It's both scary and exciting that so much appears in flux. I have kept in touch with my former ELCA church and synod. The synod has a pastor on staff working full time with congregations that are in the process of closing. The ELCA just announced an initiative to review the relationship of the denomination, synods, seminaries, campus ministries and more, and how to adjust for all the changes. The last time they did this it took 5 years. This time is more urgent, they need make changes now, so the timeline is a year and a half. I've been following a pastor that does statistical analysis of the various surveys on religious affiliation, attendance, etc. (Ryan Burge, Graphs About Religion, you can sign up for the basics for free). The last ten years have shown substantial drops in affiliation, attendance and a rise of the nones (spiritual but not religious) and atheists. In even five years the landscape is going to be very different.
I just step in here to gently disagree with the general implications (not by my correspondent, but in the larger world beyond) of "nones." I could probably mine those posts for more commentary, but I mean just a slight examination here.
I equate "nones" with most of the people in my congregations (and, for that matter, in the churches I grew up in): "Baptized heathens," for the most part. That doesn't make them bad church members, or illegitimate ones. Somewhere in my archives there's the story (not my own) of a church in Austin that admitted an atheist to membership. He wanted to be a part of the church, but he was honest enough to say he didn't believe. Should he be denied entry? Was he less "religious" than the person who told me, in my first parish, that I talked about the Bible too much? That he had read it years ago and he was done with it, and I should be, too, as his pastor? The more polite term among clergy for such people was "unchurched," because they didn't understand how a church was supposed to function. (For one thing, it wasn't for you; you were there for the church.) I suspect that atheist member was more a true "member" of the church than many who were born there and had grown old in it. All the problems I had in parish ministry came from people who demanded their needs and desires as to how the church should work and worship, had to be met first.
My wife still lovingly insists I didn't have the personality to be a pastor (not enough of a "people person"), and I don't fully disagree. But I still lovingly insist the problem was far more them than me (this you are not supposed to do; it's not the proper model of humility). But all I mean is, they were "unchurched," and no amount of emollient or glad-handing was going to get them around it. (At my second, and last, church, the pastor before me retired abruptly when told he couldn't take more time off to tend to his ill wife. I spent hours on the phone talking to his adult daughter about what they went through. He was a pastor for his adult life, certainly adept at being a "people person" as well as an administrator of a church (the primary pastoral role, actually), and yet he couldn't, in the end, stomach the "unchurched" in my congregation. No one could, as they never called another full-time pastor after I left. These experiences leave deep wounds that keep you re-examining your actions and intentions decades later. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.)
All of which is to say: changes are coming hard and fast, and the greatest of these is the place of church in society. As I've said before, it once had such a central and solid place that a UCC church in St. Louis had its own china pattern and silverware, complete with cook staff to prepare and serve meals on Sundays (and other days of the week), and it catered (in more ways than one) to the important and famous in the town. That wasn't unusual, it was just the one I knew about, long, long after its heyday had ended. The china and silver were in glass display cases, mute remainders of long faded glory. In that, you can see a metaphor for the church in the world. And where does it go now?
Hell, I don't know. But the "nones" that had to go to church in order to "fit in," or to access the social networks, or to be accepted and proven "our kind," now fit in better without church. The people who do go are the outcast, the odd, the "NOK." That's why most of us think of "evangelicals" and fundamentalists as both primary examples of churchgoers, and scary and dangerous people.
I remember a lecture series (what about, now, I can't remember) by an ordained minister who also gave such counsel in Europe, and he said in Europe he hid is ordained status and church affiliation because it would actually keep people from hiring him or listening to him. Even here, of course, if I say my church background is Evangelical, and mean "Lutheran and the Reformed traditions," I'm heard as "fundamentalist Bible-thumper who thinks the earth is 6000 years old and Jesus is coming as soon as Armageddon starts in Israel and consumes all the Jews who won't convert." Or some such tedious bullshit.
So I welcome the "nones," if only because they know what they don't want. I'm not sure they know what they want, but I'm also not sure Augustine was right and our heart are restless until they rest in God. I prefer a more gnomic understanding: "The peace of God, it is no peace, but stife sown in the sod." Combined with Matthew 11:28-30 (which I quote from the KJV because I'm too lazy to type out the SV version I prefer):
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
Because there's still a yoke, and there's still a burden, and because we are still the light of the world.
But a light has to always burn. And, I suppose, always be steady, but always be in flux.
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