Two Birds (1/3): The First Bird
“The Church is dying.” “(Mainline) Christianity is dying.” “Christians are becoming the minority.” How many of you have heard one of these statements (or something along similar lines) within the last year? How many of you have thought or said these or something similar in the last year? How about the last month? Admittedly, the landscape for Mainline Christianity doesn’t really look all that good. Long-standing churches that have been there for decades, maybe even centuries, are starting to close their doors due to lack of funding. Congregations that once flourished now struggle to fill even a few of the pews on a Sunday morning, let alone run all their programs. Where once the Church was gaining new members like crazy, now, we are hemorrhaging members from both ends as older members enter “the Church Triumphant” and as the younger generations leave the Church for one reason or another. Where once there were enough pastors to fill every pulpit in our great nation, and whereas being a pastor was once a competitive field with great financial stability, now we as pastors might as well be put on the “endangered species list,” as there are now less pastors available to fill pulpits than there are pulpits to fill, and pastors struggle far more than they used to at making ends meet. In short, it would seem that the Fat Lady has begun her Swan Song for the Church, and there isn’t a heart that isn’t aching or a dry eye in the house. However, I would argue that this mentality is wrong.
We as Christians (especially Mainline Protestants) look at the current landscape and all we see is death and despair. However, we need to remember that the current times are not the only time the Church has faced a “life-altering event.” In fact, the church has faced a “life-altering event” roughly every 500 years (give or take). The Church was born roughly 40 C.E., but as “the new thing,” early Christians faced unimaginable struggles with persecution, condemnation, and the like. Fast forward to around 500 C.E., and what we have is the institution of a unified “papacy,” a system that brought together previously-divided nations, each of whom had their own papacy and religious leaders before that point. Imagine the difficulty that most have posed not only for leaders to bring together their people “under one roof,” but for the people to afford such power and authority to one set of leaders. Then, around 1000 C.E., there was the Great Schism, which was the final and formal separation of the Eastern Church (Orthodoxy) from the Western Church (Catholicism), an even that surely would have had a sense of “death” to those witnessing such a split. Then, in the 1500s, yet another massive schism happened, this time in the form of the Protestant Reformation, and again, we can imagine the stress this split must have invoked in the hearts of many. Now, here we are in the early 2000s, roughly 500 years later, and again, we find the landscape to be, in a word, “chaotic.” However, let me be clear about something: “Chaos” does not equate to “Death.”
The Church is going through a very “chaotic” period as it faces what appears to be another “life-altering event” in its life, I’ve no doubt of that. As such, we can speculate about what that “new thing” that will come out of it will be, but who among us can know what God is up to behind the scenes? However, should we choose to believe that God is even now still at work behind the scenes, and should we continue to believe that God works in and through every one of us to make Their Will be done, then very truly we reap a two-fold benefit. On the one hand, such belief reassures us that this, too, shall pass; that this also is part of God’s plan, just like Jesus’ death was part of that plan. On the other, it charges us to think about how even we are playing a role in that plan, whether or not we realize it, and what we should be doing in response. To quickly clarify what I just said, yes, there is a right answer to what we should be doing, and I’ll get to that in part 3 of this miniseries. However, this situation is but one metaphorical bird. As the old saying hints, there is a second bird (next month’s article) whose solution lies in the same stone (July’s newsletter article). For now, though, I leave you with this question: How are you doing God’s Will in your life right now?