In rural Vermont, the church where Jenny Stoner worships has some members whose families have been involved for four or five generations. But there have been a lot of funerals in the last year, she said. And some of the grown children of those longtime members are not active Presbyterians. They say, “You don’t have to do what the family expects you to,” Stoner recounted. “A lot of them have chosen no church.”
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has been losing members now for more than 30 years. As it considers its future, sometimes there’s a tendency to look inward, to talk about polity and ordination standards and who’s on what committees and how the money’s spent, and how fixing those things might fix the denomination’s problems. But recently, the PC(USA)’s Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church (of which Loudon, Anderson and Stoner are all members) spent some time looking the other way — outward at the bigger picture, at the changing demographics of the United States, and the broader forces shaping the future of mainline Protestant denominations.
Another member of the task force, Barbara Everitt Bryant, is a research scientist at the University of Michigan Business School and former director of the U.S. Bureau of the Census — someone who understands clearly how the U.S. is changing. Among the insights she shared, some drawn from the 2000 census:
o The U.S. population is growing increasingly diverse. In California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, more than a quarter of the population now is Hispanic. In 17 percent of the homes, a language other than English is spoken. Eleven percent of the U.S. population was foreign-born in 2000, compared with 5 percent in 1970. Many new immigrants are Roman Catholic.
o Membership in the PC(USA) is declining. But the U.S. population is growing about 1.3 percent a year, which means the denomination is not keeping up with the nation’s population growth.
o Population growth is bigger in metropolitan areas, particularly in the suburbs, than in rural areas. But many Presbyterian churches are small congregations in rural areas.
o The United States has a mobile population. In the 2000 census, 43 percent said they were living in a different house or apartment from where they had been five years ago, and 18 percent had moved to a different county. That has real implications for congregations, particularly in high-turnover areas.
o Relatively few U.S. households are “June and Ward Cleaver” families — a mom, a dad and their children. Only 33 percent of U.S. households were families with children in 2000, compared with 45 percent in 1970. Significant numbers of households are married couples without children in the home, single parents or people living alone.
Overall, “social capital” is declining — meaning less involvement in voting and volunteer work and organizations, everything from the PTA to the church choir. Why is that? Look at what takes up our time, Bryant said. We watch television for hours each day, sitcoms and sports on dozens of channels; more women are working outside the home; people feel the pressure of too much to do at work and in their families; people move around, and may feel less inclined to plant deep roots, wherever they’re living now.
The Presbyterian Panel surveys also show some interesting trends, Bryant said. Although the PC(USA) has voted repeatedly not to ordain those who are single and sexually active, there is more openness to ordaining gays and lesbians among women, younger members, those who are highly educated and female pastors. The national electorate is nearly divided along liberal and conservative lines, she said, and the Presbyterian Panel results show similar splits between members who favor a “big tent” church that tolerates diversity and those who favor a “strict” church that requires uniformity.
In an effort to lay out for the task force the “American religious context” — some of the forces in the religious history of the U.S. that affect Americans’ attitudes towards religion and also the vitality of mainline denominations — Milton “Joe” Coalter, who is a professor of bibliography and research at Louisville Seminary and one of the co-editors of the Presbyterian Presence series, which examined the history of the Presbyterian church in the 20th century, wrote a paper laying out some major forces at work in recent centuries. Coalter made it clear his paper reflected his own views, not those of the task force, and he made no recommendations for the group. But, like the Anaheim Angels blasting balls into the outfield, laying down hit after hit in their big World Series rallies, Coalter punched out factors that have had an impact on the peace, unity and purity of the church. He mentioned everything from scientific advances and the impact of immigration to the growth of non-denominational mega-churches and “mix and match” spirituality.
In their discussion of Bryant’s demographic findings and of Coalter’s paper — an exercise in which Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Seminary in New York asked each person to talk about which factors from Bryant’s and Coalter’s findings they most saw evident where they live — the task force members mentioned particularly the impact of aging congregations and of churches becoming localized, looking different in different places.
José Luis Torres-Milán, a pastor from Puerto Rico, said many who worship at his church used to be Pentecostals or Catholics; they do not come from Presbyterian backgrounds. Some congregations, he said, don’t even use the word “Presbyterian” in their name.
Jack Haberer from Houston said his congregation is very mobile — lots of job changes and transfers — and “we’re in megachurch country.” Within just a few miles are four churches of 3,000 people or more, “very seeker-oriented.”
Joan Kelley Merritt of Seattle said Presbyterian churches in her area minister in the midst of “a very secular culture.” In the small town in New York where Wheeler lives, people make fairly traditional choices about which church they join, but that’s not necessarily the church they attend. Some Presbyterians, for example, go to Mass on Saturday night rather than get up for worship on Sunday. (“It’s a small town; they’re related to a lot of those people in the Catholic church,” Wheeler said.) Or, when Sunday rolls around, some folks just stay home.
One evening, PC(USA) Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick met with the task force, describing work he’s doing trying to develop what he calls a “missional polity” for the Presbyterian church for this new century. Kirkpatrick spoke of developing a culture of respect for the denomination’s Constitution, about being clear about the basics of the faith, about creating freedom “to let 100 flowers bloom” in ministry. It’s telling, Kirkpatrick said, that the Book of Order, which lays out all kinds of rules and regulations of the denomination, is a perennial best-seller (60,000 to 70,000 copies a year), while the Book of Confessions, which talks about what Presbyterians believe in, is not.
Kirkpatrick, ever-enthusiastic and heart-felt about his work, was deep in a discussion of some of his projects when a few task force members raised their “big- picture” voices. “I wonder really if the Constitution revitalizes the church,” or if the Bible does, said Jong Hyeong Lee, a pastor from Chicago.
“An appeal to heritage, to documents, to tradition isn’t going to move people,” said Mark Achtemeier, who teaches systematic theology at University of Dubuque Seminary. What will work, he said, is “lifting up Jesus Christ with passion and conviction.” Perhaps the PC(USA) Constitution keeps getting bigger, Achtemeier said, because “we’ve stopped worshipping and started being canon lawyers.”
The big picture — of a world bigger than the Presbyterian church here and now — also was reflected in the task force’s worship.
Lee, who is from South Korea, and Torres-Milán from Puerto Rico, spoke of the courage, perseverance and love for the Bible of some of the early Christians in North and South Korea and in Puerto Rico — telling of people who were stoned for their beliefs, who refused to quit talking about Jesus, whose unyielding faith turned lives around. Lee became a pastor himself after he was hospitalized for months with tuberculosis, and, isolated and despairing, saw the eye of God watching over him, asking if he was ready to be molded to do God’s work. “I was transformed” and went to seminary, Lee said. Lee asked for prayer regarding the proliferation of nuclear weapons in North Korea and Iraq, a concern that task force members returned to repeatedly, praying for peace.
Martha Sadongei, a member of the Kiowa tribe of Oklahoma and a pastor in Phoenix, led worship one morning and said she was thinking of the task force struggling with questions of unity one day while she was cooking fry bread for her father. Fry bread is not a traditional Indian food, Sadongei said. Native Americans began to eat it after they were rounded up on reservations and were given flour, baking powder and salt, and had to come up with bread to feed the people.
Where she’s from, in the Southwest, fry bread is light and fluffy. In the Northwest, “it’s smaller and thicker and weighs a ton,” Sadongei said, and in Texas, it’s cooked with a hole in the middle. “We have all these variations,” but fry bread is commonality for the Indian people, she said. Her text that day was from the sixth chapter of John, where Jesus said, “I am the Bread of Life.” In the Presbyterian church, “there is still one bread that holds us all together,” Sadongei said. “It’s the one who says, ‘I am the Bread of Life.'”
