Blogotional: Seize The Moment

Thursday, February 05, 2009

Seize The Moment

iMonk recently reprinted a post he did earlier on mainline churches:

Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Disciples of Christ…do you know what I mean? We’re having a moment, and it’s slipping right by.

What moment?

We’re having a moment when thousands of evangelicals are getting a bellyful of the shallow, traditionless, grown up youth group religion that’s taken over their pastor’s head and is eating up their churches.

It’s a moment when people are asking if they want to hear praise bands when they are 70…or if they will even be allowed in the building when they are 70. It’s a moment when the avalanche of contemporary worship choruses has turned into one long indistinquishable commercial buzz. It’s a moment when K-Love is determining what we sing in church and that’s not a good thing.

It’s a moment when some people are wondering if their children will ever know the hymns they knew or will ever actually hold a Bible in their hand at church again. It’s a moment when a lot of people are pretty certain if they hear the words “new,” “purpose” or “seeker” one more time, they may appear on the evening news for an episode of “church rage.”

The conclusion is startling:

You need to communicate, and you need to go back to your roots. It’s frustratingly ironic to know that when many of us are longing for a church that has the things we cannot find in evangelicalism, you have so many of those very things every Sunday. But what you don’t have is the willingness to come back to the center of evangelicalism where people who love the Bible and take it seriously can find a home with you.

You’ve made it clear that you want those on the left. And evangelicals have made it clear that they are not going to accommodate those who want tradition. We’re having a moment here, if you can stop and see it, who knows what could happen? Will your own churches divide in order to meet evangelicals on the road? Or will the moment go by, a “might have been,” that never was to be?

The moment will come and it will go. Right now, the moment is upon all of us.

The analysis is fairly right on. The first thing I note is that mainlines that are surviving, some even thriving, are doing so because they have largely jettisoned the past and embraced the forms (or lack thereof) of Evangelicalism. Which means that in purely marketing terms, I think that iMonk has identified what is at best here a niche market. There are indeed people searching for what he discusses, I am certainly one of them, but I am not sure there are that many of such people - certainly not enough to "save" the mainlines.

All this made me wonder if pointing out that there were congregants to be had was the right way to appeal to any church. Is it really the correct way to appeal to the mainlines to say, "Gee if only you were more conservative, your membership might stop dwindling," or to Evangelicals, "If you were only more liturgical and sacramental, your membership might be less of a revolving door."

The church it seems to me is an institution, ordained by God, to represent Him in this world - that's it - that's all. Therefore the only question to which the church should address itself is "How well are we representing God Almighty?" Which means that if we want more conservatism in the mainlines we need to demonstrate that conservatism is more representative of God. Likewise, if we want more liturgy and sacrament in the Evangelicals, we need to demonstrate the value of liturgy and sacrament to God.

It concerns me when we reach out to "baser" motives, even to reach an admirable end. The glory of the New Testament is not that we act differently, but that we are changed. We are transformed into different people, with better motives and resulting actions. The appeal directly to action reduces the glory of Christianity to more theological complex Judaism.

What was it Jesus said?