I was living in Bellingham, Washington, on May 18, 1980, during the explosion of Mount St. Helens, the most disastrous volcanic eruption in U.S. history. On that Sunday morning, from 300 miles away, I heard the massive blast that blew off a significant chunk of the mountain’s peak and flattened hundreds of square miles of trees. A vast moonscape surrounded the remaining mountaintop. Scientists predicted that the resulting dead zone might never recover.
The explosion and its aftermath became a teachable moment. The experts were astonished by the mountain’s resilience. Within weeks of the eruption, tiny plants emerged from the ash, and small animals began to return. The key to the ecosystem’s vitality was its inherent – if unexpected – sustainability. It had the capacity to adapt, drawing on its basic resources to find a different equilibrium within an utterly new context.
The church could learn from the natural world’s ecosystems. They adapt after perturbation. They change. They seek balance. They thrive on diversity. They understand their carrying capacity within a given environment. They interact with their surroundings. They demonstrate resilience. They know the goal is not growth, but sustainability.
The Iroquois Confederation was known for its long-term thinking. Their Seventh Generation Principle means that in every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation. That is ecological thinking. Imagine if congregations approached their life using that principle, thinking ahead one and a half centuries. To do that would require new ways of envisioning how to be the church.
For the last 50 years, American congregational leaders have labored under the burden of the wrong language when it comes to church vitality: the metaphors of economics. Jesus calls us not to market the Gospel but to serve it. God needs us not to develop the brand but to live with humility. The Holy Spirit is not dependent on demographic surveys; the Spirit longs for us simply to follow with courage.
When I was a new pastor in a small urban congregation, I was encouraged to study the growth of surging megachurches to learn from their strategies. Our presbytery even sent pastors of small, struggling city congregations to weeklong classes at the enormous suburban Saddleback Church. They came back depressed by their failure to succeed, as if they were serving in ecclesiastical dead zones that did not stand a chance of exhibiting anything like church vitality.
We were all pushed to use the language and concepts of free market economics. The Bible – as popular books of the time suggested – was a marketing text. One writer declared, “God wants the church to grow and grow and grow.” Obsession with church growth became idolatrous. “What are you worshipping?” pastors would ask one another, as if the numbers mattered more than the Almighty.
Church vitality depends at least in part on the language we use and the questions we ask ourselves. If we ask, “How can we grow? How do we find new members? How can we increase funding?” then we are using market imagery, and the goal is tactical: short-term survival. If, however, we ask, “What is our context, where is it changing and how can we adapt? What are our sources of resilience? Who will be our future constituents, in seven generations?” then those are ecological terms, and the goal is strategic: long-term sustainability.
The essential aim of Christian congregational life is to gather communities of resilient faith to worship God, follow Jesus and share the fruits of God’s love and justice.
God is better served when we seek not to build the “spiritual redwoods” one author champions but instead to use the image given us by Jesus: the fruit tree. The image of redwoods is concerned with growth; the latter image is about producing fruit that sustains. The essential aim of Christian congregational life is to gather communities of resilient faith to worship God, follow Jesus and share the fruits of God’s love and justice.
Churches of any size may discover their own sustainability when they let go of the oppressive imagery of market economics and begin to think in ecological terms. Like the scientists who gave Mount St. Helens little chance at recovery and were pleasantly surprised, congregations who are willing to adapt, seek new balance, embrace diversity and welcome change by trusting in their own God-given resilience may find themselves enjoying new vitality.
