It's faithful to believe in the death of the church
are we not in the resurrection business?
‘It’s a lie from the pit of hell’.
This is a quote from the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church - the Most Rev. Sean Rowe, speaking at the Episcopal Parish Network conference in Charlotte last week.
Church decline, he went on to say - as 'a final word, and a final story’ is ‘not the teaching of Jesus’.
This quote got a lot of press - I’ve read it in at least three articles this week, plus I heard it from people I knew who were there at the conference (held in the city near where I live).
Bp. Rowe was answering a question about the decline - and predicted death - of the mainline church.
But he answered a question about the Body of Christ.
I completely agree - with my whole life - that the church itself is not disappearing.
I also believe that the way we do church - the mainline institutional structure - is, in fact, collapsing.
And that it may survive in some form - but it will not look anything like it does today (or more accurately, anything it look liked 50 years ago, which is where our imagination tends to get stuck).
There is danger in conflating the continuation of the church itself with the insistence on a certain expression of it.
The danger I see: we miss where God is actually calling us to death and resurrection.
Not our own re-construction of the church the way we remember it.
Not even our own re-imagination of ministry (which is my work!).
The actual adventure of being part of something that God is re-creating - something we cannot see yet. That is not ours to see yet.
And that if we keep insisting that particular denominations and congregations must live on into the future - and framing that as ‘the church’ - then we may be missing what God is leading us toward.
So how do we walk that line?
How do we move forward faithfully - trying new things, while holding to the tradition - while still having the humility to know that, in the words of Thomas Merton:
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
I ask myself these questions every day.
Part of the re-imagination journey for me has been to create a ‘gym for your soul’.
Technically, this is just a modern branch of it. As far back as the fourth century, Christian monastics have been describing a life of faith as ‘spiritual gymnastics’ - ascesis (ἄσκησις).
We don’t think our way into believing - we practice. We actively take part in life with God.
I see so many parallels between the first century and the 21st - it calls me to lean all the way back to the first Christians to find pathways into the church of the future.
‘The decline is how we frame our next spiritual step forward’.
Bp. Rowe said this in the same conversation at the EPN conference.
I think he’s absolutely right about that.
We can’t let our fear push us into denial - and at the same time, we can’t let it push us into believing that we’re just going to do the same things we’ve always done, and God’s going to miraculously restore us.
I can see three ways to faithfully follow where God is leading us during this spiritually adventurous time…
