Please bear with me for one history lesson — so that we can go over it and go on with living in today.
Starting in 1964, membership in mainline denominations went into a long and steady decline. Much has been made of this decline. Church partisans have used it as a weapon to denounce whatever they didn’t like. Look at what happens, they argued, when you open the door to new liturgies, women, gays, liberals, conservatives, renewal hymns — take your pick.
In fact, 1964 was the year that “Baby Boomers” began to graduate from high school and to leave home. Not only were these teenagers gone, but many of their parents took this as an opportunity to leave, as well.
Many congregations were unprepared for this shift. Churches had grown easily in the post-war era, as millions of young couples started families, moved to new areas for work, sought out familiar denominations to help them get established, and sought activities for at-home mothers.
Those needs began to change as early as the mid-1950s. People sought socialization in other ways, especially in new suburbs. Women joined the workforce in greater numbers. The divorce rate began to spike. Television, automobiles, and prosperity changed lifestyles. Career mobility accelerated.
Established churches were slow to see these changes and even slower to respond. A typical congregation was still offering daytime ministries for women decades after women stopped being available for them. Churches didn’t see a need for support groups to handle growing stressors of modernity. Churches didn’t see the impact that suburbanization was having, not just on the racial mix of neighborhoods, but on lifestyles and emotional well-being.
Churches got out of touch with members’ needs and schedules, especially the young and the growing numbers who had moved miles away from church and were seen only on Sunday. We felt “entitled” to Sunday morning and Wednesday evening and didn’t see that we needed to compete for it.
In arguing about who should be ordained, we didn’t go far enough in re-thinking the nature of leadership for a changing era. In arguing about worship, we didn’t look at the Sunday enterprise with fresh eyes. Like neighborhood hardware stores in a “big-box” world, we clung to the “neighborhood church” model long after self-selected “community” replaced “neighborhood” as a locus of belonging.
Denominations allowed themselves to become battlegrounds for issues that evoked strong opinions but, even when resolved, didn’t advance the health of congregations or denominations.
It’s important to know this history and to stop arguing about who is to blame. The point is to recognize the radically new context for our work.
In the Church Wellness Project, one of our convictions is that if congregations got more intentional about nurturing health and being effective in the basics, they could nimbly respond to cultural shifts and stressors.
We would learn from our history and stop using it as a weapon.
Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant, and leader of workshops. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. The church wellness project may be found at www.churchwellness.com
