Change? So what’s new?
It has become a cliché to say that we are living
in a time of great change. Everybody knows things are changing.
“Christianity must change or die!” is the recent battle cry of the
patron saint of post-Christian liberalism, John Shelby Spong. And
the rhetoric of change is heard in almost every congregation I know.
I have represented my Presbytery on several Search Committees at
churches that are seeking a new minister. “We simply have to
change if we want to get the young people back and have a future,”
people say. And they say it with sincerity. The mantra of change is
pretty much constant.
The problem is that saying the
church needs to change and understanding how change actually happens are
two entirely different things. One congregation I know was adamant
that they needed to “do things differently.” They were shrinking and
aging and something had to change. They called a minister known for
experimental worship and an full-steam-ahead attitude who promised
to shake things up. Within months, his approach had collided with
the generations-old entrenched power structures of the congregation
and his ministry ended in bitterness and recrimination.
Different kinds of change
Another cliché is that “The
only thing that is constant is change,” and there is a plenty of
truth in this as well. There has never been a time in human history
when things have not changed. What varies is the type of change.
There is a difference between change which
happens all the time and transition, those cataclysmic times when
the foundations are shaken and a new world comes into being.[1] Western
culture is emerging from a 300-year-long period of tremendous
stability in which the basic assumptions, values and structures of
society remained relatively constant and predictable. Not that
things didn’t change. Perhaps no period in human history has seen as
much social and technological change as the 19th and
20th centuries.
But it was change that was manageable and predictable. Alan Roxburgh
describes change in this period as “evolutionary” and
“developmental”. This means that change tended to occur in gradual
and incremental steps, and change tended to be about “improvements
to already existing systems and practices.”[2] Take
the basic structure of family life as an example. The pre-modern,
extended family went into decline with the Industrial Revolution and
the shift from a primarily rural to an urban-centred economy. But
for at least 200 years, most people followed a fairly predictable
pattern: childhood education or training, courtship, life-long
marriage and the procreation and raising of children – the so-called
“nuclear family.” This pattern remained stable for the vast majority
of people until the 1980s. Since then, however, it has been replaced
by a dizzying and quite unpredictable array of family
configurations.
Human beings tend to respond to change within a
framework of stability with “technical” solutions. They cope with by
applying tried and tested techniques to solve problems at hand. The
invention of the automobile, for example, profoundly changed
European and North American society, but it could be argued that the
car is part of a more fundamental transition, beginning with steam
travel, larger cities and the creation of suburbs, from a stable to
a transient culture. Adaptation to the invention of the automobile
has largely centred around the technical challenges of building the
infrastructure of roads, filling stations, repair facilities and
bodies of law that would make the whole system work safely and
efficiently.
We are transitioning from a period of
incremental, developmental, evolutionary change into a time of what
Roxburgh calls “discontinuous change” in which the old rules no
longer apply and the known techniques no longer work. This has been
a profoundly disorienting experience for those trained to work in
the old context. Countless people who were trained to work
effectively and productively in the old economy find that they do
not have the necessary skills to cope with what is happening around
them. Living as I do in a community extremely dependant on the car
industry, I see first hand the impact this has on people’s lives.
Many auto workers are highly skilled, but the jobs for which they
are suited are disappearing.
Nowhere has the pathos of discontinuous change
been seen as greatly in North America as it has in the church. Most
mainline Protestant congregations in Canada are at least forty or
fifty years old. They were born into that world of predictability –
of closed and quiet Sundays, of schools and governments that
reinforced the Christian story, of social relationships rooted in
the nuclear family and lifelong institutional loyalty. Most United
Church clergy are at least 50 years old and they were trained to
work in churches where the focus of community life was the Sunday
morning church service with attendant Sunday School, youth and
mid-week programmes. These churches and their leaders continue to do
things very well, but we live in a culture that is largely
indifferent to them as mediators of significance, meaning, hope and
belonging.
It is not simply that the world is changing. It
is that the culture of which our churches are a part has become a
moving target -- we do not know where it’s going to move next. For
example, most of us took for granted that even if younger people did
not attend church regularly, the door to the church would remain
open because they eventually would seek out the church for rites of
passage like weddings. Indeed, as recently as 2004, sociologist
Reginald Bibby offered this as a piece of encouraging good news to
the churches. According to his research, 87% of Canadian teenagers
anticipated turning to the church when they wanted to get married.[3] This
may be true statistically, but anecdotally many congregations are
living a different reality. Requests for weddings have dropped off
steeply as people choose the winery, golf club, hotel, wedding
chapel, cruise ship or beach in Cuba as the location for their
special day.[4] Not
many of us saw this coming fifteen years ago.
The church needs to do more than simply recognize
that the world has changed and we need to change along with it. Our
analysis must penetrate to a deeper level. We must develop the
ability to deal with a kind of change that is qualitatively
different from what we have faced before; and learn a new set of
skills and competencies. The church’s crisis is due, in part, to our
persistence in trying to respond to what’s happening with
structures, habits, techniques and assumptions that don’t work any
more.
A Case Study
A good case study to illustrate this is the
United Church of Canada’s recent proposal to conduct a five year
financial campaign to raise up to $200 million in pledges and gifts
for the work of the church. The motivation for this campaign is
pretty straight forward. The denomination has been under intense
financial pressure as annual givings to the Mission & Service Fund
have remained stagnant at $30 million for the past two decades. In
2008, the General Council Office of the United Church announced
draconian cuts in staff and curtailment of programs in an attempt to
get the church’s financial house in order. The United Church has had
to virtually abandon long-standing commitments to social justice,
overseas grants, resource production and entire areas of ministry.
It is not alone. Mainline Protestant denominations across North
America are facing a similar crisis. Something very widespread and
systemic is going on.
As part of the church’s due diligence prior to
launching such an ambitious initiative, the General Council did what
all organizations do these days – they hired a consultant. KMA
Consultants of Toronto, a firm specializing in non-profit
organizations, was asked to do a comprehensive study to determine
whether or not a $150 – 200 million campaign was feasible. The
consultants worked with the steering commitment charged with
planning the campaign, conducted 54 interviews with various
stakeholders, convened seven discussion groups, and mailed a survey
to 4349 ministry personnel, receiving 1330 responses (31%). (The
consultants’ report can be found at www.united-church.ca/files/funding/campaign_planning.pdf.)
The conclusion of the consultants’ report was not
encouraging. In their opinion, “the church is not positioned to
mount a significant financial campaign, nor are congregations ready
to participate.” The main reasons for this conclusion were four:
-
“a lack of specificity about how proposed
funds would be spent …
-
doubt that spending
funds in the manner proposed would have a beneficial impact….
-
a sense of disconnection
between congregations and General Council; and:
-
skepticism
about the capacity of the church’s structures at every level to
generate a clear, compelling, and unifying vision for the
future. (This was frequently described in terms of a lack of
leadership throughout the church.)” [p.
2]
The underlying implication of these observations
is that if they could be addressed effectively; in other words, if concrete
specific plans for the funds could be formulated, if the
benefits of spending the funds could be demonstrated, if the
gap between congregations and General Council could be bridged, and if a
clear compelling and unifying vision could be generated – then the
campaign might be a success.
Responses from the interviews and discussion
groups make for very interesting reading. Even though one of the
criticisms of the proposal was that there was no clear plan for what
to do with money raised, people had pretty definite ideas about what
they thought ought to happen. While the impetus and leadership for
the campaign would come from the national church, those interviewed
clearly expected that the money should be spent locally..
“In the opinion of those consulted a campaign
should promote these ideas:
-
A national campaign
would free up clergy and elders from fund raising, and
congregations from focusing so much on balanced budgets…
-
Funds from a campaign
would allow congregations to focus on mission… [p. 7]
Later in the report, we find this opinion
expressed:
For people to give in an unusual way... the
campaign must support initiatives that:
-
seem to arise from a new
vision for leadership and ministry;
-
are heavily weighted
towards local ministry, local vision and local expenditures.
[p.11]
The basic inner contradiction in all of this is
that while people recognize the need for systemic change before such
a campaign could be launched, they continue to think in old
categories. This is a good example of organizational behaviour in
what Roxburgh calls a “reactive zone” where people “respond to the
changing environment by working harder to make their dominant
habits, programs and actions effective.”[5]
Both the proponents and many of the critics of
the financial campaign are operating out of the same paradigm in
which the national church casts a vision and local churches and
individuals raise the money to support it. At this juncture in the
church’s history however, we do not need a campaign seems to support
existing structures but an awakening of ecclesial imagination that
moves the church beyond models of community that have served it well
for many years but which are less and less able to speak to the
world in which we now live.
A Missional Perspective
I would like to look at the financial campaign
proposal and consultant’s report from the perspective of the
missional church. The missional church movement grew out of the
thought and work of Bishop Lesslie Newbigin who served as a
missionary in India for over forty years. Newbigin was a leader of
the 20th century
missionary movement in which churches in the west sent missionaries
to evangelize and nurture Christian communities in Africa, Asia and
Latin America. He was instrumental in the ecumenical movement that
led to the formation of the Church of South India.
When he retired, Newbigin returned to his native
England and was astonished to discover that the “Christian society”
he had left in the 1940s had pretty much vanished. Within two
generations, Britain had ceased to be a “Christian nation.” Even
though the vestiges of Christian institutions remained, the Gospel
was largely unknown and unheard.Newbigin came to the conclusion that
if churches were to play any meaningful role in British society,
they would have to begin to see their own culture as a mission
field.
Newbigin asked the question, “What would it mean
for the Christian church to have a missionary encounter with modern
Western culture?” One of his fundamental convictions was that the
church’s mission is God’s mission. The purpose of the church’s
mission is not to benefit the church and its members but to bring
people into an encounter with the God who is made known in Jesus
Christ. Mission, Newbigin argued, “is not an action of ours, but the
presence of a new reality, the presence of the Spirit of God in
power.”[6] Witnessing
to this presence and power in the post-Christian west required an
entirely different impetus and imagination than had been required
when the church swam in the friendly waters of a Christian culture.
The work of Lesslie Newbigin was appropriated by
a number of people in North America, leading to the formation in the
1980s and 1990s of a loosely-defined “missional church” movement.
One vehicle for developing a missional theology of the church was
the “Gospel and Our Culture Network” (GOCN), centred in Western
Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, but with participants
sacttered throughout North America. In my view, the most persuasive
proponent of the missional church on this continent for the last two
decades has been Alan Roxburgh. Roxburgh has persistently returned
to the basic question of how to create and sustain a missional
church in the West. His writings and speaking show how this
fundamental question has evolved and matured over a twenty-five year
period. Roxburgh now works through an organization called Allelon.
Some involved in the missional church movement sensed that it was
too bound up with academic and theoretical questions and had not
grappled with the practicalities of forming missional communities.
Allelon – Greek for “one another” – works to nurture and equip
missional leaders to work through existing church communities and
structures to foster transformation. (See www.allelon.org.) Recently,
I attended a course led by Roxburgh on “Mission-Shaped Structures”
in Hamilton, Ontario. What follows draws heavily on the readings,
sessions and conversations that took place in that course.
In an earlier article reprinted in Theological
Digest & Outlook, Alan
Roxburgh identified four characteristics of the missional church.[7] First,
it recognizes that Western society is a mission field requiring the
church to adopt radically different forms of community life and
ministry. “We need to fundamentally rethink the frameworks and
paradigms that have shaped the church over the last half-century.”
Second, the missional church recognizes that its task is defined by
the missio dei – by
God’s mission. North American churches have become very inward
turning and preoccupied with questions of institutional survival.
The church’s story, Roxburgh argues, “is no longer about God and
what God is up to in the world; it is about how God serves and meets
human need.” In a culture where all persons are defined as
consumers, God has become “the spiritual food court for the
personal, private, inner needs of expressive individuals.” This
framework of values and assumptions needs to be challenged at the
deepest level by the Gospel. Third, the missional church is
concerned with the basic nature and purpose of the church. The
church is a community called and set apart to be a public sign,
witness, foretaste and instrument of God’s work in creation. The
church exists for the sake of the world, not for the sake of the
personal needs of its members, present or potential. Therefore, the
church’s basic task cannot be defined as one primarily of effective
marketing. Fourth, the church is a “contrast society” gathered
around beliefs and practices that form an alternative way of life.
This puts the church, by definition, into a situation of counter
cultural liminality vis a vis reigning cultural norms.
As Roxburgh’s thought has continued to develop,
he has emphasized another characteristic of the missional church: it
is environmentally and culturally sensitive. This is another way of
saying that churches must continually be responsive to their
contexts. One size never fits all and universal solutions cannot
work. Local churches cannot simply be duplications of one central
overarching “ethos.” Roxburgh insists that the church needs to
re-discover its roots in the neighbourhoods where people actually
live. The church will be effective in mission when Christians gather
with other believers who live in their areas and together they learn
the practices of the Christian life for the sake of the world.
Churches in the 20th century
were very good at what they did. Roxburgh suggests that the
denominational structures of the last century were built on the
model of the vertically integrated corporation, pioneered by Henry
Ford for the mass production of automobiles. At the top of such
organizations was a head quarters which created the culture, cast
the vision and formulated the strategies that made the corporation
work. Below was the
design and production level which turned out the actual product. And
below that, at the “grass roots”, so to speak, was a vast network of
local branches known as dealerships which marketed and sold the
cars. These branches produced a steady flow of cash upwards through
the organization to the top level, feeding and fuelling the entire
system. After the Second World War, large denominations began to
copy this organizational structure, creating national headquarters,
mid-level judicatories, and an equally vast network of local
“branches” (congregations) which “marketed” and “sold” the “product”
(religious goods and services) to the public at large.[8] Like
car dealerships, congregations also generated the flow of money to
pay for denominational offices, seminaries, overseas missionaries,
publication of resources and all the other things the church needed
to do good work in a Christian culture.
In a stable environment, this model worked
extraordinarily well. But we are in a time of “discontinuous” change
when the old rules no longer apply. Both local car dealerships and
local congregations are being affected by a change in the public
mind and heart. I have heard it said, for example, that the Big
Three North American car manufacturers are suffering multi-billion
dollar losses, not because the Japanese won’t let them export their
vehicles but because they are building cars that people do not want
to buy. Similarly, Protestant churches are in crisis because they
have ceased to be places of significant meaning or belonging for
most people, especially those under 40.[9]
When organizations are faced with overwhelming
change, they acknowledge it, but then tend to default to the known
and fall back on the familiar. In an effort to re-establish
stability, people continue to reach for a set of practices that are
no longer effective. Specifically, according to Roxburgh, “church
systems will spend down their heritage and they will use up the
resources of past generations to maintain their status and place
before they will face the need to change the ways they are
structured and the ways they function.”[10] The
$200 million financial campaign is, I think a perfect illustration
of this. The timing of the proposal is clearly related to an
awareness that the generation of the philanthropically minded who
would identify sufficiently with the United Church to make large
gifts is aging and disappearing. There is a sense that future
generations will have neither the means nor the will to support the
kind of denomination with which most of the church’s leadership have
grown up. The attitude seems to be, “Let’s do this before it’s too
late.”
Undergirding this project seem to be three
fundamental assumptions.
-
The national church ought to
generate a comprehensive vision for the whole church. Even
though there is deep scepticism about the ability of the current
leadership to do so, there is an expectation that if things were
working the way they’re supposed to, this is where the vision
would originate. But this flies in the face of powerful trends
away from all-encompassing, “vertically integrated”
organizations. The disconnect is expressed in the contradictory
desires that the project be driven at a national level (because
local churches are too tired and depleted) but that the flow of
money, essentially, be reversed – from the top down rather than
the bottom up.
-
The purpose of the campaign is to continue
resourcing existing denominational structures. In other words,
if we just have enough money we can fix what’s wrong with the
church. From a missional perspective, this is misguided because
what is ailing the church is not lack of money, it
is lack of imagination. Here’s
an illustration. My Presbytery, like many, has seen a number of
congregations disband in recent years and their assets
liquidated. The Presbytery decided to set up a fund with the
proceeds from these buildings to finance locally initiated,
innovative ministry projects. The vision behind this fund was
that new life would emerge phoenix-like out of the old. However,
there have only been a handful of grant applications and most of
those have been to pay for very conventional projects like
hiring staff to run Sunday Schools or young adult ministries.
The problem isn’t lack of money, it’s lack of energy to generate
fresh experiments in ministry. Clearly, these will not be
forthcoming from today’s congregational systems. The key is not
a nationally mandated vision for the whole church, but the
formation of genuine communities of practicing Christians. But
the key to their effectiveness will not be $200 million.
-
What we’re really faced with is a problem of
effective marketing. If people could just hear “the United
Church story,” they’d respond. The financial campaign proposal
seems to be coming out of the same energy that produced Emerging
Spirit in which the church will spend $10 million to reach out
to a 30 to 45-year-olds who, the market researchers tell us, are
“open” to the message of the United Church. That campaign
included a six-month blitz of saucy magazine ads and a series of
workshops to train congregations about how to welcome the people
when they come. The fatal flaw in the whole Emerging Spirit
enterprise, however, is that it is a technical response to a
systemic change.
Ecclesiology
What kind of ecclesiology lies behind a proposal
like the $200 million campaign? It is clear that the establishment
thinks that being “United Church” means responding positively to
certain positions, causes, convictions or views. United Church
people use inclusive language, for instance. They’re gay positive
and they don’t drink bottled water. They support the Native apology.
They are steadfastly opposed to patriarchy, homophobia and
globalization. And if we can just find the people who share those
convictions and tell them “the United Church story,” the church will
be revitalized.
This is an approach deeply rooted in modernity.
Among its many characteristics, modernity has to do with a drive
towards homogenizing and universalizing and away from the local and
particular. That’s why modernity has produced such powerful
phenomena as the nation state, science and technology and the
vertically integrated corporation. Even the much-touted value of
“inclusivity” is practiced in a modernist system like the United
Church in such a way as to produce conformity rather than true
diversity. By definition, being “inclusive” means embracing the
church’s agenda of just causes. While officially inclusive, the
United Church is, in fact, highly intolerant of genuine dissent,
diversity and non-conformity.[11] Inclusivity,
United Church style, has a remarkable sameness and predictability to
it. The consultant’s report lists a number of comments from
interviewees expressing their confidence in the reputation of the
United Church. This comment is very telling: “Those who decided they
do not like what the United Church of Canada stands for have left.”
In a section titled “Releasing Vision & Passion
for Third Generation Ministry,” specific snapshots of future
ministry are suggested, including the following: “Rural
congregations [could lead]in care for creation, such as through
promotion of environmentally friendly farming practices, or linking
urban folks to locally grown food.” [24] Only someone with an
outdated and romanticized view of rural life could have written such
a statement. It assumes that the country is divided into two kinds
of community – rural and urban – that rural life and farming are
synonymous and that the value of rural communities is in their
potential to conscientize urban people.
Truly local mission
In its last round of cut backs, the General
Council was criticized for abdicating its historic commitment to
social justice and mission. The local congregation was declared to
be “the primary unit of mission” in the church. A missional church
perspective would support such a shift, but expose the
superficiality of what the church is doing. The shift to so-called
“local units of mission” really amounts to attempting to download
what remains of a nationally
mandated agenda onto local congregations. For example, the national
church discourages congregations from launching their own mission
projects not vetted by their own staff person on the grounds that
people can’t be trusted to know what to do. There could scarcely be
a more egregious example of paternalism and condescension. At issue
is whether the church sees itself as primarily about promoting its
own institutional agenda or being humbly and radically open to the missio
dei.
Signs of hope
There is plenty of discouragement in the church
today. As the people of God, we need to discern the signs of hope,
remembering that God’s people have always been a stiff-necked bunch,
and most of what God has accomplished has been done in spite of us,
not because of us.
The missional perspective is helpful in unpacking
what is going on with a proposal like the $200 million campaign. It
provides clarity in the midst of confusion. This campaign is part of
a larger response to the crisis the United Church is facing, and a
classic illustration of how a system behaves when confronted with
discontinuous change. If we could grasp this, it would help us turn
away from recrimination and blaming (another symptom of systemic
crisis), from mistaking effects for causes, and turn towards a more
constructive response.
The missional perspective also opens up space for
hope. What is needed is not another program, policy or technique.
Certainly not more money. What is needed is a re-engagement with the
biblical story in which we would find that the people of God have
been here before. Many times, they have been in the wilderness and
in exile, as we are. But as we return to our larger story – to God’s
story – we will find that those times were precisely the spaces and
places in which God prepared new things.
