Adapting to the New Climate

As described in yesterday's posting, "Church Decline & Not Knowing What is Going On For Sure," local congregations of all denominations and faiths in the United States are having to adapt to a new social and cultural climate, one that is colder and less hospitable.  This is less true, apparently, in the South than the rest of the country and especially true of the Northeast, but on the whole we live in a new religious environment, at least a Little Ice Age.  The challenge is to adapt.

The evidence at hand suggests that American churches are finding it hard to adapt.  Thus, as one small example, Thom Rainer's posting, "12 Biggest Challenges Pastors and Church Staff Face," which lists the responses to what he calls a "non-scientific Twitter survey" in which he asked pastors and church staff members, "What is your biggest challenge in ministry?"  According to his respondents, the churches they serve are apathetic, inwardly focused, lacking in lay leadership, and financially challenged.  They cling to their traditions, focus on trivial matters, and some members devote themselves to criticizing pastoral leadership. Rainer concludes, "What is fascinating, if not discouraging, about this survey is that virtually all of the challenges noted by these pastors and staff were internal challenges. It appears that many of our churches in America are not effective conduits of the gospel because the members spend so much energy concerned about their own needs and preferences."

The weather has turned cold.  It is harder to find game, which is also dying off.  The crops we've been depending upon can't survive in this new, harsher climate.  Church folks are mostly hunkering down, shivering, and not very happy in these new conditions.  But here and there old churches are adapting, new forms of churches are emerging.  Religion is taking new forms.  And it is worth a thought that all of this is encompassed in the providence of God.  We're still headed in the direction of the Kingdom.  Amen.

Church Decline & Not Knowing What is Going On For Sure

In a posting entitled, "The Great Decline: 60 years of religion in one graph," blogger Tobin Grant begins his comments on the graph displayed on the left by stating, "Religiosity in the United States is in the midst of what might be called ‘The Great Decline.’ Previous declines in religion pale in comparison. Over the past fifteen years, the drop in religiosity has been twice as great as the decline of the 1960s and 1970s."  Scary stuff, that, for those of us who labor in the church.

Some months back, however, I shared with readers in a posting entitled, "Rethinking the 'Nones'," the helpful speculation of Frank Newport, Editor-in-Chief at Gallup, that what may be happening is not a decline in religiosity, let alone spirituality, but rather a change in the way people answer questionnaires. I wrote that according to Newport, "it is becoming easier or more acceptable for people to say to pollsters that they are they are atheists, agnostics, or otherwise not religious. [Newport] argues that the number of religious people has not been declining, at least not very much."

On further reflection, it is likely that what we are experiencing is a sea change in the place of organized religion in American society and culture.  As is widely observed, outside of the South churches no longer occupy the honored, central place they once held.  As they continue to lose their privileged place in society, they shed members who were not really all that interested in the first place but in the past felt a social need to be part of a church.  As a consequence, churches that adapted themselves to the 1950s climate of hey-day religiosity are being challenged to adapt to a new climate, a colder and less hospitable one.  Many are simply not adapting.  But others are and will continue to do so.

All of this is not to say that churches are not in any less jeopardy than they clearly are in.  It is to say that for the foreseeable future viable, even exciting congregations of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other faiths will continue to thrive as they find new ways to pursue their faiths.

Breathing In - Breathing Out

In meditation, the meditator's breath is her guide and anchor.  Breathing in, he is aware that he is breathing in — breathing out, she knows that she is breathing out.  Breathing is the most fundamental, necessary fact of life.  Nothing is simpler nor more necessary.  To breathe is to live.  Outside of the practice of meditation, however, we seldom think about our breathing unless it is threatened or even momentarily interrupted.  When we can't get our breath, suddenly and anxiously we are aware of just how important it is to breathe.  Otherwise, we seldom pay attention to it.

Meditation encourages us to be awake to our breathing—to see it as the core of all of our spiritual technologies and the simplest to practice.  It can be done anywhere.  All it requires is breathing and knowing we are breathing.

And one thing that we might discover in our meditation is that breathing in (Lord, I know I am breathing in) is not like breathing out (Lord, I know I am breathing out).  Regarded mindfully and gently, breathing in gathers energy and breathing out expels anxiety.  Together they are a dualism, the dualism that circumscribes our lives.  They are much more than a physiological mechanism for delivering oxygen to our body.  They define the flow and ebb of life.  Lord, we breathe in our suffering, Lord, we breathe out our healing.  Lord, we breathe in tension, Lord, we breathe out relaxation.  Lord, we breathe in experience, Lord, we breathe out learning.   Yin and yang.  God's gift of the Spirit created in us at the very core of what it means to live.  Lord, we breathe compassion in, Lord, we breathe ministry out.  Amen.

Sitting & Non-sitting Time

We have so many compartments in our lives.  How can we bring meditation out of the meditation hall and into the kitchen, and the office?  In the meditation hall we sit quietly, and try to be aware of each breath.  How can our sitting influence our non-sitting time?  When a doctor gives you an injection, not only your arm but your whole body benefits from it.  When you practice half an hour of sitting meditation a day, that time should be for all twenty-four hours, and not just for that half-hour.

Thich Naht Hanh,

Peace is Every Step, 34

How, indeed, do we in our Christian tradition transform non-worship time with our worship?  How do we teleport our hymns, litanies, prayers, and readings into the kitchen and the office?  This is a question that every church, pastor, church board, and national church agency should be wrestling with.  The question of injecting non-sitting time with sitting time injections is, in fact, a core question and central challenge for all of religion.

No Easy Answer

Just fifteen years ago, Fuller Seminary professor Wilbert R. Shenk, published an article entitled, "The Priority of Mission for Renewal of the Church," in which he states in a highlighted sentence that, "Authentic renewal will only come with a return to the theological roots of the church in Scripture along with missionary engagement of its culture."  He then proposes a strategy for church renewal, which is to recapture the missio Dei, that is the mission of God, for our time and context.  "Mission" he concludes is the most appropriate symbol for the church and is its reason for being. He states, "At the heart of mission is the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:11-21) and witness to the reign of God. The church is that community earnestly seeking, albeit imperfectly, to embody the justice/righteousness of God’s new order."  He then comes full circle and argues that recapturing God's mission for our time and place means that churches will respond compassionately to the hurt of the world and read the Bible in light of the world's suffering so that it will be better able to respond to that suffering.

It sounds good.  In recent years, there has been a ton of talk about "the missional church."  There has been another ton about how churches need to base themselves in scripture, which often is taken to mean reading it "the right way," whichever way that might be.

The past fifteen years, however, have only served to prove that church renewal is not something that can be neatly packaged in this way.  Where it happens, personalities are involved, circumstances shape events, and an uncontrollable element of serendipity that we associate with the Holy Spirit is usually at work.  There are no magic bullets apart from commitment, wisdom, and openness to the Spirit by the faithful.  In one church, the renovation of a narthex surprisingly takes it down the path of renewal.  In another church, a concerted effort to generate a revival leads only to division, discouragement, and accelerated decline.  In still another church, the unlooked for emergence of a small-group movement reorients the future of the congregation.  In a fourth small, rural church, an elder prays week after month after year for his church to grow without answer—until, one day, a family begins to attend who prove to be a catalyst for renewal.  Sometimes conflict leads to renewal because it breaks a logjam of dysfunctional relationships; sometimes (more often, actually) conflict leads churches in the opposite direction.  You just can never tell, not for sure.

What seems to be constant in the stories of renewal is that courage, vision, prayer, and humility are usually involved.  Renewal means change, which means courage.  Somewhere in the church there has to be a vision, a hunger even for renewal.  Humility is crucial, meaning a compassionate, self-aware, disinclination to force or push, demand or judge.  Prayer is key as well.  These things can be channels for the Spirit.

Rounding the Circle of the Human Spirit

[Buddhism] is quite rich material about what I call the inner world.  Modern science is very highly developed in matters concerning the material world. These two things separately are not complete. Together, the external and the internal worlds are complete.

Dr. James W. Wagner,
President,  Emory University
Quoted in Kim Severson,
"A Bridge Between Western Science and Eastern Faith,"
NY Times, Oct. 11, 2013

Toward a Pedagogy of Suffering

In an article appearing in the Clinical Law Review, 19, 2 (Spring, 2013) and entitled, "Painful Injustices: Encountering Social Suffering in Clinical Legal Education," Law professor Sarah Buhler proposes a "pedagogy of suffering" aimed at helping clients and lawyers address the sources of social suffering to the end that larger questions of injustice might also be addressed.  In her conclusion, Buhler writes,

It is important for clinical law teachers to be prepared, during class discussions, case rounds, or routine supervisory interactions with students, to critically interrogate dominant discourse about suffering, and to urge students to ask questions about the proper terrain of legal practice. This may require clinicians to push students into examining their own emotional responses, and to help them to develop a critical vocabulary for understanding and contextualizing these experiences. A critical pedagogy of suffering would entail a deliberate challenge to the tendency to suppress or divert emotional responses within the clinical classroom, and to encourage students to understand their own sadness or distress about their clients’ stories as resources for thinking about larger questions of justice and injustice in society.

In the Christian tradition rooted in Judaism, we have from the beginning recognized the instructional value of suffering.  Traditional theology held that God is the source of all suffering, which is intended not so much to punish sin as to offer sinners the opportunity to change their ways.  In more recent times and in many Christian circles, the idea that God purposefully causes suffering in specific instances has lost favor, but we cannot escape the underlying fact that suffering is a part of the world that God has created.  God does not kill innocent children, yet their deaths are somehow encompassed within divine providence.  And suffering still has its value, if it is not so painful that healing cannot take place.

One of the key uses of our set of spiritual practices is to focus our attention on the lessons we can learn from our suffering and that of those around us.  Prayer and meditation, as key examples, are thus not ways to avoid suffering or escape its consequences.  They are the means rather for processing suffering, and as we engage in them we learn that frequently we are complicit in our own suffering.  We are a source of suffering in others.  The suffering itself is simply a physiological, including mental and emotional, phenomenon.  What it can teach us if we are mindful of it is, ultimately, spiritual and vastly important to our well-being.

If Only

In 1957 when Governor Faubus of Arkansas refused to desegregate the schools in Little Rock, if President Eisenhower with all of his enormous prestige had personally led a black child up the step to where the authorities were blocking the school entrance, it might have been one of the great moments in history.  It is heart-breaking to think of the opportunity missed.

Frederick Buechner,

Listening to Your Life , 55

Paying Attention

Suffering in all of its manifold manifestations lies at the heart of the human experience.  It is physical, emotional, and spiritual.  The world with its natural, social, political, and economic crises and processes causes us to suffer.  Others hurt us.  We ourselves are the source of a goodly portion of our own suffering.

Faith in Christ does not prevent suffering.  Indeed, people of Christian faith often suffer because they are attuned to the suffering around them—at least somewhat.  What faith does do is to help us process suffering in a way that breaks its cycles.  It helps us to better see, however imperfectly, the ways in which we perpetuate our suffering and that of others around us.  It gives us tools for better managing suffering.  Sometimes, it even allows the Holy Spirit to wend its healing way through us into situations of pain, reducing the pain and bringing resolutions that are a foreshadowing of the Kingdom.

When we ground ourselves in faith that is even somewhat open to the Holy Spirit, our faith helps us to creatively pay attention to our suffering and that of others in a way that removes us from the deadly cycles of hurt.

Other religious faiths than Christianity also provide ways through pain and suffering.  We don't have a corner on the market.  The insight of our particular  faith, however, is that like Christ we have to walk our way through the Valley of the Shadow.  We can't reach the high peaks and grand vistas without walking through the forests, the swamps, and all of the other obstacles on the Way.  The cross is not the end of the journey, but it is the way to the end—not something we seek but something we endure and learn from.

It remains unclear to me, at least, why the Creator would construct our reality in this way.  But, somehow, what we are to become is intimately tied to what we must suffer through to become what we are being created to be.  The trick is to not be defeated by suffering, not rendered insensitive by it, and learn what lessons we can from it.  Like a child who has to learn painfully not to stick her hand in a fire, so too does our safety lies in the way through our suffering.  The story we Christians put our trust in is the story of Jesus, the Galilean who walked that way with and for us.  Amen.

What We Are Losing

A recent news posting on Aljazeera America entitled, "Missouri's paw-paw French dialect fading into silence," describes the demise of an old, old American French dialect also known as Missouri French, which was spoken in the region around St. Louis.  Today, there are no fluent speakers of paw-paw French still living and few that can speak even a little of it.  Descended from the time when the region was part of New France, paw-paw French was a people's language that apparently wasn't written down or taught formally in schools.  It came to be considered a low-class language spoken only by ignorant people, which seems to be an important reason why it has all but died out.  People, esp. younger people, did not want to be labelled as backward by the fact that they spoke paw-paw French, and evidently parents often discouraged their children from learning it for the same reason.

In one sense, it is a little silly to get all sentimental about the loss of a dialect that has apparently lost its reason-for-being.  It has been centuries since Missouri was a part of New France.  People naturally use the language that best fits their social and cultural needs, and English was that language, especially as native language speakers of English flooded into the Mississippi Valley after the Louisiana Purchase.

On the other hand, when a language or a dialect dies away something important is lost with that death. In a posting from March 2012, entitled, "Learning to Speak Sami," I wrote, "There is more at stake than the loss of just [a] language. Language is a primary carrier of culture, and where a language is dying away it is certain that a culture is dying as well—ways of dressing, eating, and living together in a unique society. Cultural diversity is important because it maintains the richness of human life."  Culturally speaking, Missouri and the U.S. are just a little poorer culturally for the loss of paw-paw French.  A piece of our living history, stored in the memories and experiences of people is lost.  A living link to the past is lost, and the void is not filled by the sound recordings and video tapes collected by scholars.  Stories and songs have lost their meaning and remain only curiosities for non-native language speakers where they are preserved at all.

This kind of loss has always been a part of our cultural experience.  Old English morphed into Middle English, which morphed into something else.  The dialects of American English spoken back in the 1920s, the 1950s are dying away.  When I refer to something as "mickey mouse," even young adults in their 20s and 30s haven't a clue as to what I mean.  Still the loss of a whole dialect is lamentable.  We are poorer for it.

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For photographs from Old Mines, Missouri, which is the center for the few people who still speak paw-paw French, see a posting entitled, "La Fête de l'Automne 2012 and Missouri French."