Reinventing the Church
The religious community I grew up in was traditional Protestant. Soon after I was born my name was on the Cradle
Roll of the church whose minister had married my parents. From then on I attended regularly, participating in Sunday
School classes, regular and special worship services, special programs, and social events. Throughout my growing
years the church community was my second home, my introduction to the larger world. During my teen years, I sang
in the choir every Sunday morning, as did many of the gang from the church youth group. The experience of belonging
and working in that church taught me about the importance of the kind of community that involves and serves people
across the spectrum of human experience.
Given the 20-20 vision of hindsight, I now know that the catechetical classes which I dutifully attended when I
was 12 posed for me the questions that would eventually push me beyond Protestantism, beyond Christianity, beyond
what most Americans know as conventional religion, to Unitarian Universalism. I loved the stories and the pageants
and the music--the drama of long-told tales on which the ministers said faith was founded; but some portions of
the scriptures seemed to contradict others. And so I asked how that could be. I remember being told that I simply
had to accept it on faith; I also remember that in some deeper recess of my being I began to suspect that there
were not going to be satisfactory answers to the questions that were developing in me, let alone respect for the
process of questioning. But that realization took time to become conviction. I continued a loyal and regular member
of that church community until the time came to go away to college.
I matriculated at a school sponsored by the same denomination as my family's church. My freshman year was very
busy with studies and the new life style--encountering on a daily basis mainly peers and professors instead of
younger siblings, parents, and variously-aged adults of family and church in addition to school mates. I enjoyed
my studies--the course in Introduction to Religion was interesting since it included a brief encounter with religions
other than those of the Western bibical tradition. So it wasn't until my summer job at church camp that the rift
between me and the church of my growing years began to be discernible. Among the others on staff that summer were
several new graduates of theological school, young men--remember this was the mid-fifties--working at the camp
until the Fall Conference would assign them to their new congregations. Conversation around the staff dinner table
was especially fascinating for me when it focused on some of the scholarship regarding biblical stories and writers
and historical settings for the collection of those stories. When I naively asked how come we never heard about
such things in church, I was told that the prevailing concern among the clergy was that the people in the pews
were not ready for it; moreover, as new preachers they were not about to shake things up by introducing such things
either.
That was a wound that would not heal. My life of participation in a church community involving and serving people
of all generations, marking the milestones from birth to death did, and still does, convince me that such a community
can, and needs to, provide the nurture and challenge that calls forth the best from human being. But a centering
story or tradition that only the professional leaders may have full access to seems to me to undermine and denigrate
that process. Ministry--service--is what we provide for each other and the larger community according to the values
we share. Professional leadership has a responsibility to study and think and teach and challenge--that's a special
ministry which requires special talents and inclinations as is the case with other forms of ministry. The larger
responsibility of the whole religious community which encompasses a variety of special ministries is a shared and
sharing ministry.
* * *
We came of age in the years following the Second World War. We could not know in the midst of things that those
were extraordinary, rather than normative times. Those were the years when people seemed determined to make up
for decades of scarcity and want, the consequences of depression and war--the years when the American dream seemed
possible for the vast majority if they were prepared to work with diligence and commitment. In those years, young
men returned from war determined to create a normal life for themselves. They went back to school or they took
jobs; they married; they bought homes and began families.
Those were the years when women, who had poured their energies into the shops and factories and offices of the
nation during the war, left those jobs and retired to the home, expecting to resume the lives their mothers had
led. Those were the years when the vast suburban housing tracts were invented, and women who had exhibited such
energy and skill in jobs outside the home found themselves confined to a domestic ghetto of look-a-like houses,
a world of repetitive domestic duties and endless child care. As the literature of the time suggests, it was a
world many found stifling, confining, depressing.
Those were also the years when organized religion was growing like crazy. Churches were built to serve burgeoning
suburban communities--often faster than they could be adequately staffed. Inadequately financed, the churches relied
on the volunteer efforts of their members to sustain much of their operation. And into those churches people, especially
women poured their time and energy. People whose financial resources were often stretched thin by house payments
and car payments and medical bills could be and were generous with their time. The churches, on their part, saw
in this reality, a very real ministry. As men and women, new residents of new communities and for most part strangers
to each other, served on projects and committees and task-forces of the churches, they began to build social and
personal relationships by means of which they could overcome the loneliness and isolation many were feeling. In
these new religious communities, men and women who were geographically, and sometimes emotionally distant from
their families of origin could establish new, "extended families" based on shared experience and shared
need.
And so, in response, churches elaborated their organizational structures. Committees and all sorts of ancillary
organizations sprang up like weeds in an untended garden. The assumption was that in a healthy church there was
a job for everyone and everyone had a job. The further assumption was that in the ideal church, no job was ever
a one-person job. Many of us in the trade chanted the mantra, "No task that can be shared with others should
ever be done by alone." Efficiency of operation was of minor importance in most instances. After all, there
was all that time and energy out there, and if it could be tapped in such a way that community could be built and
sustained, that is what the church should be about in those days of "suburban captivity."
For a while this strategy seemed successful. Churches grew and thrived and provided a safety valve for much of
the frustration and discomfort and isolation of the new suburban communities. But, in the sixties, things began
to change. Books like "The Crack in the Picture Window," and "Diary of a Mad Housewife," and
on another level, "The Suburban Captivity of the Church," all began to explore the shallowness of much
of what was being accepted as normative. At the same time, the country erupted in protests against injustice, against
the war in Vietnam, against the moral and cultural assumptions of the generation which had fought the last good
war. Energies began to drain away from the churches and to flow into a number of causes and issues, while parents
found themselves forced to confront the unrest which roiled under the surface of placid suburban family life.
And then came the Women's Movement--a determined attempt by women to reclaim their rightful place in the larger
world. They were no longer willing to be confined to the suburban ghetto; they were no longer willing to settle
for "make-work" jobs which paid little or nothing. They demanded to be taken seriously. And the churches
began to discover that the time and energy-sinks they had created were no longer functioning well. Leaders of churches
found it increasingly difficult to staff all those committees and boards and councils. What is more, people were
finding community in other areas of their lives--in consciousness raising groups, in protest groups, in political
action groups, or on the job. The church was left with a structure which it found increasingly difficult to staff.
And then came the decades economic upheaval--a phenomenon which created vast insecurity within the middle-class,
as down-sizing and restructuring resulted in job loss and economic uncertainty for social classes which had rarely
experienced those things before. The second income in the family was no longer a luxury but had become, for many,
a necessity if the family was to survive economically and maintain the life-style to which it had become accustomed.
And that needed second income meant that time now became more and more precious. Demands of the job were implacable
and competed with the needs of the family. Children were in school or child-care through much of the day. Mother
and Father commuted to work, often gone for a dozen or more hours. What time could be carved out of that schedule
for family or for recreation was often too precious to be volunteered. And in many cases, there was simply not
enough time or energy left for primary relationships, let alone the community, the neighborhood, the voluntary
association, the church. Increasingly, the pool of volunteers was comprised of the elders, now retired, for whom
volunteering had been and continued to be a meaningful use of their time.
The solution, for many, was to substitute the gift of money for the gift of time. In these years, despite the economic
uncertainties many families faced, church budgets grew at a rapid rate. And much of that money was spent on hiring
people to do the tasks that once were done by volunteers and committees. Accountants and computers replaced the
volunteer collector with her pad and pencil for keeping financial records. Housekeepers were hired to maintain
church kitchens; caterers, hired to prepare community meals; janitorial services hired for day-to-day maintenance.
Professional musicians replaced the gifted amateur pianist or organist. Additional ministers were added to the
staff to organize church schools and sustain pastoral ministries. Secretaries and administrators were hired. Operations
were computerized. All of this, at a price with the intention of making up for the volunteer hours which once were
the foundation upon which the religious institution rested.
While all of this was going on, the organizational structure of the church did not change very much. All of those
standing committees were still there, and much energy was devoted to the frustrating effort to staff them. Sometimes
we noted that committees that used to be considered important had not be staffed for a long time. Sometimes we
noted that some committees were staffed by a single person and other committees were staffed but simply did not
function. But the old wisdom died hard. We still believed that the way to serve people was to find them a job to
do, despite the obvious fact that virtually no one was coming to church looking for work.
Few of us noticed the profound consequences of this shift in attitude for the spiritual life of the church. As
involvement in and commitment to the church came to be expressed in terms of money rather than time, the church
was able to sustain a high degree of excellence in many of its offerings; but gradually it came to be viewed as
a part of the entertainment industry. People expected a quality show for their money--excellent music, moving worship
services, stirring sermons, quality religious education programs and child care along with meaningful outreach
into the community. And they expected this to happen with minimal demands on their time or their lives. Church
became a place where you could drop in at whim, and drop out when you no longer hand time or were no longer satisfied.
Church became a service you purchased, a service which you might cancel when it no longer lived up to expectations--
rather like the cable service or a symphony subscription.
The irony, of course, is that the very spiritual need which has driven people back to the churches in the nineties
cannot be satisfied if the people remain only spectators; and the churches, structured around an energy intensive
model of community building and involvement, find themselves unprepared to minister to the special needs of this
generation.
If the reponsibility of the religious community is indeed to be a shared ministry; then it is time we devised new
ways of serving each other and the larger community. In short it's time to reinvent the church. Inspired by the
recognition of all the work of this community as comprising its ministry, of all of its members as sharing in the
ministry of this community, we are looking to discover and implement differing ways of enabling everyone's participation
in the various ministries of this congregation. This project is not one devised by the professional leadership
alone and then superimposed on everybody else; but rather, this is to be a shared process, the outworking of which
is at this time not yet known.
Indeed, the challenge the church faces at this moment of time is nothing less that to reinvent itself so that it
can respond to the deep yearnings of a generation which is discovering that meaning forever eludes those who remain
spetators, that without an understanding of the deeper, sacred reality in which we live and move and have our being,
all of our accomplishments, all of our efforts, all of our undertakings remain persistently pointless and without
enduring significance. The challenge the church faces at this moment is to understand that people do not come here
looking for work; they come here looking for meaning, for spiritual depth and so our task is not so much to get
the jobs of the church done, but to engage people in the life of the community in ways which leave them enriched
and deepened, not exhausted and guilty. The purpose of the church is to help people grow their souls.
We confess to you that we do notknow how to do this in the uncertain climate of these times. But we believe
that the secret to the challenge is to be found in understanding the life of the church as ministry. All that we
do here is justified as it enables us to nurture our souls. We believe that central to that mission is finding
ways which allow us to minister meaningfully to each other. For that reason, we invite you, this year, to join
us a process of reinventing the church. We do not propose to abolish the old organization structure in one fell
swoop. Our twenty-two standing committees remain in our by-laws and many of them continue to function. In addition
there are special committees and task forces which must continue their efforts if we are to survive. But in the
midst of all of this, we invite you to join us in thinking about the life of the church as a series of ministries
through which we invite the growth of meaning in our lives.
We propose to do this through a series of mini-retreats--Saturday experiences together when we join in exploring
the areas of ministry important to our religious community, reflecting on how those ministries impact our lives
and then how they can be structured and accomplished so that they become neither chores nor burdens, but occasions
for service and spiritual growth.
* * *
The religious community which constituted my first experience of the church was structured to serve the poor, the
underclass, the marginalized. It was focused on a central message, a gospel designed to support and sustain lives
in difficult and uncertain circumstances. In time, I came to see that message, which encouraged quiet acceptance
and patience and endurance, as in adequate and unhelpful. But from those early days I learned a lasting lesson--that
the function of the church is to witness to a central and transforming truth. I believe that our central gospel
is this: All will ever know of the sacred, the holy, will be revealed to us in the context of our ordinary, quotidian
existence, in our interaction with each other and with the earth which is our home. I believe that if we would
encounter the sacred, the holy, we must seek it in our own experience, and in the hand and eyes of others. The
church exists to proclaim the gospel that each human being is infinitely precious, that the meaning of our lives
lies hidden in our interactions with each other. The challenge we confront is to be a church which does not bury
that great truth beneath all our business, but which enables us to encounter each other with wonder and appreciation
and expectation, to call out of each other strengths and wisdom and compassion we never knew we had.
We hope you will join us over the course of this year in reinventing a church which can respond to that challenge.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
You may want to read other visitors' comments on Beverly and David Bumbaugh's "Reinventing the Church" .
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