1 Kings 17:8-24; Luke 7:11-17
June 6, 2010
I am surely not the first to imagine the church being connected to one of those machines in the hospital that measure your vital signs. I think it’s natural to wonder how we’re doing. What is our heart rate, blood pressure, how regular or irregular is our heart beat. Are we alive and well, or is the line flat, the beeps long since silenced?
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard or read the phrase, “the church must change or die.” People say or write this in response to perceived problems with organized religion today – especially mainline churches that are thought to be “stuck in the past.” They believe the answer to declining church membership is for churches to change to “match the times,” to be “be more relevant,” and to be more appealing to people who don’t already come to church. But every time I hear it, it raises more questions for me than it answers. To being with, I have questions about what is meant by “church,” “change,” and “death,” in this phrase, and ultimately what does a living church look like to those who believe the church is on its way out?
“Church” in this phrase often means a particular kind of church. Almost invariably, they begin by quoting statistics on declining church membership in mainline denominations over the past 2 or 3 decades. All of these denominations are hemorrhaging members, they point out. Then, after establishing the decline, the author or speaker goes on to describe the churches within the denominations they think are guilty of causing this decline; In other words, the churches that must change or die. They are generally small churches that used to be bigger. And you can spot them because they still use organs and music from the hymnals. Their worship services are largely filled with words. They do archaic things like observe the liturgical calendar, pass an offering plate, say old creeds and prayers – all things, they argue, that alienate the young, un-churched folks out there that are needed to grow the church…to keep it from dying. So that’s what is meant by “church”…basically, us .
Next what is meant by “change”? The problem with trying to figure out what people mean by “change” is that it’s pretty amorphous. We have to ask, change what? Of course, the “what” depends on who is quoting this phrase, and it usually has to do with something they find particularly offensive, hurtful, or meaningless. If they don’t like a church then, they argue, others won’t and so the church will die. So “change” to these folks means “change your church to make it more appealing to people like me”. Stop observing the liturgical calendar, stop passing the offering plate, stop saying prayers and creeds, stop preaching from a manuscript, stop using old hymns. Change seems to mean throw out the old and embrace the things that are attracting people to other activities in the world – technology, coffee, music, high quality entertainment, etc.
Finally, it seems the definitions for death and life are pretty simple: Death means shrinking church membership, life means more people in the pews.
There is truth in the notion that change is necessary for life. Things do die, or at least stagnate, if newness is not a part of it. But I want to rethink church, change, life and death in light of our passages this morning. I think we need new definitions of these things, I think if we want to know our vital signs, we should look at the bible and how it defines life and death and what kind of change is needed.
Both passages are weighted with death. To begin with, there are two dead bodies. But that’s not all. There’s spiritual death and there is death that is caused by the dominant systems of that day. We can see someone spiritually dead in the widow Elijah visits. She had completely resigned – her fate was sealed, she thought. When Elijah finds her, she is ready to use up the very last of what they have and then, she assumes, with nothing left, she and her son will die. Essentially because she believed so strongly in the principles of scarcity, the idea that there wasn’t enough for her and her family, she was already dead to the world.
Then there’s death that is brought about by an entire system, an entire culture that fosters death for certain segments of society. Our two widows did not count as people at that time. If there was no male to care for her, she was left to her destitution, with no way to support herself economically. That’s how the system worked – that was the reality beyond their control. For these two women, their sons were their only hope for making it in their culture. Now their sons are dead. Their deaths cannot be far behind their sons’.
That is the death with which Jesus and Elijah are concerned, not the death of the institutions around them. It’s the loss of human life, spiritual wholeness, and death fostered by oppressive systems. And if this is death then life is a reversal of these different aspects of death. Life is a world of abundance of resources, not scarcity. When the widow trusted Elijah and gave over her last food, there was more than enough to go around! Life is an alternative system that cares for the widow – for the weak ones, the ones beaten down by systems they can’t control. It is care for those who are usually ignored. Life is resurrection of people and systems that restore relationships of safety, nurture and economic sustainability.
With life and death redefined not in terms of church membership but the life Jesus and Elijah bring, we can look back at how churches must change in order to be a part of this life. And I think we come out with a different understanding of what a living church looks like than those that define it in terms of numbers.
Many, if not all, mainline denominations – certainly ours included – are trying to reverse the decline in membership. They see the decline as a sign that death is on its way, and so life must be signified by the number of members each church has. Or by the number of youth, or by worship attendance. This is what defines, they think, a vital church. And then, they give lots of things a church can do to increase membership, youth participation and worship attendance.
Yes, mainline Protestantism is losing members, but I have problems with declining membership being the definition of death and the only catalyst for change. The “goal” of church is not gaining more members. The “goal” is to live out God’s reign in our lives here and now. That may attract throngs of people, or it may be completing uninteresting to most people. Even if it scares people away, a church must do what they can to live out God’s call to care for the widow and bring new life in places of death. Church membership is not the criteria we use to judge the “life” of the church.
Worship attendance and total membership measure nothing other than how many people have joined and how many people come to worship. They are numbers. I think both of those numbers can be very high in churches that are dying – and both can be low in churches that are alive. As one person put it, “we count because counting is easy, not because it tells us what we need to know.”
The much more compelling measurement in vital churches is the percentage of active participants (members and regular “friends”) engaged in some form of ministry each week. How many people are served and how many lives are touched both within and outside the boundaries of the congregation?
In the same way, the number of children, youth and young adults in worship and Sunday school is just a number. There can be hundreds of youth, but we may know nothing of the vitality of their faith or the church that is trying to shape their faith. Is the church doing a good job not only getting them in the door, but also helping them grow into people that go out and bring new life into the death-filled places in the world? And even if a church has only a few young people, are they not alive if they are touching the lives of dying children in the world: working for peace, better schools, safer streets, better health care – in short, creating systems that bring life. Change so often means making the church more appealing, a place kids will feel comfortable and entertained. If that’s all the church changes, it is doubtful the life Elijah and Jesus brought will define that church.
Missing from these discussions about growth is an evaluation of what the people of the church are doing in the world and how much that work reflects the life Jesus lived. For example, how much of the church’s budget goes to benevolence verse institutional maintenance or programs meant to attract members? How many people in the community know the church as a place they can count on when they are at the end of their rope? How loud is a church’s voice when it comes to the death of the environment, the senseless death through war, and systems that keep people down, poor, desperate and forgotten? Those are good vital signs. Those will give us a sense of whether a church is dying or alive and well.
Life is what we give people. It’s not whether we are alive as a church – as an institution – as measured by growth in numbers. It’s whether we offer life to those who most need it. Things must change in the church if that work is in decline, not necessarily if their membership is in decline. But we should only change those things that will lead to an increase in life-giving ministry when we leave this place on Sunday, not the things we think will “attract” more people for the sake of just getting them through our doors.
So given the lack of a machine capable of reading our vital signs here at First Pres, how do we think our church doing? Well, I can say with great confidence, we are not on life support. I have no doubt about that. We give away something like 22% of what we bring in. We can always do better. I suppose the goal is not just 20 or 30 percent, but rather spending more on mission than salaries and building maintenance put together. Obviously we have a long ways to go with that, but the percentage has been increasing every year since I’ve been here, and that’s been true for long before I got here as well. I know it has been on a steady trajectory from the time we actually received mission money from the denomination until now. That is life – that is vitality, because it contributes not just to the ongoing life of the institution, but to life in this world as well.
I also think about how many people in our congregation – friends and members alike – touch lives, change lives, and work to change the world. Can we do better? Of course. But, one of our strengths as a church, I believe, is how we care for those in need in our congregation and in our community. Those who are ill, those who are dying, those who are in need of food money to make it through the month, those who need rides, those who need regular visits as reminders that they are a part of this community. That is one of our strengths! A big one. And in a fractured world where people are increasingly left to their own devices, increasingly left without community support and family close by, like Elijah’s visit to the widow who had been failed by her community, that is counter-cultural. That is powerful, life giving and a sign of vitality. We care for the modern day equivalent of the widow.
I think there are many more vital signs that show us we are alive and well here. We’re small, we still believe in the wisdom and transformative power of tradition and liturgies like communion, and we do things radically different in here than in the world which so often caters to people’s desires only to sell them something. We may look to others like a dying church in a dying denomination. But it’s not the denomination’s life or even our life as an institution that really matters. If people think we’re dying, they are misreading our vital signs.
We can do better; we can do more; there’s room for improvement. And we should think seriously about things we can change in order to do better at bringing life not to our institution, but to the world. It’s true that we must continue to change or die. But far more importantly, we must change and grow so we can bring more life into this dying world. Amen.
