Diverse ecosystems thrive when different kinds of organisms share life and energy together in a particular place. In western European nations with a long legacy of state churches such as the U.K., the inherited system of local, geographically based congregations no longer connects with the vast majority of neighbors in a meaningful way. While most of those neighbors don’t mind that a historic church building is part of the cultural landscape, they have no interest in participating in what goes on there.

Over the past few decades, churches in those contexts have developed a vision for a “mixed” or “blended ecology” of inherited and new forms of Christian community coexisting together. The word “inherited” is deliberate. Like any inheritance, traditional forms of institutional church bear a wealth of gifts but also sometimes a complicated legacy. 

Read the full post on Faith+Lead here.

August 2021

Two years ago, I wrote a blog post entitled “Will the ELCA Be Gone in 30 Years?” that mapped out some ominous institutional affiliation and participation trends facing the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The impact of the pandemic on congregational affiliation and participation is not yet clear, but it will likely only accelerate the disintegration already taking place, not only for mainline denominations but many other religious institutions more broadly in America. This is not to say that Christianity itself is going away but rather its dominant institutional forms of the past two centuries. In this piece, I want to offer a bit more context on an underlying cultural shift taking place that helps explain the trend and invite leaders to reexamine the focus of their energy and work.

Read the full post on Faith+Lead here.

April 4, 2023

In many congregations today, there is a basic social contract that goes something like this: clergy and staff (the “ministers”) are expected to perform Christian faith for congregation members, and congregation members are primarily expected to express their discipleship by supporting the institutional church. Clergy and staff are the ones expected to read the Bible, pray, evangelize, and perform public witness. Congregation members are expected to donate, volunteer, and show up at church activities and programs. 

To ask regular church members (what we at Faith+Lead call “everyday disciples”) to pray aloud, interpret scripture, talk about their own spiritual lives, or share their faith is uncomfortable because little in their experience of church has formed them to do these things. They are happy to defer to the professionals and experts because they have been conditioned to do so, often over a lifetime of church attendance. Their experience of church has not been oriented around equipping them to embody Christian discipleship and witness in daily life. 

Read the full post on Faith+Lead at this link.

Samuel Wells’ latest book, Incarnational Mission: Being with the World (Eerdmans, 2018) builds on his earlier work in naming four modes of mission: working for (charity, benevolence; assumes church has abundance and neighbors have deficit); working with (community organizing, joining networks and movements); being for (having the right attitudes and taking the right public positions); and being with (presence, relationship, listening, story sharing, participation, wonder).

The first three of these are familiar to most churches today, which tend to focus their energy around some combination of working for, working with, and being for. However, Wells points out that Jesus spent 90% of his ministry in being with, 9% in working with, 1% in working for, and basically none in being for.

Being with requires a very different posture than the others. It is grounded in relationships, presence, attentiveness, and abiding or dwelling. Wells invokes Augustine’s sense of enjoyment: what we enjoy is of value for its own sake, not a means to some other end. To be with is to enjoy, not to see the neighbor as an object of fixing, attraction into our established thing, management, or other instrumental approach.

While there can be times and places for working for, working with, and being for, when we focus there primarily we miss a deeper opportunity for participating in God’s life and mission with our neighbors. Taking the journey of being with requires unlearning speed, distance, and innocence (as Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice put it in Reconciling All Things). It requires humility, and a posture of openness and vulnerability. It seeks the wonder and mystery of God’s presence and life in the presence and lives of others.

So much of the conversation about the challenges facing the church today is missing the point. In all the discussion of how to spur renewed participation and giving, activate members, or even get people to connect “missionally” with the neighborhood, the underlying spiritual crisis in many churches never gets named or addressed.

Renewalworks, a ministry of Forward Movement that uses a survey instrument to assess the spiritual growth of congregational members, has just completed a white paper summarizing their learnings from 12,000 Episcopalians in 200 congregations across the country. It offers a devastating picture of the spiritual health of The Episcopal Church that I suspect could likely apply to many other mainline denominations.

Most of the survey respondents are longtime members who fit the denomination’s demographic profile (older, white, relatively affluent). Many attend Sunday services but don’t feel personally responsible for practicing faith outside of worship. Some are interested in going deeper spiritually but don’t know what steps to take.

On a spiritual continuum from initial spiritual exploration to spiritual maturity (God as the most important relationship in one’s life), here is how the respondents located themselves:

• Exploring a life with God in Christ: 18%
• Growing in a life with God in Christ: 55%
• Deepening in a life with God in Christ: 23%
• Centered in a life with God and Christ.: 4%

In other words, nearly three quarters of these Episcopalians are stuck in the first two stages of spiritual growth, even though the majority have been part of their churches for a decade or more. Many want help learning spiritual practices (for instance, how to pray) but feel their congregations are not providing this. They look to clergy for spiritual leadership, but the majority have never discussed their spiritual life with them. Many clergy feel overwhelmed and distracted by other tasks.

Episcopal congregations fit into three primary archetypes:

• Troubled (55%): Their members are restless and desire more spiritual growth, but they feel that congregational life is not helping them.
• Extroverted (23%): These congregations are deeply committed to serving their neighbors but struggle to connect this service to God.
• Complacent (21%): These congregations have low expectations and are resistant to change.

My own work with congregations has convinced me that talk of missional transformation often meets resistance because many church members don’t know the Christian story very well, don’t have functioning spiritual practices in their lives (beyond Sunday worship), and are ambivalent about embracing discipleship as their core identity. Those willing to take a deeper missional journey have often been through intentional spiritual formation experiences like Cursillo or EFM (Education for Ministry) or have backgrounds in evangelical churches or connections to monastic communities.

There are no quick fixes.[1] The issues are much bigger than congregational life; they derive from late modern culture itself. But now is the time to turn our collective attention to the challenges of forming Christian community and apprenticing people into the Christian life in today’s culture. This must become our primary focus. So much energy is being spent on renewal and vitality efforts (to say nothing of reorganization and restructuring) that never get at this deeper crisis. In The Episcopal Church, it’s wonderful to talk about being “the Jesus Movement,” but unless we help people understand and operationalize what this means in their daily lives, it will be a mere slogan.

The Renewalworks study offers some hopeful pathways forward: the centrality of engagement with scripture, the introduction of simple spiritual practices, the importance of the Eucharist, and the critical role played by spiritually-centered leaders. I’m grateful to Renewalworks for the service they’re providing the church with this work, and for the congregations that have taken the risk of discovering where their people are at spiritually. That is itself a courageous step.

You can read the full white paper here: RenewalWorks White paper-10-17b

[1] For an important exploration of the nature of the faith formation challenge, see my colleague Andy Root’s latest book, Faith Formation in a Secular Age.

I am on sabbatical currently, which means I get to read a lot of books. One of the most profound and disturbing among the many I’ve been reading is Sherry Turkle’s new Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press, 2015). Turkle is a professor at MIT, author of Alone Together and a researcher into how technology is reshaping human life and community. This book focuses on how digital devices are eroding our capacity for conversation, deeper connection, and generative solitude.

Turkle spent a lot of time interviewing people of a variety of ages (many of them millennials) about their everyday lives, including family, friendships, education, and work. The picture she paints is sobering. In the past 20 years, empathy among college students has dropped 40% (most of it in the past decade). The more preoccupied with technology we are, the more tenuously we’re linked to community. People find themselves overwhelmed with so many choices and possibilities that they struggle to focus on any one. “In the new communications culture, interruption is not experienced as interruption but as another connection” (p. 37). But such connections through technology are thin and fluid; they have nothing of the embodied presence or richness of face-to-face conversation.

The most heartbreaking stories in Turkle’s book are about children frustrated by their parents constantly turning away toward their devices. The common narrative that children are the ones lost behind devices begins, for Turkle, with parents’ own behavior. Children find themselves competing with devices for their parents’ attention and generally lose, so they turn toward devices themselves.

Along the way, a whole generation seems to be losing the capacity to navigate conversations of depth. Relationships are formed and broken off by text message. Employers describe employees who want to communicate with colleagues or clients by email at any cost rather than pick up the phone or talk in person. The kinds of solitary moments that can be so generative for creativity and imagination (as well as self-reflection) are being replaced with an endless checking of devices. Our brains reward us with a high when we do so, but the connections often never really land anywhere.

Turkle writes about classrooms, workplaces, and homes. But the chapter that begs to be written is about spirituality—about spaces and practices of faith and worship. At the heart of all the world’s great faith traditions is attentiveness and presence—to God, to ourselves, to one another, to the world. Whether through prayer or meditation, being still is central to experiencing the sacred.

But in the culture we find ourselves in today, such deep, sustained attention to anything or anyone seems a vanishing proposition. We are losing the habits that make it possible. What does prayer look like in a world of “continuous partial attention” (in the words of technology scholar Linda Stone)? If we can hardly hold a conversation with a friend, colleague, or partner anymore, how can we sustain one with God?

Jonathan Franzen has a remarkable capacity for capturing (and critiquing) contemporary American culture. His last novel, Freedom (much of which is set in my current city, St. Paul) probed how late modernity’s promise of liberation so often ends up in chaos, confusion, and captivity. When I learned that Franzen had moved to the town where I grew up, Santa Cruz, California, I eagerly awaited his next novel. Released this fall, Purity offers a picture of a world that so many in western cultures have come to inhabit—a world devoid of any sacred horizon for meaning, identity, and purpose.

Purity focuses on a young woman, “Pip” (short for Purity, but also with echoes of Dickens’ Great Expectations), whose mother lives as a recluse in a cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains, pursuing a life of spiritual seeking that never seems to land anywhere. (Let me assure you this is not at all uncommon there.) Like other millennials, Pip must navigate the relational, economic, and environmental chaos left by the Baby Boomer generation. This comes in the form not only of her mother and father but also of a Julian Assange-like character, Andreas Wolf, who uses the Internet to air dirty corporate and governmental secrets, all in the name of a kind of righteous and “pure” transparency, even as he hides a deep secret in his own past.

For Andreas Wolf, who grew up in communist East Berlin, the age of the Internet and social media is not unlike the totalitarianism of his youth. With all its promise of “revolutions,” “transcendence,” and “a new epoch for humanity” it is at the end of the day manipulative, controlling, and spiritually hollow. The characters in this novel are all navigating the world primarily by a mix of emotions and idealism, which they all know on some level (or come to discover) can’t sustain human reality or human flourishing. But there is no alternative. Wolf is haunted by his past and can find no absolution; Pip’s parents have no grounds to be reconciled; there is no possibility of real healing or restoration in this world. “Purity”—being cleansed, reborn, renewed—like true freedom, is ultimately elusive.

The sociologist Douglas Porpora says in his book Landscapes of the Soul that in American life today, the cosmos of Judaism and Christianity has been largely abandoned without replacement. Popular morality tells us what we shouldn’t do but little about what our lives should be oriented toward. There is no greater framework within which to shape human life toward deep and enduring commitments. Instead, all is fluidity and self-actualization (even as the self is understood to be no dependable and enduring thing).

We live in a culture that by forsaking the deeper narratives and structures that once formed it has become thinned to the point of despair. Without a larger story than the one we individually invent, without commitments and practices for relationships that can endure past fleeting feelings, human life and community disintegrate. Novels like Franzen’s make clear the need and opportunity for an alternative story and an alternative community, even as they refrain from offering one. The sad thing is that many churches have in various ways embraced this contemporary ethos or lost the capacity to speak meaningfully into it. Church, like religion generally, is almost completely absent from Franzen’s novel, as it is from so many American lives today.

Next week, the triennial General Convention of The Episcopal Church will meet in Salt Lake City. Among the primary agenda items is a series of proposals for restructuring the denomination. Episcopalians are hardly alone in this work—the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has restructured itself about every five years since it was formed in 1988; United Methodists will no doubt try again to restructure in 2016 after their last attempt ran aground. Such restructuring is needed, but fundamentally insufficient. Here’s why.

In an important new book, Structured for Mission: Renewing the Culture of the Church (IVP, July 2015) Alan Roxburgh writes: “Denominations, despite their best theological statements and confessions, have lost touch with the massive culture shifts reshaping Western societies. Such shifts are not primarily about structures; they’re about narratives.” 

Against those who would romantically suggest we abandon structure and somehow start over, Roxburgh points out that structures and institutions are necessary ways in which human life and community are embodied. Structures reflect culture, and at the heart of culture is story. The primary issue for the “Eurotribal” denominations (inheritors of the European state and ethnic churches) is not in fact structural reform; it is recognizing and revisiting the deeper stories that are expressed in structure and practice.

Roxburgh explains that for the Eurotribal Protestant denominations, the legitimating narrative around which they formed themselves for much of the 20^th century was the corporation. Denominations embraced a cultural story that had powerful economic, social, and political legitimacy at the time by organizing themselves in franchise congregations connected by regional hubs (e.g., dioceses, presbyteries, synods), all resourced and regulated by experts at a central national office. The denominational headquarters was the primary hub in a hub-and-spoke system in which local churches were the end users. This all reflected 20^th century models of national or multinational industrial corporations.

This corporate bureaucratic and regulatory structure is based on using rationalized efficiency, professional management, hierarchy, and standardization to deliver branded religious goods and services uniformly across the system. It is deeply wedded to the logic of modernity, with experts and denominational assemblies issuing system-wide policies and procedures to ensure compliance. Local churches and especially their lay members are recipients or consumers who underwrite the whole enterprise with voluntary offerings.

This whole system has been rapidly disintegrating since the late 1960s because the story that underpins it has lost its legitimacy. Neighbors aren’t interested in joining a church like they once were. Centralized experts don’t know the answers to the challenges facing local churches. The institutional trust and loyalty upon which the whole business model rests has dramatically eroded. Reducing the church to a vendor of religious goods and services not only betrays its identity and purpose; it can’t compete against more enticing consumer alternatives today. To the extent to which denominational identity was based on this story, the denomination faces an identity crisis.

The typical response by denominations has not been to question the legitimating narratives that shape their current life, but rather to try yet another strategy (e.g., congregational revitalization programs from the national office), reorganize/restructure, apply new language to old roles (adding the word “missional” or “missioner” to leaders’ titles), and rewrite formal policies and procedures. Needless to say, none of this will address the deeper identity crisis.

The Task Force for Reimagining the Episcopal Church (TREC), on which I served, was a classic instance of a denominational response—unanimously created to present proposals for restructuring in order to get the church out of its mess. As I have consistently said, restructuring (though necessary) will not save The Episcopal Church. To the extent to which the 2015 General Convention makes its decisions within the language world (paradigm or social imaginary) of the 20^th century corporate regulatory denomination, restructuring proposals will either not pass or be colonized into minor adjustments to the status quo. What many leaders heavily invested in denominational structures, assemblies, and policies don’t seem to realize is how profoundly irrelevant those things have become to what is actually going on with local churches and the broader culture.

The primary work before churches today is about learning and inhabiting a different story than these inherited ones (e.g., the 20^th century corporation or earlier stories of empire and cultural establishment). Roxburgh calls for turning our attention to the “narrative memory of God’s purposes” and creatively reentering our stories and traditions. No one knows yet what kind of structures will be adequate for 21^st century church life; they need to be innovated, largely at the grass roots. No one has a privileged view on what the future church will look like. What does seem certain is a massive amount of continued disruption and disorganization for years to come, even as new forms of Christian community and witness emerge.

The final report of TREC offers an alternative story in its opening pages, drawing from Luke 10:1-12: Follow Jesus together; into the neighborhood; travel lightly. Biblical stories such as this describe a very different posture toward God and the neighborhood than the establishment corporate denomination. They are about going empty handed, in humility and vulnerability, to join neighbors in their daily life and work, sharing God’s peace and healing, and giving witness to an alternative story—God’s reign or kingdom.

Churches need first and foremost to relearn and practice the deeper stories of the kingdom. Insofar as denominational and judicatory structures endure, they should create space for that learning.