Stop Blaming Congregations for Failure
Let Social Media Save the Day
We lay people have been taking it on the chin for years.
- We’ve been ridiculed. We don’t tithe. We don’t evangelize. We aren’t welcoming. We don’t volunteer.
- We’ve been labeled. If we aren’t strong, we are backward and resistant to change, and dying. If we are strong, insisting on answers, we are adversarial and resistant to authority.
- We are made to feel inferior and inadequate, unable to find our way in the world without hanging onto the robes of the clergy.
—all because mainline churches are failing.
IT’S NOT OUR FAULT.
- It’s not our fault that the church is structured to nurture homogenous cultures of yesteryear that naturally replenish and grow in numbers from generation to generation.
- It’s not our fault that, in the New World, community demographics shift every decade
- It’s not our fault that even the least dysfunctional families experience their own diasporas every generation or so.
- It’s not our fault that fewer people enter the ministry as a life call and see the only road to advancement as moving to suburban settings, making neighborhood ministries less desirable.
- It’s not our fault that leadership has been just as unprepared for changes in society as we were.
- It’s not our fault that the Church, despite a strong start in the Reformation, managed to sit out the Renaissance and stayed mired in the Middle Ages for the last 500 years.
Now that we are in a new age yet to be named (the Information Age?, the Digital Age? the Age of Globalization?) we’re all playing catch up.
In the hierarchical past, this meant creating a position headed by a well-paid think tank leader with an alphabet of credentials after his name. It meant funding an office with a staff, providing an adequate budget for developing resources, allowing three to five years for development, and the creation of a network to implement resulting initiatives. Implementation would be easy because all churches would be alike, waiting for answers to their problems to be delivered to them. After all, there would be nowhere else for them to turn.
Today, we are standing at the door of the future. The answers will come by inspiring community. There will be much less need for a centralized office of any sort.
The church of the future will be led by a conductor who stands at the podium, signals the opening downbeat and walks away, allowing the musicians to get their cues from one another, to take off in an imaginative riff, to return to the group to enjoy another artist’s take.
Welcome to the Information Age, the Age of Social Media, the Age of Globalization. It’s all coming together just in time to save the mainline church . . . if the mainline church is paying attention.
There is a lot of rethinking that needs to be done. Lay people might be best equipped to lead the way!