A Reminder of What Happens “When Church Becomes Pointless”

One of the oldest posts on this blog–one that has survived platform changes over the years–is When Church Becomes Pointless.  Written in 1997, it was primarily directed at the Episcopal Church, where I was raised, but as evident then and now it can happen to any church.

That time was an interesting one in Episcopal History.  (What time has been boring the last half century?)  The Episcopal Church took a major fall in its attendance since the tumultuous days of the 1960’s and 1970’s, and by the time I posted the original piece the downward trend had levelled off or even shown a small uptick.  That didn’t last long: in 2003 the church opted to ordain V. Gene Robinson as bishop and that began an era of conflict and more downward trends that resulted in much litigation and the formation of the ACNA.  The decline has continued, mostly now driven by the church’s aging demographics.

Driving the downward trend was the existence of serious unbelief in what the church traditionally taught, and few believed less and talked about it more than the bitter Southerner John Shelby Spong.  So how would people react to being told this from the pulpit?  In my original piece I set forth the following:

Let’s suppose that you really believe that a) the basic teachings of Christianity are false and b) that you’re idealistic enough to want to “do good” under the new rules. What’s the quickest way of getting going? Well, to start with you have the usual plethora of political groups, environmental organizations, the government, the United Nations, and countless other organizations that have nothing to do with the church but which propagate your message. All your church is succeeding in doing is to add one more organization to the confusion. It would be simpler to simply dispense with the church and proceed with the secular organizations.

So let’s take this a step further; suppose you are sitting in an Episcopal pew listening to John Shelby Spong go on about why the basic truths of Christianity have no basis in reality and that those who teach them are a bunch of morons. Suppose that you finally realize that you think that Spong is right; that all that you’ve said when you’re repeated the Apostles’ or Nicene Creed is false and that the life you have is all you’re expected to get. What should you do? You should first realize that life is short and that, if you’re going to live you’d better hurry. So the sensible thing for you to do is to get up, gather your family, walk out of the church, get into your Lexus or Mercedes, and head to Atlantic City or Las Vegas or South Florida or wherever you need to go to live it up while you still can.

That was based on the experience of the first drop, and the second, to use the BCP/KJV’s expression, was like unto it.

So how did this take place? The demographic of the Episcopal Church–and its Main Line counterparts–explains part of this, but another important factor was the introduction and propagation of modern Biblical criticism in Episcopal seminaries, starting in the last part of the nineteenth century. Although we’ve moved from modern to post-modern criticism where we shift from “the Bible isn’t reliable enough to say anything” to “the Bible says (a) but really means (b),” the corrosive influence remains the same. It starts with the academy but then filters down through the clergy to the laity, who are the last to get the memo but the first to wonder “what happened?” when things change.

So how to the people who brought us this justify their idea, both after the first drop and certainly after the second? There are two shared assumptions of left and right that underlie this, neither one of which hold water:

• People “need” church. Both left and right are right about this for a certain universe of people. However, as we say in the Church of God, I have come here to tell you today that for a wide swath of the populace this assumption is wrong, and that swath is getting wider. They may need church and they certainly need God, but they either don’t know it or don’t want to face it.
• The church needs to be “in sync” with the culture. One the left it involves adopting all of the causes of the secular left, which leaves us with the differentiation problem noted above. On the right the imperative to evangelise pushes the church to adopt the forms of the world, but eventually there comes the point where they “cross the line” and adopt the culture’s idea, and that’s where a good portion of Evangelicalism is at these days. What neither side understands is that, if the church is leading the culture, this works; when it’s following, it does not.

So what is to be done? With churches like the Episcopal, there isn’t much with the institutional inertia that can be done. With those churches who are “further upstream” from this process, they need to recognise two things: a) they don’t need to bend to every demand of the academy, which is trapped in a system designed for scientific pursuits but applied to non-scientific ones with poor results, and b) they need to figure out where to stop in moulding themselves to fit the culture, especially in the name of the income stream.

This is where we’re at after all these years; may God help us to discern his true will and do it.