“We live in a different world now”
Arising out of The Great Courses DVD set, The World’s Greatest Churches—which is available in SSUC’s Library—this third instalment in what is a multi-part essay reports that, “We live in a different world now,” and “There’s no going back,” and, if that’s so, wonders: whither the Church?
“I miss church. I bet you do, too,” Christina Embree avows, this in an article she penned last summer for churchleaders.com. She, family minister at a congregation in Kentucky, went on to write, “Theologically, we all know that ‘church’ is not a building. We understand that ‘church’ is the body of Christ. So, more precisely, I think when we say we miss ‘church,’ we mean…that we miss the people. We miss the things we do together as people: worship and communion and conversation and prayer and hugs and food. We miss the community of faith. We miss each other….”
Feel likewise?
Certainly, Tish Harrison Warren does. Bob Smietana and Elizabeth Evans, writers for Religion News Service, draw attention to this priest at an Anglican church in Austin, Texas, and to her vexatious January column in The New York Times: “Online church, while it was necessary for a season, diminishes worship and us as people. We seek to worship wholly—with heart, soul, mind, and strength—and embodiment is an irreducible part of that wholeness.”
Journalist Sara Scarlett Wilson could not agree more. Writing in April in America, the magazine of the U.S.A.’s Jesuits, she insists, “[V]irtual mass pales in comparison to the real thing.” She recognizes that there is a “tension between making Catholicism available at the click of a button, and conveying the importance of parish community and in-person encounters. There is a temptation to move our…spiritual lives online, but this should be the last resort.” She concluded her don’t-rock-the-boat affirmation with this: “[F]aith should not be about comfort and convenience. Spirituality is not a TV show you fit into your free time. It is an experience for the mind, soul, and all the senses.”
Baptist preaching pastor Allen Duty, in his review of Thom Rainer’s recent book, The Post-Quarantine Church, is yet another traditionalist: “I believe that regularly gathering in person to hear the Word read and proclaimed, to sing and to pray, to fellowship and to serve, is simply not optional for Christians.” And George Anderson, writing in February last year in The Presbyterian Outlook, predicts, “Churches that moved mostly to an online presence will progressively shift their priority from those attending online to those attending onsite.”
Others see things differently. In a February opinion piece for Religious News Service, Jacqui Lewis, senior minister of Manhattan’s Middle Collegiate Church, rejects such thinking, and champions “robust virtual options that do not treat online members as an afterthought.” Some religious leaders, she warrants, “are clinging to worship models that were broken long before COVID-19. But for every person rejecting change, I see dozens daring to serve people better, expanding our understanding of ‘neighbour’ beyond our ZIP codes.” She adds, “Our future is constrained [only] by the limits of our imagination.”
_________________________________________________________________________
Ways of “being church in a post-pandemic world”
Leadership coach for the Center for Healthy Churches, Barry Howard, writing two years ago in Baptist News, anticipated “the next chapter of ministry” in a fast-changing world; he concluded his forewarned-is-forearmed piece in this way: “This is a major sea change, an ecclesial paradigm shift, so let us be faithful and flexible as we navigate uncharted waters.” He envisioned a dozen trends “emerging for being church in a post-pandemic world,” including these [see them all at https://baptistnews.com/article/12-trends-for-being-church-in-a-post-pandemic-world]:
✴︎ “Being the church will become more important than going to church. …church life will be much more incarnational, and much less institutional.”
✴︎ “Churches will be more community-oriented. Inward-focused churches…will diminish.”
✴︎ “…churches will welcome honest inquiry and dialogue…where seekers and believers meet…to discuss the meaning of life.”
✴︎ “A hybrid model of participation will continue…. Both in-person and virtual gatherings are around to stay.”
✴︎ “Church programming will be less Sunday-centric, and will focus on opportunities throughout the week.”
✴︎ “The strength of a church will be manifest in small-group connections, rather than crowd size.”
✴︎ “…groups of churches…will share ideas, resources, assignments, and in some cases even staff members or campus space.”
✴︎ “Guilt-ridden, judgment-infused, condescending approaches…will give way to…holistically adopting the Jesus way of life.”
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Carey Nieuwhof, who founded in 1995, and then served for 20 years as lead pastor, a church in Barrie/Orillia, Ontario, ventures: “What if the people you’re missing haven’t left your church; what if they’ve just left the building? […] They’re just not coming back to the building, and perhaps they won’t even after…the pandemic is a distant memory. […] I’m not saying this is good (I don’t like it either). I am saying it’s, in all likelihood, real. […] Here’s what’s critical: the mission isn’t dead, but the methods might be.
“The good news is, your church is online, and that’s where all your people are, and everyone you want to reach. I think that’s also where much of the future of the church lies. […] Engaging people online will soon become the most important thing church leaders do.” That SSUC’s own ministers have twigged to this can be seen in this line from an end-of-winter e-mail Chris New addressed to this writer: “I’m grateful for the way we eliminate geography in our new reality—it’s so helpful to people without a community they can attend in person.”
That’s so, according to Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life. He’s quoted in the March story, “The State of Faith,” in Deseret News: “’Online faith communities could really open the door to folks. If you’re a little bit suspicious of what being part of a religious community entails, virtual services are an easy and safe way to engage and explore.’”
Look what it’s coming to: in an article in June, 2021, in the Christian Courier, Ross Lockhart mentioned how he had worked recently “with a Reformed congregation that has seen such an increase in online worship attendance during the pandemic, the leadership decided to name one of its elders specially as the ‘online elder’ for pastoral care and support.” Dean of St. Andrew’s Hall and professor of mission studies at the Vancouver School of theology, he added that this outgrowth would benefit “especially…those not living locally.”
Still, Diana Kruzman, writing for MinistryWatch, quotes sociology of religion professor Scott Thumma, who worries that online services face “unique challenges,” since “virtual worshippers can very easily become spectators….” Congregations, she notes, are “having to figure out what it means to worship online in meaningful ways.” Even so, “Many religious traditions see the online space,” the sociologist told her, “as a ‘new mission field’ to reach people who otherwise wouldn’t be drawn to worship.”
Just so, the Best Christian Workplaces Institute affirms in its recent report, “What churches have learned during the pandemic”: “Online ministry expands our ministry impact. Embracing new technology allows the church to continue modernizing and reaching new people.” Even that Baptist cleric, Allen Duty allows, “Perhaps one good outcome of the pandemic is that it [has] provided churches with an opportunity for a hard reset—an opportunity to consider whether their ministry programs were worthwhile.” Near the end of that book referenced earlier, The Post-Quarantine Church, its author writes, “The opportunity to lead change is likely greater than at any other point in our lifetimes.”
Minister of Calgary’s Hillhurst United Church, John Pentland affirms this. In a January letter to the editor in The Globe and Mail, he states, “Our church has undoubtedly lost people, but it has also gained people who have never stepped inside our building as they join us online. It isn’t about the building,” he insists, “it is about the message.” After all, “Jesus didn’t ever say go to church; he said go to the world.”
In a testament in Sojourners in February, Melissa Florer-Bixler tells how the church she pastors, Raleigh Mennonite in North Carolina, “bloomed under the access granted by our virtual Zoom space. […] In the presence of people separated from in-person worship, I have come to see Zoom church as its own sacrament.” In her denomination, the petition is offered, “Send your Spirit upon us,” she writes. “Now in our hybrid worship, I sense the breath of those words, how they move across time and space.”
Indeed, it may be wise to continue to offer hybrid services. “[C]hurches might want to keep streaming services even after returning to in-person worship,” Smietana and Evans suggest in a February RNS posting. They point to recent data from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research which underscores the success of a hybrid approach: in the 2,700 U.S. congregations from 38 denominations that were surveyed, those that offered both in-person and online services saw attendance grow by 4.5%, while those that met in person only experienced a decline of 15.7%. [Learn more by calling up https://religionnews.com/2022/02/14/houses-of-worship-grapple-with-the-future-of-their-online-services.]
________________________________________________________________________
“Game changers: faithful steps to being the vital church”
Publishers appear to be racing one another to issue books that imagine a changed Church in a post-pandemic world. From The Distanced Church to Religion in Quarantine, from Fresh Expressions in a Digital Age to Dalhousie University professor emeritus Sister Nuala Kenny’s Prophetic Possibilities—at least half a dozen are already in bookstores. Your church library has acquired one, Being Church in a Post-pandemic World, and a very practical guide it is: author Kay Kotan charts “our next faithful steps to being the vital church” in Covid’s aftermath.
A credentialed coach who’s counselled hundreds of congregations, she identifies and champions eight key trends; “game changers,” she calls them. They’ll come to characterize the “healthy, vital, and culturally-relevant church in the post-pandemic world,” she’s sure. Such congregations will be flexible and relational—these especially, she underscores; and also visionary, spiritually-grounded, committed, innovative, resilient, and courageous. “These were likely not the practices most churches regularly practiced or valued prior to the pandemic,” she ruefully acknowledges.
Be that as it may, there is in the book a couple dozen words that may very well capture best what this multi-part essay is striving to pose. They’re by another writer, Taylor DuVall…who no longer attends church: “’Church—a human connection of love, not a building; a lifestyle, not a weekly activity; an act of service, not a service to attend.’”
________________________________________________________________________
In yet another RNS missive, Albert Hung, a Church of the Nazarene district superintendent in Northern California, regrets that “many churches still cling to old ways of doing ministry, which often involve waiting for people to show up on Sunday. Instead, he said, churches will have to find ways to get out into the community, and prove their worth. ‘Now is the time for bold experiment,’ Hung said. ‘Because we have so little to lose at this point.’”
Ian Harber says so, as well. Director of communication for a Texas nonprofit, he, in urging congregations to employ in their outreach social media marketing principles, affirms: “We now live our lives in a hybrid of physical and digital, and there’s no going back.”
Smietana and Evans end their article by citing that sociology of religion professor, Scott Thumma: “‘I keep telling clergy that they are going to have to remain open to change. There just isn’t any chance they can go back to the old ways.’” How we “do church” henceforth is “’up for grabs,’” they quote him as saying. “‘We live in a different world now.’”
So it is that historian of Christianity and an advocate for progressive Christianity, award-winning author Diana Butler Bass concluded a blog posting in April last year, “Into the future,” with something like a prayer: “Pandemic dislocation calls for guides and weavers of wisdom. […] There is a journey beyond the pandemic, and we will find the way a step at a time. We haven’t been to this particular future before. And we will need one another to get there.”
Ken Fredrick
To be continued. The fourth instalment in this series about “Church” will be posted to the SSUC Library website [ssucedmonton.com/library] on October 14th. It will be all-Canadian. Come again!
A sidebar
A reflection on the idea of a “church home”
“[T]hink beyond the current social architecture of church.”
That’s the counsel Mike Moore offers clerics in a sage writing for Christianity Today this past March. Director of the theology and mission program at Illinois’s Northern Seminary, he, ordained with the Christian Reformed Church, points to “Sunday service in a building” as an example of what he means when he takes up the phrase, “social architecture”.
“[T]he church and its pastors must seek to recover a social architecture that centres on people rather than properties,” he declares. “The social architecture of the church can, and should, extend beyond buildings, and into the social spaces wherever God’s people dwell.”
He’s making his admonishment most especially, he explains, in order to reach the “nones,” the “dones,” and what he labels the “umms”: “The nones are ostensibly those who do not self-identify with any religious affiliation…. The dones are those…[who] are done with church.” And the “umms”? They’re what Bishop John Shelby Spong famously referred to as “alumni,” folks who have opted out of organized religion, but maybe not for good: they may be “uncertain and hesitant about how to reengage with the church,” as Moore puts it, but he’s betting that “most umms grieve the loss of Christian community, and many look forward to returning to a church body.”
__________________________________________________________________________
They’re leaving church, and is this why?
“[M]otivations for departing organized religion are numerous,” Martin Thielen observes, this in a June posting on his Doubter’s Parish blog. To hear him tell it, “doubts about God, institutional religion, and traditional beliefs, lead the pack.”
He, a retired United Methodist minister in Tennessee—who, as UM News has it, “reaches out to skeptics and struggling Christians, offering help and solidarity through his website”—delves more deeply into the matter in another entry, “Leaving Church?”. Hear him out:
As the world struggles with “massive challenges, including climate crisis, a pandemic, poverty, hunger, racism, injustice, polarization, and serious threats to democracy,” what, in response, “is the church doing? The Catholic Church continues to resist transparency and accountability in its massive pedophile priest scandal and coverup, while focusing most of its attention on abortion. The evangelical church demonizes the LBGTQ community, fosters Christian nationalism, participates in partisan politics, and fights endless culture wars…. And the mainline church engages in constant ecclesiastical civil warfare over same-sex marriage and gay clergy, carving up its already small and rapidly declining segment of the religious pie into even smaller pieces, completely disregarding Jesus’ command to unite in love.”
In point-blank fashion, Thielen insists, that history “reveals that today’s bad behaviour in the church is not an anomaly, but the norm. In response to this never-ending nonsense, a large and growing number of people are leaving church for good. And who can blame them? By and large, the church, past and present, fails to carry out its primary mission to love God and neighbour, and advance the kingdom of God. Instead, it engages in constant pettiness, fights endless conflicts over secondary issues, consistently ignores the teachings of Christ, requires belief in outdated theological doctrines, and prioritizes institutional survival over following Jesus.”
__________________________________________________________________________
Still, “when Sunday gatherings are the only entry point to the church,” he reckons, “we will most certainly miss many of the umms, nones, and dones in our midst.” Under the subhead, “Reimagining God’s home,” Moore writes, “If my instincts are right, and Sunday morning is no longer the primary entry point for some believers, then we need to further reflect on the idea of a ‘church home’. Specifically, we must reconsider the physical places where we gather.”
He’s not alone in his thinking. In an early-April, straight-arrow e-mail, SSUC’s Chris New wondered about reaching “our younger folks,” and “younger families”: “In my opinion,” they have been, and are, “deeply suspect of organized religious gatherings, of churches, of the institutional aspect of what we represent. SSUC might be different, and those who know us or learn about us (even online) are quick to become aware of the differences in approach…. However, we still meet in a church building on a Sunday morning, [which can be] a huge psychological barrier….” The notion that everyone must be “in one place on a Sunday morning” is not immutable.
SSUC is bound and determined to help those nones, dones, and umms, recognize and experience “the sacredness in all of life,” New states, and then wonders “if we need a church ‘service’ in order to do that.” The younger crowd might “see that as a potential waste of time, if they’re focused on ‘living their faith and values’. And I’m not sure I fully disagree” with their reasoning.
“So we continue to launch new ideas into the world,” he reports, “and connect with people that may never want to enter ‘the building’.” SSUC attempts to “‘be the church’ by infusing the things we value into our ordinary lives,” and to “make our lives meaningful.” The social architecture—“the learning, the caring,” in New’s words—“can happen in a lot of contexts beyond” what we conjure when we hear the word “church”.
