From 1990-2003, 5 percent of our Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s 11,000+ churches grew by net one member. In the years 2001-2005, that number slumped to less than 1 percent demonstrated growth in worship attendance and membership.
To put that in other terms, 70 percent of our fastest growing churches in the 1990’s have lurched into decline in membership and/or worship attendance. The slide proved remarkably omnipresent, as though a field of thoroughbreds suddenly pulled up winded.
What follows are my early ruminations on this millennial effect. Perhaps no single factor accounts for this dispiriting downturn among even vanguard churches, but together they may help explain the phenomenon.
1. Pastors increasingly note an exodus of active families once their children are confirmed. This post-confirmation syndrome accelerates through high school and college. Between 2000-2004 (boomers were age 34-54), the trailing edge of boomer’s children cleared confirmation. Formerly strong churches perhaps boosted the trend that will likely continue into the college years.
2. Our post-millennium global economy is vastly different in its effects and ethos from anything previously experienced. Revolutionary communications, outsourcing, and immigration have demoted our status from that of dominance to being but one faith among many. PC(USA) Presbyterians now account for barely 0.8 percent of the US population (historically never above 2.8%). Fickle institutional loyalties and suspicion toward institutional power commonly produce diminishing returns of meaning and purpose. In short, many experience an erosion of meaningful connectedness. The accelerating cultural flux only exacerbates the trend.
3. In this culturally traumatized world, millions feel that traditional religion has become an anachronism, a less than tenable world-view. Close to my home on the Philadelphia Mainline stands a struggling, historic church. Three years ago a sign by its antique gate proclaimed “Celebrating Three Hundred Years of Faithful Service.” It pealed out like a death knell, a church walking backwards into the future.
4. In the aftermath of 9-11, I fear we missed the boat. Those who came out in droves during that awful week, then ebbed like a spring tide in the weeks that followed, came hungering and thirsting for meaning and purpose. Writes Douglas John Hall in The End of Christendom and the Future of Christianity (in 1997!), “Interestingly enough, the increase in demand for religions to fill the void left by ideological progress is accompanied by a marked decrease in those very churches” (p. 64). They came hungry, but we had too little of substance to offer. Why come back? This tacit disavowal of traditional churches strikes me as similar to my native British populace slowly turning their backs on their historic national church following two world wars in which the church was unable to bring order out of chaos, or meaning out of terrible loss and long despair. Our foundation is hope, after all.
5. Another factor: accelerating since the 1950s, we have been losing our formerly strong centers of social nurture and formation that fashion one’s sense of place and personhood. Church, for millions of young people, inhabits an alien world whose vocabulary, rituals, and traditions are conventions as alien as Bantu to an Inuit. A whole culture finds fewer and fewer motivations to break into that strange world of the traditional church whose authority is so diminished.
6. Long percolating in the human soul, this disaffection with institutional religion turns inward for sustenance to the spiritual, because the soul will have its way. Ecclesiastes puts it beautifully: “God has set eternity in our hearts.” This realignment has a parallel impetus in a long partnership between fundamental axes, mythos and logos, that has become uncoupled like a damaged corpus callosum severing the two halves of the brain. Mythos and logos are complementary ways of perceiving the truth (see Karen Armstrong, Battle for God, Intro.)
Myth was always concerned with meaning, logos with the rational, functional mode of engaging the world. Where mythos, the meaning giver, is too long absent, despair and dislocation follow. Logos’ facts are a poor substitute. Logos is forward looking, ever in search of the new. Mythos’s retrospective eye is the conveyor of faith and mystery. We need both. However, the Enlightenment’s flowering of the Western mind gave the back of its hand to myth, to story, seeking instead to explain through impeccable reason. Western theology, has been dominated by logos: words, explanations, dogma, definition. Preaching, in the Protestant West, dominates the word-bound focus of worship. Only recently has the more contemplative discipline of “spiritual formation”–long the province of discreet pietism–begun to make its way into the discourse and curriculum of Protestant theological education, let alone into our churches. I suspect the millennium’s turn tacitly sanctioned the new era.
The theme pervading these thoughts, I believe, is a loss of connectivity, culturally, socially, personally, spiritually. Loss of connectivity promotes self-interest and self-preservation, the very antithesis of Jesus’ mission. Governing bodies, seminaries, church agencies have for decades viewed congregations as resources to fund their own programs and initiatives. Very little flows back to help congregations in crisis. The image comes to mind of a man lying on the sidewalk, hemorrhaging blood, while someone runs over with a transfusion bottle on a stand, and asks if he’d mind donating the blood to the Red Cross. In a time of crisis, the flow of resources needs directing to the health of the patient–the congregation. We need our theological leaders to help reshape and re-voice our theology; seminaries to ask congregations “How can we help?”; governing bodies to act as channels and servers, identifying and deploying resources to churches; churches to share their best creative minds; meetings to shift from deadening protocol to prescriptive dialogue; leaders with the courage to commit terminally ill congregations and apply their resources to the living.
In short, we need a reconnected, reemerging, life-giving church.
Victor M. Wilson is pastor of St John’s Church in Devon, Pa.
