What I hoped to discover through more research, was the impact of this national trend on large congregations, arbitrarily congregations reporting more than 700 members in 2006; there are 540 such PC(USA) congregations. Large churches are typically flagship churches in presbyteries. They have significant resources, contribute to the pool of excellent denominational leadership, and frequently are at the leading edge of mission. If these are imperiled in significant numbers, it is imperative to understand the dynamics that cause it, and suggest change for the body of Christ into the 21st century.
I first looked at a seven year trend for each church from 2000-2006, identifying three key categories — membership, worship attendance, and contributions — by counting the years above and below the baseline year (2000). The results ranged from -18 to +18 for any congregation. Only two churches had perfect scores, Westminster Church in West Chester, Pa., and Pilgrim (Korean) Church in Paramus, N. J. When set against comparable data for 1994-2000, only 31 percent showed some positive trend (statistically) over the fourteen years. And only 6 percent of large churches demonstrated positive trends in all three key categories. Yet the zero line between positive and negative is far from being a pass-fail mark. To show solid growth a congregation needs to score at least +10.
Most strikingly, 70 percent of 700+ congregations showed significant negative trends between 2001-2003, with marks of definition. Worship attendance commonly declines before membership, which in turn declines before contributions. (“Contributions” does not include capital/building campaign gifts, bequests, or investment income.) A rationale might run as follows. When a congregation’s contributions seem reasonably good they can camouflage a deeper trend. A thinning congregation prunes many members giving modest financial support. Typically, faithful attendees respond to bridge a shortfall. But the few bridging the gap for the many is likely to have a short life. Also of note, General Assembly data makes no adjustment for inflation, so dollar values are unequal and real contributions are understated.
Membership statistics are also somewhat suspect insofar as many (most?) churches do not adjust active membership losses with the same passion as membership gains. And Confirmation gains — with high school and college beckoning, have brief congregational lives, as often do their parents.
Worship attendance is clearly the most difficult to sustain of the threeindicators, and is likely the most “honest” indicator. In terms of relative sustainability, a ratio distilled from the data proposes the following (the higher the number, the harder to sustain): contributions, 6; membership, 11; worship attendance, 19.
Now for some hypothesizing. Data alone is a bit like road-kill. It has no voice. We don’t know if the possum was reconnoitering new territory, chasing dinner, or scurrying after the opposite sex. But the times we inhabit are at least suggestive as to our church’s dilemma.
1. Douglas John Hall writes “it is impossible to have any genuine impression of the Biblical picture of ‘the people of God,’ whether of Israel or of the Christian Koinonia, without coming to terms with the recurrent theme of the suffering of this people”(God and Human Suffering, p. 124). In China, in April 2007, President Iain Torrance of Princeton Theological Seminary, remarked in a devotional: “God is allowing us to be led into a Babylonian captivity in the West so that in our exile we can see our way to be remade and renewed.” Church has become for too many, I suspect, an interim place for the parental indulgence of the child, a place offering moral grounding in much the same way that parents press for their children to gain a college education. Such “Church-lite” commitments become easy to disengage from once a rite of passage, like Confirmation, has been met. It seems not to be the case that, as some might claim, the church is being punished for its departure from historic articles of faith. The trends outlined above seem to cut across the theological spectrum with as little discrimination as rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
2. This first decade of the new millennium also coincides with children of younger baby boomers entering high school and college, while middle boomers enter their “empty nest” years, and many older boomers begin salivating at the prospect of retirement. Having raised their children in the church, their “moral/religious obligations” to their children completed, many find it relatively easy to walk away from and ease into other pastimes. Their reasons for being involved have also graduated. At the risk of cynicism, these are ubiquitous facts. In trying to chase down the reasons for their absence, a group of officers in my church, after hours of calling, came up remarkably empty-handed as to proffered reasons for their absence. My own conversations have done little better.
3. Another suspicion lingers, and I confess it may have no more traction than the doctrine of predestination as attached to a loving and patient God. It is that the very nature of traditional, predominantly white, Western worship in America may be seriously impaired for these times. The year 1964, on the cusp of the massive and prolonged downturn in Americans’ affections for mainstream religion, marked the first year that baby boomers went off to college in unprecedented numbers. Higher education imbued the susceptible with the experience of dialogue and a healthy reservation toward things untestable (religion!). These, they were wisely told, are integral to learning and experience. Traditional Christian worship, however, lacks meaningful dialogue to any substantial degree. It has been said that the pulpit is the one place in western civilization toward which it is culturally forbidden to speak back. That the decline in worship and other church attendance fell after 2000 may, in part — and perhaps unconsciously — be a response to the perception of worship as soliloquy and irrelevant. The form appears redundant to an information age and a democratic experience. Seldom can this be more true than in the opening years of the millennium in which swift and massive changes in security, economy, and global isolation begged for dialogue with the very religions that stand at the heart of so much unrest. The counter might be made that non-PC(USA) evangelical and conservative churches often do well, and this may be true. However, my sense is that worshippers are drawn to those experiences more by a desire to know precisely where the boundary lines are, what the church’s teachings are, how to negotiate daily life, and by what rules; as receptacles for information more so than as actants in worship.
4. What, then can we do? The new Babylonian captivity, mentioned above, actually spurs the imagination with the prospect of good outcomes in the midst of crisis. From those seventy years came a staggering array of reform. Fully one third of the Hebrew Bible emerged from those years, including astonishingly inclusive passages in late Isaiah that still have to be made incarnate by the church — not to mention the extraordinary hymnody of the psalmist. Theology was reworked to give hope of redemption in place of the benign afterlife of Sheol. The emergence of the synagogue as a place of study and prayer gave a local habitation and extensible presence to God. Judaism as the modern world knows it, and much of the heritage of the Christian church, came out of the crucible of the exile. The church we have become most familiar with should not balk at such a modern captivity, any more than childbirth can bypass labor and delivery toward a newness of life.
5. Theological schools and seminaries will have to take a principal role in the reconstituting of the church, a role that is tangential at best in some of our leading seminaries. Theological training deserves to be held accountable to our congregations and wider governance, for the equipping of pastors and staff for the world they must face. This is not widely enough the case, though individuals who support local congregations are extraordinarily important in funding theological institutions.
6. In a conversation with colleagues recently about leadership of the church, I raised the issue of the disjuncture between middle and higher governing bodies and our congregations. When I suggested that we need consciously to look for leaders with “a heart for Christ and a passion for the congregation” as the life forces of the denomination, there was a reflective silence. It was as though these were not common attributes that we see or anticipate in leadership. They should be!
Ministry has presented historically unanticipated challenges in my thirty-plus years of pastoring. But the greatest one is before us all. I challenge our theological schools — whose exceptional resources are phenomenally underutilized for our congregations — to be active partners with congregations in shaping a new future. It was, we are reminded, the needs of the people in a desperate transition, and the response of the priestly theologians that reshaped and restored Israel’s faith in God while in Babylon.
And in the midst of this, may we pastors and officers not forget the common touch: the gathering for meals and conversation, the listening ear, the touch of compassionate hands, the intimate fellowship of prayer and study, the call to “come away and rest awhile,” that all speak of Jesus’ incarnational touch, which is the church’s soul.
Victor M. Wilson is pastor of St. John’s Church in Devon, Pa.
