(Note the emphasis on GOOD, as in Martha Stewart’s famous catch phrase. Try to keep up. The joke’s not as funny if I have to explain it).
I will start, I think, a series of indeterminate length on church attendance in general. The most common question I hear among Christian Ghetto ex-patriots is “Do we really need to attend church?” this question is not often voiced by those with no Christian history – after all, we have cemented permanently in our culture the idea that religious people of all faiths attend church services of some variety, and the more often you attend, the more devoted you are to your particular belief set. But corporate Christianity refugees are wondering if, when, and how to even approach being part of a community of faith. There are a lot of really good reasons for this, and we’ll get to some of them as we go along (feel free to post the ones I miss in the comments).
But first we must discuss a recent cultural trend – the overall decline in church attendance in America. For about 10 years now I have been hearing this statistic in one form or another – a majority of Christian church denominations in America are plateaued or declining. What this means. or course, is that their attendance (or number of adherents, depending on the methodology of the group or denomination) is decreasing. If you slice the stats by generation, the younger they are, the less likely they are to regularly attend a church (www.barna.org has lots of these kinds of statistics).
This, or course, has led to a panic at the disco.
The future ain’t what is used to be.
For generations, we have judged the effectiveness of the advance of Christendom by Sunday morning church numbers. And for good reason – a core pillar of the structure of a solid Christian life has always been weekly church attendance. One of the main jobs of a pastor (or usher) is to know who is missing from week to week and go hunt them down if they are gone a bit too long.
With numbers declining, a flurry of books, seminars, manuals, DVDs, and, yes, blogs and websites have flooded the market. We are desperately looking around for the 1 out of 20 churches that are NOT declining in numbers (usually in the suburbs, usually attractional in nature and strategy) and writing down what they are doing while visiting their week-long seminar for pastors called “Here’s What We Do in Suburban Illinois, it’ll work in New Hampshire Too (I am paraphrasing, but the titles are similar to that 🙂 ).” We are looking for a magic bullet, a permanent quick fix, a little Dutch boy with fingers big enough to plug the dike before our village floods.
In pockets and places, things are going better. But overall we are in decline. Some extreme theories say that if you want to see the state of the church in America in 20-40 years, look at Europe today. I thin they radically underestimate the influence of mega-church, corporate Christianity, especially in the suburban to almost rural space, but in our major urban centers, they might not be far off. Short version of what they are talking about: In Europe, once great cathedrals and influential communities of faith have become little more than historical tour stops as the culture has become increasingly secularized. Church attendance is super-low.
If church attendance is truly the measure of the penetration of the message of Jesus into our culture, then this is truly a cause for concern. The buzzword for a while was “seeker-sensitive”, meaning we needed to find ways to make non-Christian guests and visitors (renamed to the more PC, cheery “pre-Christian” – which sounds a lot less judgmental than “pagan” or the 1930s version “sinner”) feel welcome, safe, comfortable and understand what we are saying or doing. Not a bad idea, and a lot of positive changes came from that. The next buzz-word was “cultural relevance” – the need to make our message valid in the current cultural context (an exercise every missionary must regularly go through, but American pastors didn’t have to start doing until a few decades ago because, well, we were a dominant voice IN the culture. So we started using more salty and peppery language and Simpsons clips and the latest movie or fashion trend or news story as our examples (“red is the new black” = “forgiven is the new sinful”).
Hard questions.
All of this is based on that premise that church attendance is the goal. So we are going to have to deal with that question – is church attendance an accurate measure of the adherence to the gospel by members of our culture? Answer: Sort of.
Let me posit some theorems:
– Church attendance does not necessarily indicate internal faith. Lack of church attendance does not indicate lack of internal faith.
– Even though the first theorem is accurate logically, there is a higher incidence of true believers in those who attend church than those who do not (meaning those who have embraced the message of Jesus usually attend church regularly, and rightly so, as we will deal with in another post).
– Church attendance is used as a measure of Christianity because it is empirical and quantifiable.
Now some hard questions:
– Is it possible that our well-intentioned measuring of attendance numbers has blinded us to other measures that are equally as important?
– If attendance drops, it usually means giving drops, which means our church budgets collapse. Is it possible that sometimes we do whatever it takes to get more attenders to support our infrastructure (and thereby ensure our survival).
It may actually be a good thing.
The decline in church attendance may be the best thing that ever happened to the American church. When Jesus wanted to get down to brass tacks with the rich young ruler, he asked him for his security (“sell everything and give it to the poor”). When the Gospel was stuck in Jerusalem, the Apostles were suddenly spread by great persecution. In 21st century America, our comfortable place as the center of “Christian” culture has eroded. As we stand on our last sliver of moral high ground, we are forced now to do all the things we have avoided.
Like have meaningful discussions of the intersection between faith and culture and art and beauty and truth and so on (instead of resting in the knowledge that if people were looking for answers, they knew where our church was and would come see us). Like creating nimble, scalable organizations that function more like a non-profit, grass-roots movement and less like a corporate machine. Like looking for ways to engage the community, rather than just asking the community to engage with us. Like measuring health instead of numerical growth, discipleship instead of attendance, and being more excited about baptisms than successful building fund-raising campaigns.
It’s a brave new world. And a scary one. We have to question everything now. And the first question is: do we really need to attend church? My answer – Emphatically yes. And emphatically no. As Bill Clinton would say, “depends on what your definition of the word ‘is’ is.” In this case, it depends on your definition of the word “church.” And that we will get to tomorrow. Stay tuned!
