Faith Works 2-1-20

Faith Works 2-1-20

Jeff Gill

 

Where the news is not the news

___

 

"Rattlesnake on the path."

 

When I was hiking with our Philmont crew in the New Mexico mountains, our lead person shouted back down the trail those four chilling words.

 

Fortunately, he'd seen the snake before stepping on it, and stayed to help the rest of us heading up the steep and rocky path give the rattler a wide berth.

 

Except we didn't. The people ahead of me, and myself, I walked away from the rattlesnake, but not as far as I could have. I wanted to get a good look at it, but stay safe. So I edged around, in a tight circle, looking it over from darting tongue to faintly buzzing rattles.

 

That's kind of how I feel about discussing the story recently all over social media about a Methodist church up in Minnesota. The initial story was that the wider church was closing down the congregation and telling the old people to go away, so they could re-open a few months later as a re-launched congregation, in the same building.

 

It came out in a local paper, then the state capital media picked it up, and then . . . it caught fire. Every online platform, it seemed, picked up the story and intensified the pain and injustice, upped the indignation, and passed it along for two, four, sixteen, 256 blogs and webpages to continue the story. It went viral, as the phrase goes.

 

And like so many viral stories, it turns out to have another side. A couple days after the initial eruption (65,536 and so on of posts and tweets), a few major news outlets sent reporters in to dig deeper, and found out there was more to the story. Also worth noting: in the Methodist church, unlike many other traditions, the local congregation does not own their building, nor pick their pastors. Lots of misunderstandings around that subject, as well.

 

But I'm not as interested in the sad, not surprising "rest of the story," a narrative which I kind of guessed at, as I read the first fifteen messages I got asking "what do you think about this?" And I've been fairly low key on social media and in the church where I serve in my reactions to the story.

 

Because I think the real story here is how so many people all over the country leapt directly into the anger and angst and worry over small churches with mostly older worshipers getting closed, or worse (note: #irony) having contemporary worship forced upon them. The original narrative of the viral story was a perfect combo of those horrors: old people pushed out AND the new church having contemporary worship.

 

Look, I am all too aware of how in cases right in my neck of the woods, an organist of thirty years service (and a good one, I would note) meets the new pastor and is told over the first (and last) handshake "thank you for your years of faithful service, and you can enjoy worship now from the pews because we're going in a new direction." I've picked up new members that way. Also by people having their familiar worship overnight becoming very loud and extremely unfamiliar. It's painful at best, and at worst it can be very badly handled . . . though I will say in some ministers' defense that after you've learned there's no upside in a cautious approach, the temptation is there to rip the bandage off in one quick rip.

 

What is leading to this sorry state of affairs, though, is that traditional worship is struggling in this country. I see various statistics, depending on who's making their case, but it's well known: more churches are having to shut down their pipe organs for lack of players at any price, going to keyboards and simpler music; choirs are more rare, whether in frequency or if they exist in a church at all; outside of liturgical traditions, informality has become its own rigid orthodoxy.

 

Full disclosure: the church where I serve is hybrid "relaxed traditional" but clearly the latter, with hymnals (yes, I've gotten the post about keeping hymnals, only forty-eleven times) and a choir and bulletins with the service outline across two pages. We've held steady in attendance over the last five years, which is good compared to many of our peers, but not something I'm comfortable with entirely.

 

The truth, though, is that in general traditional worship has seen staggering losses in attendance over the last decade or two. Yes, there are exceptions, and usually it doesn't take long to figure out the exceptional circumstances at work. And if you want to reach younger people (yes, I know there are exceptions, rare but they exist) you need contemporary worship.

 

This has created over the last few years a huge tension in churches of all sorts and denominations and non-denominations alike. They don't want to die as a church, but if growth looks like that, then…

 

Which is where, God willing, I'll pick up next week!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's been mostly a traditional kind of guy for most of his life, but he's curious, too. Tell him what you've wondered about worship at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.