Can a disintegrating organization of Christian believers find a way to reverse its downward spiral? Our national leadership needs our help to find a way.
That downward spiral strikes a distinct resemblance to the deterioration of Main Street in many an American town. That hub of the community’s commerce, with its pharmacy, supermarket, clothing, and shoe stores faded when developers built the shopping mall or Wal-Mart on the highway just outside town.
Hearing that sucking sound pull their customers away, the stores downtown tried to adjust. Some raised their prices to help the cash flow, only to find that their customer flow slowed to a crawl. Then they cut prices, but the profit margin could not sustain their costs. They cut their staff, but customer loyalty waned when the clerks no longer called them by name. The storeowners complained about their problems, but the few remaining customers grew weary of the whining.
Eventually one store after another closed. The landlords offered the stores at a lower rent, and soon tattoo parlors, tarot card readers, and “For Rent” signs populated Main Street.
Who caused this downward spiral?
Who’s to blame for the downward spiral in Louisville?
Well, as pink-slipped General Assembly staff members begin their search for new jobs, and as remaining staff try to regroup and reorganize their work, they all can find plenty of culprits to blame. Fund-withholding churches have starved the budget. Exaggerated reporting from a hostile press has incited such withholding. Missteps by a handful of national staff have thrown red meat to the reporters. GA commissioners have adopted provocative policies. Localists in the pews have adopted the ecclesiology of congregationalism in place of Presbyterian connectionalism. And self-absorption, the spirit of our age, has lured churches into cultural captivity.
No one event opened the drain. All of the above factors have contributed to the problem. They have been reinforced by human nature, which at times lashes out to blame others and then reverses field by pandering to the critics.
Put it all together, and we find ourselves in the downtown deterioration spiral. Tragically, the PC(USA) witness to Jesus Christ is suffering.
Can this downturn be reversed?
Many a town manager will cry, “Yes, it can!” Many a village mayor will testify, “We have turned it around!”
Such a turn-around must begin with accepting blame. As with recovering alcoholics, we–every one of us–needs to make a fearless moral inventory of how we have contributed to this descent, both in the things we have done and those we have neglected to do. Each one of us needs to ask where we have tacitly or actively wed our churches to the secular culture: its morality, its market mentality, its self-promotion, its rhetoric of contempt, its patterns of exclusion. We need to repent of our own sins ten times over for every time we decry the sins of others.
We also need to become church builders. Just as the Apostle urges us to seek gifts that build up others rather than ones that build up ourselves, we need to exert ourselves in building up the church–and especially the parts of the church that stretch beyond the bounds of our own fellowship. We need to escape the cave of our own isolation in order to serve the world of our higher calling.
One additional thing. This downward spiral has pulled folks down the drain with it. The laid-off GA employees need to feel the love of the Lord through the people of God. And those who have left our local church fellowships out of disenchantment need to know that we still love them and want them back. To each person hurt by the downward pull we should give our friendship and assure them we will pray for them with fervor.
This downward spiral pattern can be reversed. Many a downtown has revived and so can the national church. But we need to band together, thinking like creative city managers and mayors, in order to rebuild what has been broken. Knowing that “with God all things are possible,” we have reason for hope.
