Back in 2014, Pew Research Center made it clear that if American religious trends continue, I’ll retire as a priest in a dying Church. But I didn’t need Pew to tell me that. I could see it in the increasingly empty pews and offering plates of the churches I go to.
This is the point where most of us have to resist an urge to pull out the ashes and sackcloth and light our hair on fire. In fact, that’s what I did myself, for the first few years of college. I knew I was committed to a career in the Church. But I felt overwhelmed and baffled by my responsibility to somehow keep progressive Christianity afloat for another couple of generations.
It didn’t take long for me to realize I was sinking under the pressure. So I decided to reexamine my assumptions about church, culture, and my own supposedly secular generation. I did a lot of research and conducted a lot of interviews around the country and spent a lot of time in prayer. And by the time I was done, I wasn’t sinking anymore Instead, I could envision an entirely new, hopeful story about the Church.
Maybe you’ve been noticing fewer young families and young adults in your pews. Perhaps you’re unsure what the Spirit’s vision is for your denomination. Or you’re struggling to make the tithes of a handful of members maintain a church property built for hundreds. In a world where the Church is a place for an increasingly older and smaller population, what is the job description for its leaders? What, if anything, comes next?
I don’t pretend to know the Spirit’s blueprint for the Body of Christ. But I have borne witness to progressive congregations where the Spirit is alive and well. And I have discovered a framework that will help us explore both the challenges and possibilities together. Here are four questions that led me—and I hope will lead you—to a Reformation for our age.
1. Who is the Church for?
Whenever I tell someone that I want to be a pastor, their eyes widen and their eyebrows shoot up. They say something like, “Wow, really? What an interesting choice.” And then, almost immediately, “But why?”
I’ve gotten this reaction from people across generations and religious affiliation. Because most people assume that my generation is responsible for the dying Church. That we are secular, agnostic, atheist, or spiritual-but-not-religious: basically, anything but devoted to institutional religion. By this logic, I’m the needle in the haystack.
But guess what? I’m actually not that different from the rest of my peers. Here’s my fundamental assumption: everyone has spiritual needs. Yep, even Millennials and Gen Zers. All of us need God’s love and grace (which can come in an endless variety of names and forms). So, why aren’t young adults showing up at church?
Here’s the other assumption: everyone exists within a cultural context. Different societies and cultures around the world and across millennia have vastly different physical, economic, political, and social realities. So, it makes sense that God wants to respond to those needs differently in different cultural contexts.
I want to be clear: the fundamentals of belief (whatever those are in your tradition) can stay the same across time and space. But the expression of that belief, the expression of God’s love, must be brought in specific and concrete ways to each societal context.
2. So, is the American Church meeting our society’s spiritual needs?
Umm . . . not really. Hence the decline.
The thing is, we used to be doing a great job—back in my grandparents’ time. That’s why so many people attended church. That’s why so many people from that generation are still faithfully attending. The church was designed to meet their spiritual needs. Their children were well-educated on information that was relevant to their Christian life. Adults could base their entire social lives on church events. For the most part, the sermons and music facilitated a connection with the Spirit and helped them concretely in their everyday lives.
But the needs of many Americans have changed a lot since my grandparents were my age. If I tried to cover all of the political, social, economic, and cultural changes since the 1950s, we’d be here all day. And yet, your average mainline Protestant church still looks pretty similar to how it did 60 years ago.
Which means, naturally, it can’t do a good job of meeting the spiritual needs of 2019.
Millennial blogger Emma Copper says it best, “[Millennials] crave God. When we walk into your churches, we are on tiptoe, dying of thirst, willing to die for a finger-brush with the divine. But there is no God.” At least not in a way that most Millennials know how to connect with. To give one important example, living in intersectional, diverse communities is crucial to many people in my generation. Yet most mainline Protestant churches are overwhelmingly white, straight, cis-gendered, and led by men.
And when the Church isn’t meeting the spiritual needs of the society around it, people will turn to other resources to compensate. Or, like many of my peers in college, they simply won’t find a way for their spiritual needs to be met, and they’ll end up dissatisfied, isolated, and sometimes with mental health challenges. And Christians will end up with a dying Church.
In short, church decline isn’t Millennials’—or any generation’s—fault. If the Church wants to spread the Good News, it has to meet the spiritual needs of the times. And it just can’t do that well, when it more or less looks the same as it did this time last century.
3. Is this the first time Christians have faced a dying church?
Actually, no. In The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle offers a startling historical perspective. It’s one that made me put away the sackcloth and ashes.
This isn’t the first time this upheaval has happened.
To be precise, it’s the fourth. Every 500 years, Tickle notes that the Christian Church holds a “rummage sale.” In other words, it gives itself a substantial update.
About 500 years after Jesus, Constantine transformed Christianity by turning it from a small, persecuted minority to the national religion of Rome. Reformation 1.0.
500 years after that, the Orthodox Church split from Catholicism in the Great Schism of 1069. By the time we get around to Martin Luther in 1517, we’re already on Reformation 3.0. And, 500 years later, it’s time for our semi-millennial update in the 21st Century.
And hey, look, we’re still here! To the people living during each of the past upheavals, Christianity’s future probably seemed at least as scary and chaotic as it does right now. But the Church eventually adjusted to meet the new spiritual needs of the society around it. And in each case, it lived on.
So, deep breath. We can do this, too. But we need to be willing to make a major update.
Recently, my phone has been bugging me to update to iOS 12.2.2. Since I already have iOS 12.2.1, it’ll probably just be small changes. I may not even notice the difference. My mom, on the other hand, hung on to her iPhone 5 for as long as possible. It ran on, like, iOS 7. Needless to say, the 10S model was a huge adjustment.
For the past few decades, ever since pastors started noticing aging congregations and smaller tithes, they’ve been playing around with Reformation 3.2.1 or 3.3. Changing the music once a month to something more contemporary. Buying some new Sunday School curriculum. Giving the website a makeover.
It’s not working. It’s akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. If we keep making little changes, we’re going to sink.
We need a big update. We need to make the leap to Reformation 4.0.
4. So, what does Reformation 4.0 look like?
I’ve spent the last year or so taking a deep dive into places that have already leaned in to the update. Churches that are really, truly thriving. They’re not all the identical. In fact, many of them look really different from each other.
But I was blown away by how many similarities they have under the surface. They’ve got so many things in common. I’ve taken that data and condensed it, so the churches that are still struggling don’t have to work quite so hard to imagine Reformation 4.0. And that’s what this blog is all about—to bring you in on the conversation.
When I announced on Twitter that I was starting this blog, Carol Howard Merritt asked me what my greatest hope is for the Church in 20 years. My answer is this: I hope that the Church in North America has listened to the Spirit’s movement and reformed itself to meet the spiritual needs of the 21st century. And that our “dying Church” has followed the Spirit through to Resurrection.
Because there are HUGE spiritual needs. My generation has massive mental health issues. We’ve got climate crisis to deal with. Religious trauma. Seemingly insurmountable political divides. And right now, without the Church or many good alternatives, most of those spiritual needs are going unmet.
We need Reformation 4.0. Not because polls like Pew say that we have a dying church. But because our society, and Millennials and Gen Z in particular, desperately need an institution that will guide, support, and comfort us. We need to know we belong and that we have something to contribute. We’ve got spiritual needs. And God’s calling the Church to meet them.