In an age of TED Talks and Pod Casts do we need sermons? If our churches are only organized for social justice are we something different than a political group? What form should our churches take that will best do what our world still needs churches to do?
I saw a little video online the other day.
The video was produced by AARP, the American Association for Retired People, so the video featured a story about an older guy. The video began, “He was about to retire and then he found a secret that might save the planet.”
Well that’s a little exaggerated. But here’s what he discovered.
The guy is some kind of marine biologist. I’m a little unclear on the details, but it’s not really relevant for the point I want to make.
The guy discovered that if you break apart a living coral that the separate pieces will grow. He said he broke the coral by accident. After the accident his expectation was that the broken pieces would be stressed and die. Instead, he put the broken pieces into an ocean-like environment, cared for them, and was surprised to see that the broken pieces more than survived; they flourished. They actually grew much faster than normal.
I’m a little surprised people didn’t already know this about coral, so undoubtedly I’m missing something, but again, not relevant.
So apparently, the guy has discovered some sort of super-growth gene response, a finding that has implications for cancer research, for one thing. But being a marine scientist, and a diver, the guy also realized that his discovery was a way to help re-establish coral in places where coral had died off due to rising water temperatures and increased acidity in the oceans due to climate change. Coral die-off is a huge threat to the health of our oceans, and thus the future of life on our planet.
This guy, found funding somewhere (again I’m unclear. Again, not relevant) and he set up a coral growing lab with the intention of re-stocking reefs where the ocean coral had died.
Here’s where a problem occurred to me as I watched this little video. “Wait a second,” I thought. “If you raise the coral in your lab (like a huge greenhouse), and then you introduce the coral into the ocean, but the ocean still has the same increased temperature and acidity that’s killing coral in the first place, then your new coral is going to die just the same as the old coral did. You haven’t solved anything!
And then, almost as soon as the question occurred to me, the video answered my objection.
The lab environment that the scientist created to raise his coral is not the ideal growing environment. He set the water temperature and acidity level to mirror the real environment of the current ocean. And furthermore, the guy has created growing environments that mimic the even more hostile environments likely to come in future oceans as global temperatures continue to rise. He’s watching which of his coral genetic lines are the most suitable for the future ocean, and he’s propagating and re-introducing those corals that have the best chance of surviving in the future.
In other words, this old guy, about to retire (says the AARP), is doing future work. He’s imagining future problems, and working our future solutions. Toward the end of his own lifetime, he’s asking what the world will look like in the future, and asking what we need to do now in order to make that future more livable, for coral, and for all living things that depend on a healthy ocean.
As W.E.B. DuBois said in a very different context, “It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow.” Even for a tomorrow that we may never see ourselves.
We who care about the future of churches must ask ourselves the same question.
Not only, “What should we do to solve the problems of the church today?” But, “What can we do today, to solve the problems that the church will face in the future?”
In any rapidly changing environment, work to solve present problems will be useless. By the time you’ve got the solution the situation will have changed. Either the problem will have resolved itself and doesn’t need your work, or the problem will have done its damage irreversibly. You’ll be too late.
The church today is facing that kind of rapidly changing environment. If we will live up to our responsibility to be good stewards of our faith, we can’t work to solve today’s problems. We’ll be too late. The solutions will no longer be relevant. If it takes a couple of years to create a solution, we have to work on the problem that will exist a couple of years from now. If it takes a couple of decades to create a solution, then we have to start now on creating solutions for the problems that will exist a couple of decades from now.
But, of course, as I often like to say in the first part of a sermon, the problem is much worse than that.
Because our churches are already decades behind.
Our churches today are not struggling with the problems of 2020. Our churches are still struggling with the problems of 2010, or 1970, or even 1950.
Video technology is not new. But most of our churches don’t use it. Our churches don’t regularly project images, which is fairly easy to do. Our sound systems are not up to date, nor are we using the latest technology for hearing assistance. We’re not solving tomorrow’s problems; we’re barely keeping up with today’s problems.
Our grey hymnal is 35 years old, and the hymns in it are decades, even centuries, older than that. That doesn’t mean we should throw it out. But it requires us to ask the question, “Where will new music come from, and how do we regularly include new music in worship?” Does singing the decades old hymns in our decades old hymnal help people with the problems they have today or that they will be having 20, 30 years from now?
We’re still following old, old forms of worship. A sermon that’s too long for today’s attention spans. Worship that depends on sitting quietly and listening, rather than responding, seeing, moving. Theologically we’re still having the same tiresome debates about theism and atheism. We’re still passing baskets to receive the collection, when there are apps for that. We’re still putting up bulletin boards to communicate. We’re still worshipping in a physical place at a specific time and if you’re not in the room when it happens, well, you just miss out.
Meanwhile, have you heard of a thing called the internet? Smart phones? Apps? Zoom Rooms? PayPal? Forget PayPal, have you heard of credit cards? Meet-up groups? Instagram? What’s App? TikTok? Live-streaming? Have you heard about the rising number of folks who call themselves spiritual but not religious who crave spiritual experiences but aren’t really that interested in sitting for an hour in a folding chair listening to a lecture about humanism?
People still crave what churches offer. But the structure we’ve created to present our spiritual product hasn’t kept up with the way people access the spiritual today. We expect people to come to us during the hours we’re open and buy what we stock on our shelf. We’re Sears in an age of Amazon.
So to be a faith that survives into the future, we have to know two things.
What is the need that people have and will have 30 years from now that churches can fulfill better than other organizations?
And
How do we offer our answer, our solution, our service, in a way that people expect to get their needs meet in today’s world, and will expect in the future?
So the first question is what is the human need that churches fulfill that only churches fulfill, or that we fulfill better than anyone else?
In the 1950s model that most of our churches still follow, churches offered a lot of things that people couldn’t get elsewhere. You came to church for community, for fellowship and friends. You came to make connections that would be helpful in your career. You came to give a moral education to your children, and reminders and encouragement for yourself. You came to church to hear interesting thinking, and hear beautiful music. You came for inspiration, hope, courage. You came to get activated on the political issues of the day, and organized to do meaningful work on those issues. You came because your church had a missionary arm that was doing good work for needy people around the world. You came for help and healing around the fears and anxieties of life: depression, loneliness, spiritual questions of identity, meaning and purpose. You came for counseling about problems with your marriage, or help with a moral dilemma, or you had a question about God. You came to church craving connection to something larger than yourself, and to feel hope and promise of a better future.
We still offer all of that. But a lot of other organizations offer many of those same things now. And some of them do it better than us. And a lot of them do it more conveniently than we do.
If I want to hear an interesting speaker talk about an important question of the day, I don’t go to church, I go to YouTube. I find a Ted Talk. Or I subscribe to their Pod Cast. I don’t need to wait for months, drive across town, be in a particular place at a particular time, to hear a talk from a person I’m interested in. And I don’t need to belong to a church or pay a pledge to hear the talk. The talk is right in front of me, wherever I am, whenever I want it.
Occasionally, if it’s someone really special, I’ll go to a live talk. The Los Angeles Central Library has a speaker series that Jim and I go to occasionally. A library is the appropriate place to hear an interview with a secular person on a book tour. Not a church.
If I want to get involved in a social justice movement, I’m going to join an issue-specific political organization, not a church. I like that our churches are involved in issues like Climate Change. But if I’m really interested in Climate Change why would I join a church when I could join Citizen’s Climate Lobby? The Women’s March was organized on facebook, not in a fellowship hall. I get my political news from the Washington Post and the New York Times, not from a minister who reads the same things I can read for myself. And I get my political theory from blogs and books, not the pulpit.
If I needed marriage counseling I’d go to a therapist, not a pastor.
I get better theater and music, and as much of it as I want, from arts organizations.
And so on.
So what do churches offer uniquely, or significantly better than other organizations?
There are three things, I believe. Three important things. Three things that should be the work of the church. Three inter-related things: Community. Spirituality. And relationship with a theological tradition.
The first answer is community. Social media and Starbucks claim to create communities but they don’t. Neither do folks create real communities through a collection of yoga classes and ad hoc activism and friends from work. I go to the library speaker series or the theater and I sit next to strangers who I’ll never see again. Creating community connections is a real problem for our contemporary culture. People need community. And we always will. We are social animals. And we need the kinds of communities that churches offer: committed, intimate, comforting and challenging.
And churches offer a special type of community. We are a spiritual community. We don’t gather just for entertainment or lectures or politics, which you can get elsewhere. Nor do we gather just for the kinds of practical help that you can get better through a social service agency or a therapist’s office. We offer those, but our unique value is in engaging in those activities from a spiritual dimension and for a spiritual purpose. A church offers a community focused uniquely on spiritual questions of identity, meaning and purpose.
And because our church is grounded in a particular Unitarian and Universalist theology and tradition, we belong to a larger spiritual community that extends through time, a spiritual tradition of freedom, reason, tolerance, transcendence, humanism, that calls you back again and again to deeper reflection and transformation, not the constant call of the next spiritual fad and the new pop guru.
Church sermons talk about a wide-range of subjects, but with the common thread of exploring the spiritual dimension of life. And unlike a Ted Talk or a Podcast, or a one-off speaker at the library, our churches offer, though the pastor, a living relationship with a trained theologian and a religious tradition. Sermons might have the form of a lecture but they aren’t lectures. Sermons are preached for a particular community at a particular time. Sermons are created for you, by someone who knows a theological tradition generally and a congregation specifically. The guest speaker on their book tour knows their book but they don’t know you. When tonight’s gig at the library is finished they fly off to Seattle to give the same talk. But you go to church to have an extended theological dialogue with an ongoing religious tradition week after week.
So yes, churches offer worship, education, fellowship and fun, pastoral care, and work for social justice, but those are merely the media of our work. What we really offer, uniquely and well is covenanted community, focused on spiritual questions, and in ongoing relationship with a theological tradition.
What then of the second question?
The first is what product do churches offer better than other organizations? I believe the answer is covenanted community, focused on spiritual questions, and in relationship with a theological tradition
The second question is, “How do we offer those products in a way that people are able to receive, in the culture of today, and in the way our culture is evolving into the future?”
That’s hard to know.
Here’s what I do know.
To be a community, people need to gather. Virtual community through the internet doesn’t work. But neither does a community gathering require a purpose built church building. People can gather in rented space, (like here) or a living room, or a restaurant, or a park. The emerging culture demands that we bring our product to the people, the way the internet does. A single big church building, like a department store across town, that you have to get yourself to during operating hours, isn’t going to cut it any more.
Neither does the community need to be large. A smaller community that can come to you, or closer to you, is better. And a smaller community is better for creating intimacy and relationships, too. I’m not saying our churches have to be small, but there’s nothing wrong with them being small. If we do have a large congregation to do some of the things that large congregations do well like an RE program or a music program, the large congregation will also need to find ways to divide itself into the smaller, more intimate, and geographically distributed communities that the future will need.
Keeping the community focused on spirituality and having an ongoing relationship with a theological tradition requires the leadership of an educated clergyperson. Hiring a minister costs money. And money will get tight when churches get small. And meanwhile, paying for seminary educations will get more expensive. But dispensing with purpose-built church buildings and shifting to electronic communications and connections whenever possible will save a ton of money. No furniture. No maintenance. No insurance. And if our church communities are tightly-focused on spiritual issues, a single professional spiritual leader could be shared by several small communities who don’t also need that clergy person to be the church administrator and broad generalist that we expect them to be now.
For examples of the kind of future church I’m imagining, ironically, we can look to the past.
The early Christian churches were organized as home churches. Small communities. Meeting in members’ homes. Worship created by individuals sharing their gifts and centered around a shared meal.
And a professional clergy person shared among several communities. Think of Paul leading a dozen different communities that he stayed in touch with through writing letters while he traveled around the Mediterranean. Think of churches in 19th century rural America served by a shared “circuit-rider” preacher.
Is this the future of our churches? Who knows?
But I do know that holding on in 2020 to a church model that served the needs of the church of 1950 is a mistake. The world has changed. Our churches must change, too. Even if we can’t be certain of the direction; we need to take the risk. And by 2050 our world and our churches will change again. Will we be ready?
Wake, now, my reason, reach out to the new.
Wake, now, my vision of ministry clear.
With heart and mind and voice and hand may we this time and place transcend.
Will we be ready? Or will we watch with regret as the churches we love, the faith we love, passes away like the coral in a warming sea, and not, before we retire, try one more thing, try one more experiment, benefit from a happy accident, to see if maybe, just maybe, there’s a new way toward amazing vitality we hadn’t known before.
Prophetic church, the future waits your liberating ministry.