want some ideas about changing things.
I keep reflecting on Ron Highfield’s blog post (Pepperdine Univ.) about the difference between church and parachurch. We kick around the term parachurch, and there probably is a fairly good shared understanding of what that is, but his critical analysis reveals that most of what we call “church” is actually better termed parachurch. Most of what we call church isn’t necessary, and probably a hindrance more often than not. (Some of that is my analysis of his.)
So, in my view, there is something to be said for getting rid of ideas.
I don’t thing I am opposed to your post in saying this, though that has more to do with the spirit of the notion than with the rhetoric.
I’m interested in Jesus. Jesus crucified and raised, particularly, and how a group of people come together in trust/faith and charity toward one another to embody him crucified and raised.
I fear my remarks come off as a takedown of yours. Not my point or desire, but they do come at the same problem with similar care, only going at it the other direction, I think.
Worth considering, I hope.
All these “trappings” of “church” are like a tail wagging the dog (to be generous) or like spies thwarting God’s grace (to be more blunt). We have commitments to all these lesser things dividing us and making us unholy, impure, and nothing more than a social club with the holy name on the door.
My God! Matt…
Just two Sunday’s ago, I was informed (in a shadowy way) that Lubbock (a town about as “Christian” as it gets) has something of an underground “Christian” wife-swap club. An open-marriage club FOR “CHRISTIANS.”
I cannot verify that, presently, but having been through divorce personally, and “divorce care” ministry in at least 3 different churches here, I certainly believe it is highly possible if not likely! I have turned my attention so much to homeless, that I rarely remark on my issues IN THE CHURCH as a divorced person, but I found an underground brothel alright! And I am amazed at how the church ignores it. How can leadership NOT know about it? I am convinced they do.
Don’t get me wrong. I think divorced people need grace, but we need to deal with these problems openly and carefully. Denying them, sweeping them under the rug, and ignoring them because its bad PR is NOT the answer. In fact, we need Jesus to save our marriages. We need to live the cruciformed life which probably doesn’t get divorced in the first place. After all, divorce and remarriage is hardly different from a wife swap!
I would be interested in getting back to Jesus. I could write more about my experience in “divorce care”, and probably should, but this comment is too long already. But I must say, the church missed the boat on the one hand and let in the devil on the other. I surely didn’t feel helped, but abandoned.
A social club with the holy name on the door. I think that’s what so many churches have become. Which is why they are struggling. But they won’t die off. They will hold on for a long time.
As for the church brothel thing – I just don’t know what to say about that. I think I need more context.
I’ve never really thought about the church in this manner, but I certainly do value these ideas & thought process. I’ve been out visiting other churches these past few months, looking for something. I’m not quite sure what that is, but I hope I’ll know when I find it. A common theme I have found, is empty pews among more
“traditional” service, type churches – much like what you are referring to. The churches don’t exactly die, they keep hanging on by a thread but rarely see new members. The last church I visited, started out praising the Lord with what I would call a Christian rock concert type worship (pretty cool actually) but thought it strange that there was no imagery of Christ, anything biblical, or even a cross for that matter! Not one single cross – strange to me. This place has multiple pastors teaching to their strengths & a great message – kinda like you were referring to. I was very happy to see such a diverse congregation all worshipping together – it’s how I always imagined it was supposed to be. For me, I don’t think there is value in shaking it up for everyone. There are many people choosing to worship Christ in their respective ways & the “church” is the people, not a structure or place of worship. In my opinion, the real trick is to find ways to work together in expanding God’s kingdom of believers. I don’t pretend to know how to go about this. We all have one thing in common: Christ. The more diversity in types of churches to reach non-believers, the better. For some, your ideas could open new doors to Christ & I place an extremely high value on that. For others, tradition is their way & should be respected as such. I think your ideas could take root & be successful. One would only hope that this would spread like a brush fire to bring more people to Christ.
Jason, Thanks for responding. I totally get the idea that that isn’t one way to do church and completely agree. In other posts I have written that church needs to be authentic to the people gathered, whatever form that takes – whether that is traditional, modern, contemporary, or whatever. It’s not the structure that matters so much as that people gather in such a way that it points to Jesus and doesn’t become an idol itself. My biggest hope is that people can gather, in whatever way that works, to be community, and be authentic, and be disciples, and serve. It’s about living the faith. It’s about a living faith. it seems like for too many churches there is a dead faith. I’m not interested in a dead faith, regardless of what it looks like. I want a living faith.
Hi, Matt. I’m doing an intentional interim at Tri-County Lutheran Parish in the Upstate NY Synod. When I started out in January of this year, there were 8 churches banded together, sharing 2 pastors and an intern. Our intern left at the beginning of June and we weren’t assigned a new one. Two of the 8 congregations have closed, leaving us with 6. The ones that are left are not exactly the picture of glowing health. The settled pastor and I have been working to try to find something to unify them around; we’re hoping there’s something in the works around a mission in one of the places where a congregation closed, but that’s not definite yet. In the meantime, we can’t even get them to do the same liturgy! It’s been absolutely ridiculous. They are starting to realize that they may be looking at the end of life of their congregations. I want to say that it’s great for congregations to band together to share resources, but it doesn’t always work out like we hope it will.
Tonya, absolutely. The main point is the intentionality. There has to be intentionality. The same is true with the the property. What is the intentionality? Just banding together for the sake of it, or saving money, for just surviving, or whatever is not the answer. It’s for the sake of mission, for being disciples, for being in community, for a greater purpose. It’s about intention.
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Brothel… context…
Yeah. I don’t write much about it, but once in a while I touch on it a bit. I figure it’s the kind of thing that can consume my whole blog, but I have dedicated it to church vis-a-vis homeless, and so I don’t say much about sex.
However, I was divorced more than 15 years ago. (Have you been divorced? – if not, then please don’t. You’ll have to take my word for some of this, but please don’t find out for yourself. It’s not worth it.)
Divorced people are nuts. A sane person goes of the rails on Ozzy’s crazy train. It involves sex. For some people a LOT of sex. Your moral compass goes spinning like a tornado. The snakes and creeps come slithering and crawling out of the woodwork.
When I got married, I “knew” my wife. I thought that made me generally aware, experienced, IN THE KNOW. I had no idea how innocent and naive I really was.
I will stop short, just for decency sake of describing some of the physiological impact divorce had on my body, but I suffered an awakening I need never have had. And that was just a physical response. My spirit was hopeless. I felt lost.
And then I went to church.
I kid you not, my shepherd instructed me to go to another church – a larger congregation that would have a “divorce-care” ministry. Ours was too small, and focused on the streets etc. He thought I was in more of a NEED season of my life than a giving one. Which seemed wise, and still sounds like it. But that shepherd was at least as naive as me, and still is.
When I showed up at divorce care, I was fresh meat. I kid you not, I’m not some sex stud either, but I had women primping for me right in Sunday school. Inside a week, I had women flashing their body parts at me, calling me seeking “love” and pursuing me like crazy.
I remember feeling conflicted. This stuff was just barely below the radar. No one behaved this way from the podium or in front of the assembly, but I was getting a lot of this attention in the hall or certainly the parking lot and definitely in more private settings.
How much of your church is divorced? Talk to some people intimately about this stuff. I left one church for another and another seeking “divorce care” and the rot was in all three of them.
That was more than a decade back.
Divorce and remarriage has been a phenom of the American church for the last 45-60 years. It’s been a booming industry. I believe in God’s grace for divorced people, but we chug along like we are innocent, and we are not. The rot is seething beneath the surface. SEETHING.
AS a divorced man, I turned down hundreds of these advances. Hundreds! And I am no sex symbol or hot bod. I was just the fresh meat.
I caved to the circus a couple times, and this was “divorce care” at church. Again, just below the radar. I supposed I could have confessed and exposed it, but I was feeling lost myself. This was the “help” my church offered me.
I would look at it as soberly as I could, and I found that when a man divorces his wife, he makes her an adulterer. (Matt. 5:32) Being modern American and egalitarian, I figure that cuts two ways, but whatever, it means being divorced jams you up like nothing else. This woman is now an adulterer and it’s not even her fault!
Plus, if I ever get remarried, it’s only a technical difference between that and a wife swap.
Look, you may not see it that way, but try looking at during the dark night of your soul. You FEEL damned. No matter what, you FEEL damned.
Impulses in your body put puberty to shame. AND you feel damned.
I have often wondered what’s next? Divorce and remarrige IN CHURCH used to be scandalous when I was a kid. It’s so easily accepted now. IN CHURCH. And the brothel is seething beneath the surface of the facade of worship. I know, I KNOW, plenty of nice people in divorce care show up to worship Jesus and leave with a hook up. TONS of them. They’re squaring off IN WORSHIP.
If half your congregation is (or has been) in this condition, how many are deciding there’s no real difference in this and a wife swap anyway? (And really, what is the difference?)
The nice lady in my Bible class the other day may well have been confessing! She may well have been asking for help! It sounded like a titillating bit of gossip, but like a person making suicidal or homicidal statements which are red flags friends and family too easily ignore, the thing continues to seeth subsurface!
At any rate, I describe something happening IN CHURCH.
I keep going to church, but I hear no sermons on this. None to convict it; none to shed light; none to offer help or hope. It just remains silent. A cancer raging through the body undiagnosed and untreated in any capacity.
Wow. I had no idea. In the last church I served, there was a good number of folks who were divorced, but none of them ever told me any of this or showed up with anyone new or anything like this. This is all new to me.
Thank you for your brave words and courageous witness. We need more voices like yours and we need much much much more of the conversation you long for.
I just left a call in April that was a social club with a church name. It was a tough two and a half years, and I’ll spare you all the details. It broke my heart because they had so many resources and so much potential (especially for a rural church) but were hell bent on keeping things the way they always had been.
Since then, I’ve become a hospice chaplain and regular supply preacher. Many of the little rural churches around here don’t have a pastor, can’t afford a pastor, and flat out refuse to die. They’d rather have a supply pastor and meet only 1 Sunday a month than close “their” church. I struggle with preaching at these places and enabling it.
The current model of the institutional church is clearly not working and you are absolutely right that we need to do things differently. There are places trying a version of what you suggested, there’s one in Texas that is thriving though for the life of me I cannot remember its name. Nebraska synod tried to get an initiative going to build faith communities like this, but it didn’t get any real traction. I hope they can try again in a slightly different way and get a better response.
Until then, I’m going to keep doing hospice ministry- I guess with both my patients and some of these congregations that I preach at. And as I do it, I’m personally going to continue my wrestling with the question Brian McLaren raised on his last book… the question of how to stay Christian because that’s how broken my heart is after 7 years of ministry.
Kimberly, Thanks for reaching out, for reading the post, and for commenting. My hope is always that there is innovation and conversation. I strive to proclaim that there is a different way to do things and to invite people into doing things differently. I don’t have all the answers, just that Jesus has a better way. And that better will look different in each context. I think there is a real fear of death – both personally and congregational. As if the death of the congregation will be the end, period. We claim life, death, and resurrection, but do we really believe it? That’s the real question. I’m not so sure that most Christians actually do, given how tightly they hold onto their congregations and they way they are currently run and exist. But we have to embrace death in order to get to the resurrection. Death is scary though because we are not in control. And that’s the key – control. We aren’t in control. Maybe our congregations can start with a confession around control first. And be released of control. And go from there. At any rate, don’t lose hope. Keep talking about these things. You aren’t alone.
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Granted, you aren’t in “The South” and that may well make some difference. But I doubt it makes as much difference as all that.
To give you an idea, check out a book called Sex in The South: Unbuckling The Bible Belt by Suzi Parker. It’s a tawdry book full of naughty revelations, but I must say that I find it realistic. However, the book was published almost 20 years ago. I doubt very much the picture has remained stagnant.
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Here’s a quote I used from Parker’s book in a paper I wrote back in school.
…I was sitting on a pew in the First Baptist Church in Russellville, Arkansas, a small town on the edge of the Ozark Mountains. A chubby blonde classmate to whom I had never given a second glance in high school passed me a note asking to do that very thing, earning him my contempt and a withering go-to-hell glance. I never spoke to him after that, and I certainly never accepted his offer. But years later, I was amused – but not entirely shocked – to discover at a class reunion that he had become a minister. That’s the South, where what you see is never what you get. Peer behind the hymnals and homilies as I do to find out what really happens when the pastor’s not looking. The region is a full-to-capacity carnal playground where the den mother buys dildos, the principal is a swinger, and the preacher is a porn fiend (Parker, 2003).
Humans find ways to do such things. Colleagues just told me about something similar in the North using keys in a church – a kind of key club.
Humans find ways to have sex. And in America we have an unhealthy relationship with sex and have for a long, long time. I like to blame the Puritans, but that’s simplistic in nature of course. They just moralized things to the extreme and when that happened, they made it scary and made people hide things and not talk about things because it becomes “dirty” in some way. Of course it’s much more complicated than that. Regardless, we end up with these secret, behind the scenes that remains hidden in plain sight that no one talks about in the open, even if people know it is going on.
Different parts of the country have different cultural ways of doing things. The South might have it’s What you see is never what you get approach. Here in South Central PA, we have a lot of folks who things in a passive aggressive way of doing things. There’s midwestern “niceness.” NYC has it’s directness, which I appreciate because it cuts to the chase. No games with that.
At any rate, back to sex. as I said before, America has an unhealthy relationship with sex in so many ways. We don’t know how to deal with this, talk about it, relate to it, and more. And we certainly don’t know how to see anything holy about it or godly about it.