It's the Culture, Stupid

While many mainline churches are healthy, most are not.  They are in decline.  They share in a culture of decline that is marked not only by statistical decline but also by avoiding talking about their decline.  In a strange sort of way, they are acquiescing to their own decline and eventual demise.  Pastors play a large contributing role in all of this, but it is the churches themselves that play the major role.

Hold that thought.  When recently asked (here) why he has been so successful in turning around the football program at the University of Minnesota, head coach Jerry Kill answered, "I guess the No. 1 thing is the culture, trying to get everybody on the same page...That was difficult. It always is, by the way, when you take a new job.”  Football success wasn't possible without a change in culture.  That change didn't guarantee that the Golden Gophers would suddenly become a relevant program, but without the change in culture there was also no possibility that it would becoming a winning team.  One key cultural change Kill identified, for example, was improving the players' grades.

Returning to the church, it is clear that declining local mainline churches require a change in culture.  It is, unfortunately, far more difficult to sell that need to congregations than it is to young football players who want to win football games.  Churches are prone to actively resist such change.  They are frequently committed to the proposition that they can overcome decline by continuing to do what they are doing, but only better.  There is a reason.  Change might accelerate decline.  Better the devil you know than the one you don't.

Nonetheless, it is all about changing the culture of decline.  The problem with all of the how-to manuals and books and audio cassettes and websites dedicated to that change is that culture is a profoundly local thing, even the culture of decline.  What works in one place may well not work at all in another.  The one constant is the need to change the local church's culture of decline.  And one crucial place to begin is to talk about it.  Not talking means not changing.  Changing a church's culture also requires finding leverage points, which are easier to change and will promote changes in other places—such as introducing a small group ministry into the church.

In any event, it is all about the culture.

It All Makes Sense

Reality makes sense to us in at least three ways.  First, reality makes sense to us in an everyday, which is for us common sense.  We sense the world, physical and cultural, and these ordinary, everyday things make sense to us.  Only philosophers wonder if they are real.  For the rest of us, the common world of our physical and cultural senses is real.  Second, we have a moral sense, which helps us navigate our social world.  It is a sense composed of values, attitudes, and ethical principles and behaviors.  It is, to be sure, related to our common sense, but it is also something universal across human cultures.  Finally, we have a spiritual sense, which again is culturally bound in many ways yet universal across human cultures.  With it, we sense a realm of metaphysical realities, such as the human spirit, awe, wonder, mystery, and the mystical.  For people of religious faith, it is with this sense that we sense the Presence of God or the reality of the Dharma.

The boundaries between these realities are porous, but they all make sense to us—in different ways of course.  Cultures define reality, up to a point.  So, too, do our individual personalities define how we sense what is real.  Experiences shape our senses and sometimes radically change what makes sense to us—what is real for us.  We, nonetheless, all have common, moral, and spiritual sensibilities, which all make sense to us.

Like Beavers, We Build

Yesterday, I attended a meeting of over 100 individuals focused on the subject of homelessness in Lewis County, New York.  The great majority of those attending work either in government agencies or in non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and as I listened to speaker after speaker rattle off an array of acronyms and refer to arcane corners of federal and state legal codes, I realized that what I was participating in was not just a meeting.  Laid out before me was a culture—for me, a foreign culture that has invented its own language.  At points, I required a translator!  The keynote speaker drew an unusually large audience not because of his eloquence but because of his knowledge of this culture.  Over lunch members of this housing and homelessness culture exchanged business cards and engaged in some important discussions that strengthened the networks of the culture of those involved in housing and homelessness in the North country of New York.

Walk into a school, any school, and we walk into a culture.  The First Presbyterian Church of Lowville, New York, is most definitely a culture of its own.  Businesses are cultures.  Industries.  Branches of government.  Crime syndicates.  Prisons.  You name it.  It is a culture.

Beavers can't help themselves.  They build damns and lodges.  We build cultures—or, better, we create cultures.  And this drive to create them is built deeply within us.  We need and use culture to protect ourselves, put food on the table, obtain shelter and clothing, and fulfill our most basic human drives.  The so-called "tribal instinct" is an instinct to live together in communities that can exist only as integrated cultures that share a language, values, behaviors, skills, religion, and habits.  We don't just eat.  We create cuisines.  We go to Italian or Thai restaurants, savor particular Chinese or French dishes.

Sociologist speak of the "social construction of reality," a sociological doctrine that holds that we humans construct our own realities at every level.  I saw and participated in one such social construction of reality yesterday.  Central to it was the social construction of a culture to mediate its reality (the "reality" being all of the laws, agencies, and institutions dedicated to addressing issues of housing and homelessness).  Building cultures is what we do.  We can't help ourselves anymore than the beavers out on Beaver Lake can't help but build damns and lodges.  It's what we do.