to thine your true self, be
to thine your true self, be
Manage decline??
When I first began as Bishop in charge of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe, Archbishop George Carey invited me to attend the annual College for Bishops of the Church of England. This has proven to be very enriching to my ministry here, in a variety of ways.
At my first meeting, I asked other new bishops what their “baby-bishop” course had taught them. “Our job is to manage decline,” replied one, morosely.
“Manage decline?” I thought. That literally turned my stomach. I could never settle for that… (Neither, as it turned out, would they.)
All the Episcopal Church’s overseas dioceses are growing, so I have had other challenges. But numerical decline is certainly happening in the United States. Recently, at a meeting of some of our bishops, one said, “We have all read the Hadaway Report, but we avoid talking about it. Soon all the Greatest Generation will be gone, the Boomers will be on fixed incomes, we lost Gen X, and the Millennials don’t know anything about church. It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.”
The smell is not just about Episcopalians, but all Christian churches in America, with the possible exception of the Assemblies of God. The number of reported atheists has doubled in the past ten years. In a potboiler article for Newsweek, Andrew Sullivan enjoined readers to “forget about church, just follow Jesus” as a way to deal with this decline.
Hmmm. Problem is, you can’t follow Jesus alone. Christianity is a communal phenomenon, and so we can’t just “forget about” church. Nor can we make the biblical Jesus more palatable to our minds, as Sullivan recounts Thomas Jefferson doing for his age. Who needs yet another guru? And locking ourselves up in mental towers double-moated ’round with declarations, confessions, and other unquestionable assertions of The Truth violates the Summary of the Law: we are to love God with all our mind, which basically means asking questions and trying to find answers (which only lead eventually to more questions).
All these have been tried over and over, and they all fail. Nor will it do to manage decline until we do a genteel shuffle off this mortal coil. Imagine standing before the great judgment seat of Christ, and boasting, “I managed decline better than anyone else, and all for you, Lord.”
Two people, holding up the simplicity, as well as the enormous difficulty, of following Jesus. And so many more, vastly more than fit in any calendar of saints. Really, if we started to focus on the hard, sweet task of loving our imperfect selves, and other imperfect people, as God in Jesus loves us, we would be worrying about serious matters. For the Gospel is about life and death... and new life.
Worry about numerical decline after we have accomplished the following:
1.) a church that is truly transforming the world doesn’t worry about size and numbers. It is wholly concerned with the proper work of the Church, which is transformative worship of God through Christ in the Spirit, and helping those who have been thus transformed to accomplish their ministries in the world.
2.) a church that is helping all its members realize each one’s gifts for God’s mission will have a new standard for judging success: percentage of people actively engaged in accomplishing each one’s unique role in the economy of God’s salvation.
3.) a church of people unselfconsciously loving God and neighbor will continue to have institutional issues: that’s what bishops are for, among other things. I remember once a conversation with a Maronite Christian woman who was telling me about a hermit saint of Lebanon, a truly holy man, “unlike you”, she said. “Huh?” I said, my usual articulate self. She explained that as a bishop, I had to deal with the world and therefore could not be holy. Hmmm...
There is a wonderful set of modern windows in St. Pierre de Montmartre, Paris’ oldest church. They depict moments of Peter’s life, My favorite (see above) is of him trying to walk on the water, seen from below, from under the water. (It came to me one day that this is the vocation of a bishop, to see things from below, for that is the perspective of a servant.)
Finally, for a long time the percentage of American Christians was quite stable, meaning that claims of “church growth” were actually no more than shifts in the overall population from one outfit to another. The general decline in number of Christians means that illusion is gone, thank God. This should engender a lot of soulsearching. Liberals might leap too quickly to point fingers at evangelicals; conservatives may continue to claim that schism can be justified in the name of purity. The self-righteous will probably keep on being infatuated with their selves. But all fingers merely point back to ourselves. It is “Christ in us, the hope of glory”, or it is nowhere else. If we do not as church grasp that and then give it away, we deserve to wither and die.
Those who are just happy to know that they are beloved of God, and that this love needs to be returned to God through other people, will not worry unduly about the issues du jour, nor declining numbers. They will focus on giving God due worship for unmerited love and eternal life, and they will judge themselves, not others, for not being loving enough in return. Such people transform the creation. It is what we are to become.
I pray a prayer fairly often, as I am confronted with some hard challenge of bishop’s work: “Lord, this church thing was your idea, not mine: you fix it!” Effective, if unpoetic. God will take care of the church, one way or another. And the Holy Trinity will continue to pour out upon us unfathomable mercy, unmerited love, and surprising, powerful gifts of healing and transformation. We have therefore pressing business at hand. Here is one poet’s way to describe that:
O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I'm constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee:
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here's my heart, O take and seal it;
Seal it for Thy courts above.
* I recently learned about Episcopal Carmelites. See here.
5 avril 2012 / Maundy Thursday