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| The windmills of Lewis County, NY |
A few days ago, I attended a Utica Presbytery committee meeting over lunch, and during our table talk one of the clergy present mentioned a new concept she'd recently heard about, "hospice care for churches." Our initial reaction was that it is a depressing concept, yet another witness to the apparently accelerating decline of mainline churches.
Our initial reaction was not "wrong," but on further reflection it wasn't exactly "right" either. In a posting entitled, "Maybe It's Time for a Hospice Program for Some Churches," Ircel Harrison observes that churches live through a cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death (often diagramed with a bell curve) and to date we have neglected ministering to churches that are in the last stages of decline. The purpose of hospice for churches, he urges, would be to "help churches that have declined to die with dignity." It would help churches "to accept the situation and close their doors with grace." On reflection, such a ministry could be important for the remnant membership of once vital congregations, a remnant that will be going through a real and probably prolonged period of grief.
Harrison goes on, however, to suggest a second possible element of a hospice ministry with dying churches, which is to help the church discern possibilities of giving birth to new ministries or even new faith communities that would live beyond the church itself. He suggests that, "... churches in decline need to become pregnant. Like Sarah of old, they need to conceive and give birth." The dying church might birth a ministry involving its members and others, it might give its building and remaining assets to a worthy local cause, or it might even discover ways to become a new kind of church postmortem. In other words, the hospice caregiver also functions as a midwife thus giving life to something new and true dignity to a dying church's death.
This is resurrection thinking—thinking about death, that is, from a Christian perspective. It looks at decline as a birth process as much as a death process. Intriguing, to say the least.
