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| Word of Life Church (phase two), Flowood, Mississippi, USA. Source. |
In her important commentary on the passing of old-school church culture and what might be replacing it, Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, Diana Butler Bass writes,
...[A]nger is not the only emotion people expess when talking about religion. Many people are just bored. They are bored with church-as-usual, church-as-club, church-as-entertainment, or church-as-work. Many of my friends, faithful churchoers for decades, are dropping out because religion is dull, the purview of folks who never want to change or always want to fight about somebody else's sex life....
In all of the fifty years since I started attending weekly services, this has not been my experience at all; quite the opposite. However, I cheerfully acknowledge that I am a peculiar case—peculiarly unqualified to comment on Diana Butler Bass's assessment.
Before I deal with my disqualifications, I should acknowledge that she backs up her comments with statistical evidence of alienation from established religion, and that the trends she pointed to twelve years ago, when her book was published, have more or less continued along the same lines. (However, "boredom" isn't an explicit category in any of those statistics!)
In my case, I didn't have any significant contact with organized religion until adulthood, and then it was in part a rebellion against my family, coupled with a personal mystical experience that no church could take credit for. I specifically looked for a church that reflected the raw experience of the first Christians—experiencing Jesus personally and forming a community around that experience—and that's how I fell into the lap of the Quakers of Ottawa, Canada.
In my flush of new-convert enthusiasm, I was not there to be entertained, and I had no prior experience of "church-as-usual" or "church-as-club," but simply wanted to hold onto that very basic expectation that we were there to meet with God, and I wanted to be with others who would understand that eagerness. I gradually understood that not everyone at Ottawa Meeting would describe their own participation in quite the same way, but their kindness and hospitality, and the weekly adventure of unprogrammed worship, gave me a precious start, and that powerful confirmation of my hopes has sustained me to this day.
My experiences of Friends in Ottawa Meeting, and Boston (Beacon Hill Meeting), and Charlottesville, and later in Moscow Friends Meeting, all involved these meetings' unprogrammed worship format, waiting in silence for God to make the first move. Meeting for worship always had that sense of adventure. (The time when an angry visitor burst into our meeting in Moscow and accused us of being a "sect" was probably more adventure than I had bargained for, but ultimately that was a wonderful and instructive incident.) However, I've spent most of my five decades among Friends in meetings and churches that don't use a strictly unprogrammed format. Most of them have simple forms of programming—sermons, music, and so on—along with a time set aside for direct listening for God. Those planned elements may sometimes seem full of inspiration, and at other times seem fairly rote and predictable, but among people who love being together and praying for each other, that programming doesn't seem to get in the way at all. I'm still there to meet with God in the company with others who have a similar hope and a similar need. Boredom is not an issue.
Practically all my Christian experience is among Friends, but I have no doubt that other traditions have equivalent elements that express God's invitation and grace. However, all of our religious institutions—Friends and others—have a whole other reality that may relate more directly to the alienation that Bass describes. What should I call it?—our organizational overhead? Drag? In my first years among Friends, I didn't have to worry about any of that; the arrangements had already been made, and I was carried along by the community's established patterns. Eventually it dawned on me that the sweet adventure of worship, the intimacy of asking for prayer, the insights of a timely sermon, and all the other things that are best experienced together, in community, inevitably require a tedious logistical checklist, and consequently a need for people to decide how to do those tasks in ways that are consistent with our values and priorities. Even a modest house church has to choose times to meet, some minimal plan for leadership and pastoral care, and ways to get the word out.
And as soon as decisions need to be made, we need trustworthy processes to discern the community's will rather than majority rule or the sway of individual personalities. And here's where we can see the increasing awkwardnesses of those imperatives amidst the competing claims on our time from the world around us. For many of us, maybe it's not the experience of community that is boring, but all the tasks that hosting the community requires, from facilities and staff and committees all the way to the most basic task: naming the times and places (and online channels?) we might meet.
Slowly but surely, voluntarily or involuntarily, willingness to undertake those tasks is being whittled away. For many years, I was a creature of that "overhead"—mostly as a denominational worker or committee member (Friends World Committee, Right Sharing of World Resources, Friends United Meeting, five yearly meetings, several ecumenical organizations, pastor, missionary), but those overhead structures seem to be increasingly regarded as nice (maybe) but optional. Shrinking congregations find that old patterns of staffing, volunteering, and keeping up their facilities, aren't sustainable.
Is there a positive way to describe these realities? I'd love to hear from you. How do we learn to be light enough on our feet to continue providing that precious access to the adventures and consolations of meeting with God ... together?
And: are there ways that the "overhead" structures and associations, and their international and cross-cultural partnerships, can serve that learning process?
Related:
The church is like ... an incubator, laboratory, observatory.
The church is like ... a lifeboat, portico, garden.
One final word: We Christians are not called to meet together simply to enjoy those adventures and consolations of the devotional life for ourselves. Our faith's credibility, and the vulnerable people we care about, are under direct attack from white Christian nationalists and others claiming the Name of the Prince of Peace for their aggression. This is not the time to get too casual about our priorities, or to complain about boredom. We need to consult, discern, and act.
Dmitry Biriukov: Why sobornost' (an aspect of Eastern Orthodox spirituality that reminds some of us of Quakers' "Gospel Order") is a double-edged sword.
Micah Bales: God asks Elijah at Mount Horeb, "Why are you here?" Good question.
Here's an interesting idea for a study Bible ... The NIV Upside-Down Kingdom Study Bible. Have you seen a copy? (Maybe not; Amazon says it is being published September 10. Take a look at the list of contributors.)
Today I visited Nancy Thomas's Life in an Old Growth Forest blog, one of my favorites. I had planned to choose a post to link here, but I found too many good ones to make a choice. My recommendation: go to the blog and just keep scrolling!
In the meantime, we have not forgotten Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore.
Italian blues band: the Blueaces, "Dust My Broom"...
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