Will Going to Church Make A Difference?
Church and the Modern Sense of Power
Jesus never used the word church. He didn’t tell his disciples to build churches. The idea of church just happened. For sure, the Spirit was involved.
The earliest church makers had a sense of power. They were fighting the establishment, undaunted by law or convention. They were doing a good thing, a revolutionary thing. They were changing the world. They had a very real sense that God was leading them.
But that was the beginning. It wasn’t long before the sense of power became centralized and the focus shifted. What’s in it for us?
This has been a temptation all along for both those who wield power and those who submit to power.
In the Church’s heyday, people flocked to church for many reasons in addition to and sometimes instead of faith.
- Social acceptance
- Guidance
- Comfort and well-being
- A carefully fostered sense of guilt
- Business connections
- Perceived access to God
- Access to the power-makers of the day
Some of these factors are still in play, but there is a new social dynamic that the Church is not recognizing.
The emerging citizens of the world have a new sense of personal power.
- They have ready access to information. Have you had dinner with a 20-year-old lately? Make a claim and he or she will pull out a cell phone and fact-check you on the spot!
- They don’t need the church for social networking.
- Their secular educations have shielded them from a sense of inadequacy and guilt.
- Books on any topic, including self-help books, can be streamed into the palms of their hands with one click. They can figure out how to accomplish complex goals very quickly.
- They recognize that the Church has lost influence in the modern world. They won’t spend time wishing it weren’t so. They will live with reality.
There is less need for access to power-makers or power-holders or power-brokers because the new generations know deep in their bones that they have power. Every pimple-faced kid carries as much power in his or her jeans pocket as Napoleon.
One newscaster noted that an individual today has at his or her fingertips as many resources as an entire television network twenty years ago.
The Church tends to read the new sense of power as lack of respect. Some of this may be true. In many cases Church abuses have justified a fall from grace. But generally, the lack of respect is an illusion.
What they are sensing is not lack of passive respect. It’s a growing sense of power in the pews.
What does this say to the church?
Older people may go to church out of habit or for personal satisfaction or devotion.
Young people, if they are to connect with the church, want to use their power. They know they have it. There is no point in pretending it does not exist. They want to make a difference.
The Church has to accommodate this new reality.
The temptation for Church leadership is to take steps to hang on to traditional powers—squash anyone who doesn’t toe the line. The pope tried to rein in the American nuns. They shrugged and went on with their mission as they defined it.
As power shifts, the sense of entitlement grows among those in the Church who are accustomed to being viewed as powerful.
They are destined to lose their grip.
This realization may come hard.
The people the Church needs to reach (for its own sake if not for the sake of others) want to be part of activities that make a real difference. Not patchwork, feel-good social fixes. Their absence from church is impatience.
For the first time, perhaps, in the history of the world they really have power and they know it.
The Church must harness the “can do” spirit. Let go of the ecclesiastic reins. Trust in a new plan.
Let the Holy Spirit into the mix and stand back! Be prepared to say, WOW!