The Church in Transition – by Jeffrey Japinga
The oldest congregation in my denomination is nearly 400 years old.
The oldest congregation in my denomination, the Reformed Church in America, is nearly 400 years old. For much of its early history, the ministry of that church—and the scores of others that sprung up in small settlements that radiated out from it—was primarily to serve its own ethnic tribe as the spiritual and community center of that group’s existence.
By the 19th century, all those individual Dutch Reformed congregations had formed a denomination with other like-minded (read: ethnically and theologically similar) churches. By the 20th century, in reasonable and measureable ways, this denomination and its churches were solidly mainstream, or mainline: good, solid, faithful churches that raised me and maybe you with a profound sense of God, the saving power of Jesus, and the proper morals of good citizenship. Those 1950s churches Cynthia wrote about.
Challenges we never before imagined
At the dawn of the 21st century, however, this church of Jesus Christ, like so many of its sister denominations, faces a daunting set of challenges and opportunities it likely never imagined two generations ago. No longer do these churches stand de facto as the acknowledged center of its community, as they have for hundreds of years, whether that community is in the urban East, the rural Midwest, or the burgeoning Southwest. No longer does the minister of those congregations shape the practices not only of the church but the laws and practices of the community. No longer is the Christian story automatically passed on from one generation to another in the majority of North American households. No longer does the Christian gospel hold center-stage rights with persons seeking to understand the purpose and meaning of life.
I could go on—there’s any number of different ways to describe the changing setting of the church, and shelves full of books that have done so. You know them as well or better than I do. But at its core, the North American church today continues its adaptation from being a “settled” establishment church to being a missional church—from civic faith to transformational faith; from being givers to being receivers who are also givers; from a civic organization to a faith-based ministry. And in trying to navigate those transitions, the church continues to wrestle with what traditions remain at the core of its identity and message, and what is simply traditionalism, best left behind.
Desperately seeking “the answer”, “the truth”, or “the workshop”
And what has been our strategy to face and, we continue to hope, overcome these obstacles? Well, we’ve often sought “the answer”: well-studied, well-intentioned, and sometimes even effective advice of experts. But as membership continues to drop, and as anxiety continues to rise, we have also succumbed to the regrettable urge to point fingers, place blame, loudly tell (insert your least favorite opposition group here) “the truth,” and when they don’t listen to your satisfaction, contemplate yet another split. We point to this book or this workshop as THE answer; this growing congregation (good!) or that faltering congregation (bad!) as the model; and, especially, this or that theology as true Christianity, to the exclusion of all others.
This isn’t a swipe at the “deathly-ill” folks in the Presbyterian Church (USA)—well, not singularly, anyway. They’re just the most current. It’s more an observation that, for all our professed urgent concern about the mainline becoming the sideline, our expressed energy still gets focused far too often on picking the speck out of our brother’s eye while ignoring…well, you know how that goes.
So what is the answer, then, for the literally thousands of other Presbyterian, Reformed, UCC, and Lutheran churches that dot the vast landscape of North America? These churches desperately want to hold on to their traditions and their identities, and also desperately want to offer the gospel of Jesus Christ to their communities in relevant ways. They know intuitively that the quick-fix manuals at the Word Incarnate Bible Book Store at the strip mall eight miles down the road isn’t them, and they are uncomfortable with bottom-line measurements like size, growth, and profitability. But if it’s not those two avenues, then what is?
Secular culture discovers and incorporates the wisdom of the church
Interestingly, even as the church struggles to understand secular culture, that same secular culture has been discovering, and incorporating, church words into its work. And here’s what they’re concluding: that influential organizations that attract and build loyalty are doing so not with gimmicks or quick-fixes, but on foundations of values, purpose, relationship, collaboration, and intentional presence. Moreover, rather than seeing diversity and opposing points-of-view as threats, they see them as a necessity—an acknowledgment that no one person can have a broad or deep enough vision; that we need diverse voices at the table and a commitment to hear those voices in order to seek and discover ways forward none of us could discover on our own.
I might humbly suggest that the challenge for today’s church is not finding the one new thing, but in nurturing a culture that seeks and values each other; that builds bridges instead of walls; that holds in tension—and holds together, in a world that most often forces choices and side-taking—listening and talking, tradition and innovation; order and mission, conservative and progressive, with the goal of helping all of us discover our mission and purpose in our own places of ministry, and to support others in doing the same. It’s hard, humble, incarnational work.
Developing the necessary synergy for incarnational ministry
Jackson Carroll, in his research in the Pulpit and Pew Project, says this about pastors and churches today: “We need to renew our efforts to nurture and support excellence, not only in those pastors already in ministry, but also in those who are yet to come. Doing so will require a synergy between several parts of the church, each contributing to the task in important ways. This includes congregations, theological schools, denominations, and clergy themselves.” And in ways workshops and quick fixes cannot, because they won’t spend the necessary time on theological inquiry.
There is great wisdom in many of the resources available to the church today. But in the end, the church in transition will be built not on new technique, but on its mission and its unity, counter-cultural as that may be. Identity, grounded in theology, and mission, grounded in our contexts for ministry, must be held together, and no one can hold it together but us. And there is no better place for that to be reality than an institution which builds its whole identity on the phrase, “For God so loved the world…”