No-Growth Churches

It is startling to consider that 80% of Christian congregations in this country may be either stagnant or declining in their membership. I use "may" in order to keep open the possibility that the available statistics have a flaw or two in them, but I sincerely doubt that they do. Apparently, a lot of church leaders today share my doubt. They have shifted, not so subtly, their principal criterion for assessing growth away from adding members and toward increasing worship attendance.

This shift is not all bad, though. Evangelism has been too tightly associated with getting more names on rolls and pledge lists. Literally, the word means sharing the good news from God in Jesus Christ, and worship services provide a rich context for doing just this. The problem is that no-growth congregations usually conduct worship services in just the ways that large numbers of outsiders do not find attractive.

No-growth congregations do other things that are equally effective at promoting decline, not always in numbers but almost always in vitality. Typically, they put all of the "doing church" eggs in just three baskets: getting people to come to worship, getting people to come to Sunday School, and getting people to come to programs. And almost always, the people gathered in these baskets are only their own "kind," economically, ethnically, and culturally.

What's missing in this strategy? For one thing, new converts to the faith. For another, pluralism. Even more, mission and outreach. Some people believe that emphasizing the last will take care of the first two. I am not so sure. Growing up, I was blessed to be in a congregation that decided to spend as much on others as it did on itself, and that constantly worried over whether they were still doing enough. For all that, however, the congregation remained a homogeneous group whose new members came in mostly by transfer from other congregations and denominations.

One way to reverse a no-growth situation is to expand the facilities. The underlying assumption, often correct, is that if you build more, more will come. Another way is to learn more about people in the surrounding community and to serve them better without asking things from them in return. I cannot find any good reason why both approaches should not work side by side. The fact of the matter is, however, that most no-growth congregations opt for the first approach to alter their situation, and never quite manage to get around to the second. As do churches starting from scratch. As soon as possible, they acquire vast tracts of land as far away from congested inner cities and town centers as possible, and then wait for people who can afford it to move out to them.

The campuses of so many mega-churches are especially inviting to people who look and act like their hosts, in the cars they drive (going to church by bus? subway? on foot? Are you kidding?), the music they applaud (17^th and 18^th century chorales, please), and the tidiness they demand all over the acreage. Herein, I think, lies the biggest problem with many churches' approaches to expansion. They replicate only themselves by their additions. They don't want to do this, at least from what their leaders say. But they still go ahead and build facilities too fancy for most of the people they leave behind, people who desperately need what just their magnificent new facilities can provide.

Two things worry me especially about fancy church buildings. One is the power they hold to make a lot of people feel unworthy to enter them. Probably, like a lot of Dr. Phil's subjects these days, I am carrying a lot of emotional baggage about stuff like this. I know that I get anxious when I'm sitting in a den that looks larger than our own house and that contains too many pricey things to permit easy passage from its sofas to its bay windows.

The other thing that worries me is that fanciness often outstrips our abilities to pay for it, whether in our homes, office buildings, or in our sanctuaries Most expansionists know this going in. They count on large influxes of new families (single parents don't count for much) to help with the large new bills.

Don't get me wrong. All other things being equal, I think good facilities make for effective ministry. The real ministry, though, only begins in the facilities. It comes to fruition apart from them. Certainly that was true for Jesus. One time he said that the Son of Man did not even have a place to rest his head. But that was okay, I think. He was too busy to sleep much, anyway.

Disease as Metaphor

A distant but genuine second to enjoying a meal with my wife is enjoying a meal with a book. The other day, I took a rather somber book to lunch with me and noticed raised eyebrows from the restaurant's manager as I pushed my tray to the cashier's station. With a twinkle in his eye, he queried, "A little light reading, huh?"

The book was written by Sherwin B. Nuland, a noted surgeon and historian of medicine at Yale. Its title is what caught the attention of the lunch crowd: How We Die. I'm on at least my third reading of it. For one thing, it helps me sound more knowledgeable than I really am when I get into discussions on the golf course with my medical ethicist playing partners.

Over this particular lunch and reading, what especially caught my eye were two passages in the author's discussion of cancer. Brace yourself.

Cancer, he wrote, is a foe "berserk with a malicious exuberance of killing. The disease pursues a continuous, uninhibited, circumferential, barn-burning expedition of destructiveness, in which it heeds no rules, follows no commands, and explodes all resistance in a homicidal riot of devastation. Its cells behave like the members of a barbarian horde run amok --- leaderless and undirected, but with a single-minded purpose: to plunder everything within reach."

A couple of pages later, the author offers a second lurid metaphor: "A cluster of malignant cells is a disorganized autonomous mob of maladjusted adolescents, raging against the society from which it sprang. It is a street gang intent on mayhem."

What Dr. Nuland had been searching for were metaphors by which to make the insidiousness of cancer more readily understood and respected. What I started searching for was a way to use his depiction of cancer as a metaphor for insidious processes in present-day society that we tend to deny as much as we tend to overlook early warning signs of cancer in our bodies.

Of all the worrisome things going on in our country these days, three ought to be throwing us, as Americans, into panic, and as Christians, into crises of conscience. One is the widening economic gap between those among us who are getting richer and those who are getting poorer. It would seem that this gap is no respecter of ethnicity, gender, or age. Parts of our economy are like a rising tide all right, but not the kind that raises all the other boats. They're more like a tidal wave in which most boats get sunk.

The second is our outrageously disproportionate consumption of the rest of the world's resources. It would seem that the consuming is no respecter of anybody else's needs, wants, or rights, but is an admirer of our power to grab things, anywhere, before they are gone. There's really enough for everyone out there? In your dreams. Be sure to get yours first.

The third is the squandering of our children's future --- and their children's --- for the sake of maintaining a standard of living enjoyed by only a few in the present generation. It would seem that the rush to spend now is no respecter of political party, ideology, or family values. Tax more and spend more; tax less and spend even more. Is there any real difference?

Running amok, plundering, bringing about mayhem --- yep, that's just about got it.

Alexis de Tocqueville's greatest fear about democracy in America, about which he wrote in the 1830's, was that our spirit of individualism would lay waste to our spirit of cooperativeness and community. What he could not have envisioned was that the process by which the disease would spread --- e.g., through uncontrolled self-assertion, paranoid perception of others as competitors only, ruthless exploitation of anyone and everyone capable of doing our bidding, and terminal addiction to adrenaline and endorphins --- would be very much like a cancer. Having already failed to prevent the disease, we may also be beyond the point of cure. And there are not many societies around the world willing to provide us hospice care.

Over the years, I've pastored a lot of people struggling with cancers of the body. Most of them coped better with the disease, even though they did not recover from it, when they were surrounded with folks who loved them. Maybe there is a metaphor here, too. What if we could surround our social malignancies with a renewed love for our country as a commonwealth of equally important, mutually respectful and supportive individuals with a commitment to the integrity of the whole that matches commitment to the well-being of the parts? Then, we would no longer be restricted to palliative care for a dying democracy. We would be on the track of curing it.

Hope you had a happy Fourth.