Faith Works 3-30-19

Warning: this is NOT for this Saturday, but for next, since I'll be out of town early next week.

Faith Works 3-30-19

Jeff Gill

 

DeChurchification, continued

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Last week I mentioned the strongly developing trend to have weddings anywhere but in a church setting, and funerals increasingly having no religious context (if a memorial service happens at all).

 

For generations, getting married was when people "came back" to church. A young adult might skip Sunday services for a stretch, but then a wedding and babies would bring you back.

 

Delayed age of first marriage, and later childbearing, have all increased the gap, and contributed to many churches losing not just their teens but their twenty-somethings and beyond. A three or four year gap in regular worship participation became more like a decade, and that's a long time to be away.

 

I bring this up because historically I think you can find back in the Fifties and the Twenties and even into the 1800s where people bemoaned how often older youth and young adults would not maintain their faith community connections. But they did tend to come back, and I think the wedding day and infant baptisms or baby dedications were a big part of that.

 

It's not that we've stopped doing something that once worked in many mainstream religious traditions, as much as we're still relying on a mechanism for retrieval that's broken, and maybe in the short term unrepairable.

 

Meanwhile, the most significant numbers for young adult participation in worship are found in contemporary style settings, which to many older Christians doesn't look much like "church."

 

To which many younger believers say "exactly."

 

Again, I'm not saying my awkward phrase of de-churchification describes something entirely bad. But for any church looking forward, it's an aspect of the cultural landscape we all have to take into account. Another way of putting it is that "church culture" is no longer closely allied to the general culture, and if we're going to teach our faith and practices to our children and youth, we're going to have to do it better, sooner, and more clearly on our own terms.

 

Is that going to be through Sunday school or Vacation Bible School or church camp? I'm less sure than I used to be of those old wineskins being able to hold the new vintage. Like many preachers, I'm pressed by long-time church goers to pour new wine into them, and then folks are distressed when (Luke 5:37) they burst and end up holding nothing.

 

The new wineskins won't look right at first. They won't look like church. They're already being put into use, and we're often overlooking them because they don't look like what we're used to.

 

They're life groups and phone apps and podcasts; they're blog posts and mission trips and hands-on ministry. They're messages in worship, whether on a Sunday morning, evening, or Tuesday night, that aren't as much a lecture as they are guided discussions.

 

Just like the "flipped classroom" model where teaching is viewed on devices during the learner's own schedule, but the group meeting is where homework is done, so is the direction of Christian formation. Not movies in church basements (or filmstrips in darkened classrooms, remember those?) and then a workbook at home, but video lessons you watch on your own time and then the blanks get filled in when the group gets together – in person or online.

 

And part of me suspects that even at these examples, which may sound ridiculously out of step with historic traditions and practices as it is, may be rooted in yesterday's technological models, and that the immediate future might look even stranger than this. But rows of chairs and students all reading out of the same paper curriculum with a single teacher sitting up front: that's not coming back. And maybe isn't as timeless as we think.

 

But what about weddings and funerals and those life events we think of as central to our church fabric? Well, in the same way, they aren't as essential to the vitality of church communities as we might think. Until after World War II, in most of our religious traditions, weddings were in the parsonage at most, often in the bride's home. Not a church thing. Funerals? There's a reason we have the term "funeral home" because they rose up to replace the long time practice of laying out a body and having the wake in the deceased's own home.

 

What churches DO have to attend to are marriages, not weddings; to the practice of dying well, not reclaiming funerals; to Christian formation, not just traditional education. There's church, and then there's faithfulness, and maybe we shouldn't confuse the two.

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's not happy about dechurchification, but he's thinking it's not all bad, either. Throw him more examples at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.