Coping With Loss

The people in the desert

Sometimes, it feels like all we ever talk about in the mainline ecumenical churches is decline, esp. in the Presbyterian Church (USA).  The literature on the subject is massive and continues to grow even as our churches continue to shrink.  No one can explain precisely why the decline continues—or why it has been so massive in Europe and so much more restrained and relatively slow here in the U.S.  This is not to say that there is not life in our churches.  There is.  One feels it in the singing and in creative worship services and in the many ways churches serve their communities.  And there are churches filled not only with life but also with younger families, young people, and children running around the way they used to run around in all of our churches.  Some churches are like that, but they are far fewer now than they were sixty years ago—and there are increasingly fewer of them with each passing decade.

A recent Presbyterian leadership conference, reported (here), took for its title, "Leading With Vision Through Loss," which combines the reality of our current situation (loss) with a proposed "way out" (vision).  The question is a vision of what?  The point was made in the course of the conference that many churches and their leaders have a vision of return, that is they want to go back across the Red Sea to the 1950s.  They don't really see any other way out and generally resist "transformational change," whatever that might mean.  The thing that stands out here is that decline is an experience in loss, which is attended with grief and a desire to not lose a dying loved "one," in this case the church the way it was back when.  One of the speakers at the conference summarized the point by saying, "We want to grow, but we don't want to change."  The point was also made that this resistance to change is not so much a rejection of new things as it is a resistance to giving up old things, that is change would be OK if we didn't have to give up what we have now.  Perhaps, then, we would be better served by focusing on what we need to lose instead of why we don't want to change.

In all of this, one senses an opportunity for every church—an opportunity to cut loose and discover a new way of being the church in the time and place given us.  Even those churches that are going great guns now are sooner or later going to lose the pastor or the lay leaders who are keeping it going.  The rising tide of secularity is a threat to every church (least so in the South, most so here in the Northeast) that one day has to be faced.  My personal sense is that the Spirit's message embedded in all of this is that fellowships of committed Christians only need to discover the courage to cut loose, walk away from the 1950s, and find renewed life in less doing and more praying, fewer activities and more fellowship, less do and more talk (that is dialogue with each other).  The vast majority of churches aren't going to do this, but there are movements afoot (e.g. Fresh Expressions in Britain, the Emerging Church here) that suggest the wave of the future.   God has already shoved us across the Red Sea, but the great majority of us are now camped on that far bank wanting to go back rather than forward—forward is desert, back is the wealth of Egypt.  Forward is hard, back is impossible.  Beyond the desert, however, is promise.

What will the next 50 years hold?  Whatever the future is, the church in 2062 surely will not look at all like the church of 1962.  We're going to have to cope with a lot of loss, but across the desert is promise.  Some will make it.  Amen.