What are We to Do?

by Peggy Haymes, Pinnacle Associate

As I read the article, I found myself increasingly bored. Maybe that’s a harsh word but it’s an honest one.

The article was on the decline in church membership; truthfully, a decline that has become a crash. It felt tiresome to me.

Not because it isn’t true. There’s no shortage of data points to support the observation, and there are no shortage of stories about churches closing and articles about what’s to be done with their buildings. 

Full disclosure: I’m not in a church struggling with the grief of facing its ending. I know that when any kind of grief shows up it can be all consuming. Grief over the loss of a faith community is real and deserves to be honored. If you’re in that place, please tuck this article away to read it later. You have other things to do right now.

Now back to the regularly scheduled program. Lately as I’ve read the articles and listened to the presentations I’ve been reminded of a time in my own life.

It was a time of deep personal struggle, a deeply demanding time that left me weary to my bones. I reached out to a friend of mine who was also a gifted therapist. 

“I don’t like being in this place,” I told her. 

Gently but firmly she replied, “Yes, but this is where you are. What are you going to do with it?” 

This is where we are now. What are we going to do with it? 

These days I’m much more interested in reading about things that are going right in churches… not as a denial of the struggle but as affirmation that God’s Spirit continues to move. Once we have stopped wringing our hands, perhaps we can put those hands to work birthing a new vision of church.

We begin by clearing the foundation; for example, addressing those things that haven’t worked for forty years but have been a part of the way we’ve always done things. Cleaning up the foundation can also be confessional.

It is tempting for those of us of a certain age to hold up the churches of the fifties and sixties as the high water mark for Christendom in the United States. Numerically it probably was. And yet, in the American South I know best, for far too many white churches the Sunday morning experience was conformational instead of transformational. That is, the practice of church confirmed the practice of culture without questioning the racial inequities and segregation woven into the life of our community. We could have a heart for Jesus without looking too deeply at the shadow places in our own hearts.

None of this is easy, but I’m excited when I hear stories about churches that are daring to be transformational. Like the churches who come to believe that making a shrine of beloved buildings is not their highest calling, and are wiling to wrestle with hard questions about stewardship and priorities. 

Or like a church who went through the ReShaping Church process sponsored by Central Seminary and Pinnacle. Through the process they realized their changing neighborhood was an opportunity, not a burden. They asked what their neighbors needed, and then listened. Now the church buzzes during the week with kids learning how to play soccer and how to play instruments and people learning how to sew. Now the moms of some of those kids have started bringing them on Sunday morning, the beginnings of a much more diverse congregation that began not as a task force on increasing diversity but as a heart for serving their community.

There is a time to grieve, but there is also a time to turn from focusing on what was to ask what might be. 

There is a time to wring our hands but then there comes the time to open those hands to become a part of the shaping of God’s new community where love and faith become agents of transformation of our hearts and of our world.

Now that gets my attention!