"No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its fruit." (Luke 6:43-44a)
The historic Protestant denominations are in trouble, and have been for some time. Numerous studies have verified the situation, and, of course, we can see it with our own eyes.
By any of several measures, since the mid 1960s the Presbyterian Church has been in decline: fewer mission personnel, lower financial support of national offices and programs, fewer children in our church schools, reduced campus ministries, loss of national staff positions, closed down urban agencies, diminished use of national publications and curriculum — and I have not even gotten to the life of our congregations!
The Presbyterian Church peaked in membership in 1960, with 4.2 million communicants. We stayed at the same level for most of that decade. In 1970, we had 4.1 million. Then the slide began. We went from 2.5 percent of the U.S. population in 1960 to below one percent today. Our membership today is half of what it was in 1960.
We are not alone in this predicament. The Methodists have had it even worse. The Episcopalians have suffered the least membership loss; mind you, they were already among the smaller of the historic churches. As a consequence of these years of decline, many have observed the mainline has been sidelined.
Canadian theologian, Doug Hall, describes the phenomenon as the "disestablishment" of the church. He argues that it is time for us to accept that reality and devise new ways to live in it. We have, in fact, always been a minority; it is just that our influence and power have waned to the extent that we now can no longer ignore our own marginalization.
I remember once talking with Janie Spahr, our Presbyterian lesbian evangelist, after one of the national votes on ordination standards. The position she and I supported was defeated — worse than the last time. I was lamenting to Janie that people like me — able-bodied, tall, strong, straight, white men that are pastors of successful congregations — are not accustomed to losing, especially more than once. I complained that I felt as if I were being marginalized.
"Tim" she said, "Welcome to the margins — only we think of it as the horizon." Million
That is good advice for this beloved church of ours. Welcome to the margins — now get over it, and try to conceive of this as the horizon, where God might be doing a new thing in our midst.
At the same time the historic churches were in decline, other U.S. churches were in ascendancy. New congregations were springing up all over the place, in the 1980s and 1990s, and growing rapidly. It was like the 1950s all over again, but not for us. Few of those churches had the word Presbyterian on the sign out front. In fact, some of them had no sign out front at all, as the emerging religious architecture of the day called for anonymous, generic, mall-like buildings.
The Church Growth movement began in the 1950s at Fuller Seminary, led by Donald McGavran. By the time the historic churches were on their way into decline, the Church Growth Movement was beginning to attract a lot of attention. Today it is the dominant player in the congregational renewal movement. Its authors are New York Times best sellers. Rick Warren and his book Purpose-Driven Church, which tells the story of the rapid growth of Saddleback Church in Southern California, are publishing phenomena.
Thousands of pastors attend conferences each year, sponsored by Saddleback, Willow Creek, and other mega-churches that now dot the American — and mostly suburban — landscape. The ingredients of the church growth mix, as purveyed by these pastor celebrities grew directly out of the principles enumerated by Peter Wagner, Lyle Schaller, and other leaders in the movement for church expansion that has swept the land.
By the end of the 1980s, "church growth" had become an institutionalized, widely-recognized movement, and everywhere the language of the marketplace had supplanted more traditional ecclesiastical concepts. Worshippers became "customers" and "consumers"; context for ministry became "market niche"; pastoral leadership became "management"; and evangelism became "church-marketing." A wholesale, uncritical adoption of the language of free-market economics characterized the direction of the church growth enthusiasts.
In their texts, the Gospel is described as a "sacred product" and Jesus himself is seen as one of the first and most effective marketers (George Barna, A Step-by-Step Guide to Church Marketing: Breaking Ground for the Harvest; 1992; p. 56). After all, in the Gospel stories, we are told, Jesus conducts market surveys. He asks what the blind man wants. He inquires as to what the centurion desires. He seeks to meet the needs of the merrymakers at the wedding feast at Cana. In each case, Jesus determines the needs of the particular consumer and develops a plan to meet them. Church marketers have called the Bible itself "one of the world's great marketing texts" (Barna, p. 29).
From this viewpoint, the problem in churches that has led to their numerical decline is that they have failed to embrace intentional marketing strategies. I remember watching with dismay in the mid-1990s as my presbytery caught the fever and began sending pastors of small, struggling city churches down to Saddleback's 30-acre suburban Orange County campus. The assumption — often unspoken — seemed to be: if it works for them, it might work for us.
After living for 15-20 years in an ecclesial world defined largely by the language and concepts of free-market economics — at least in the arena of congregational development — the church, along with the financial markets themselves, has become addicted to growth, or at least the idea of growth. We now run "the risk of transforming the church into a kind of community God never desired it to be ... marketing threatens to refashion the church in its own image" (Kenneson and Street, Selling Out the Church [1997, 35, 34]).
In the mid-1990s, before the market bubble burst, economist Herbert Daly coined the term "growthmania" in order to warn of impending trouble in the economy. "The growth economy," he wrote in 1996, "is an unsustainable goal at the present historical moment." (Beyond Growth [1996, 33, 45]). His prediction proved to be right. Daly urges us to "face the failures of the growth idolatry" in the financial markets (Daly 1996, 224).
Should we do the same for the church? Does the church exist solely for numerical growth? Is growth an end in and of itself? Has the church become so enamored of growth for growth's sake that it has lost its way?
In a church growth strategy videotape made by Rick Warren, first-century biblical imagery is made over into 21st century marketing technique. Warren construes the "fishing for people" metaphor of the Gospels as a masterful marketing strategy employed by Jesus to save individuals. Warren urges his listeners to use fishing poles, hooks and bait as the controlling images for developing a congregation's strategy for growth. He ignores the fact that biblical fishermen were not using the hooks and lines, bait and poles, of fishing today, but nets.
The image of the net propels us in a completely different direction from marketing strategies for growth by "saving" individuals. Instead, it offers a community-building metaphor, suggesting Jesus' invitation to take people in — all kinds of people, since nets do not discriminate — to form a corporate expression of faith, a living reality called church. The fishing metaphor thus becomes not a formula for winning individual souls, but an image for building up a diverse community of those who belong to Christ and to one another.
William Willimon writes, "If the church is only about the wholesale ' winning of souls' by whatever method is deemed most effective, then conversion has become the end of faith rather than its beginning." (Acts [1988, 105])
We need to reject the fixation on church growth and the uncritical usage of free market economic language and look for deeper, healthier images for our churches. As an alternative, I propose that we begin using ecological language and imagery to help us understand congregational life. Why not ask, "What makes for sustainable congregational life?" rather than "How can we get the church to grow?"
I remember discussing the widespread usage of free market economic language and church growth principles with the pastor of a tiny, struggling urban church. It is a congregation of single parents, gays, lesbians, young and old, black and white, a church with an old, heavily-used building in need of repair in a neighborhood that is either indifferent or hostile to it. In short, it is a congregation facing enormous challenges, typical of city churches in America today.
The pastor commented to me that she found the growth ideology extremely oppressive, and needed new language and alternative imagery to help her, and especially the church's leaders, envision their future as a city congregation. When I began talking about ecological language, about sustainability and adaptability based on renewable life in communities of faith, a huge smile came across her face. "I've been looking for those words!" she exclaimed.
In an ecology of congregations, we would look at churches as part of a broader environment. Any ecosystem thrives on diversity, knows its limits, seeks balance and builds resilience. Congregations should be doing the same things.
Sustainability in congregational life is a stewardship question — not only about resources but also about how we concern ourselves for the coming generations. We are stewards of the church; its sustainability is critically important not only today but for the cause of Christ tomorrow.
In his Sermon on the Plain in Luke's Gospel, Jesus says, "No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its fruit." (Luke 6:43-44a)
Here Jesus offers us a new image for the church — at least it is new to those of us weary of the oppressive language of the marketplace: a fruit tree. Economists have already begun comparing a sustainable economy to a fruit tree. Listen to how they use the image, and imagine your congregation being described: The fruit tree utilizes the cooperation of every cell in order to blossom and bear fruit. This has consequences: the fruit tree will never scale the height of heaven. Every fruit tree displays the built-in "wisdom" to stop growing in height at a particular moment. From that moment forward, after reaching its optimal height, the tree redirects its maturation processes toward bearing fruit for others (Goudzwaard and de Lange 1995, 135-136).
It may be that such an image describes Jesus' own vision of ekklesia.
We owe it to Jesus, and to those who would know him and follow him in the generations yet to come, to do all we can today to reach sustainability in our congregations, that the fruit they bear — the fruit we bear — may be good, in the estimation of God.
Thanks be to God. Amen. |
