So, what are you gonna do about it?
This week I’ve had some discussions and read some great blog posts from the perspective of young adults and their impressions of the church.
One excellent article is this one: “a letter from an exhausted/exasperated young person who has a complicated love/hate relationship with the church” It has really generated a lot of traffic this week, I’m sure. It’s been posted all over Facebook and Twitter by many of my generation.
So, go ahead and read it, I’ll wait.
Done? Ok good.
I resonate with a LOT in that letter. I’m a minister working in a mainline traditional church that doesn’t always meet my spiritual needs. Change is hard to come by, and all the talk is about “the good old days” when everyone went to church, and the longing for the church to be exactly like it was back then. Well, it still is exactly the same, which is why it’s where it is now. Through deaths and changes in the world around the church, membership and attendance is crashing down around us.
Then I also read this article by my friend Dave, “Do We Believe?” It details his experience about talking to the upcoming leaders of the church, and their general unease and dissatisfaction with the church they feel they are being called to serve in.
As I reflected on these I came to the following conclusion.
We’ve got no one to blame but ourselves!
Seriously, no one else but ourselves!
For my generation and following, we’ve done a great job at blaming the boomers and their parents for many of our problems. Sure, most of it might hold some truth, but not all the blame needs to fall on them. The church is one place where we cannot force upon them the whole blame. We need to take ownership of our own part in letting the church erode to it’s meaningless state in society.
The point is, we claim to be great innovators, adaptable, multi-taskers with the world in the palm of our hands. People of our generation have created things our grandparents could have never ever envisioned. Yet, the church seems to be one place where we’re stuck.
Our grandparents and their grandparents, roughly 80 to 150 years ago built churches like there was no tomorrow. They opened their wallets, pulled out their tools and built churches like we create snarky Twitter accounts.
They saw something they needed, and they built it.
Now these churches leave little for us to absorb. They are “too traditional”, “too stale”, “too old”, “too dreary”.
You know why this happened, because this is what our grandparents needed as they aged. These churches were once vibrant centres of the community, but now they are meeting the needs of those who go. They are meeting the needs of worshippers who have done it all, and are now looking to slow down and look to the promises of God that they will be cared for in eternity as their mortal lives approach the end.
This is the church they need right now, and since they built them, maintain them, and run them, they deserve it.
So if you are a young adult in one of these churches, and hating it, do something about it.
Be the great innovators we claim to be. Be adaptable. Be entrepreneurial.
DO SOMETHING!
If all you are going to do is sit around and whine about it (I have been very much guilty of this), then you have no right to blame anyone else about the state of the church today.
If you want something, build it. It’s what our ancestors did.
Build your church, whatever that may look like. It may not be what our ancestors would recognize as a church, but make it yours. Make something that you can call a spiritual home where you can meet Jesus Christ, our Risen Saviour.
And the church that exists today, please support us any way you can. Pray for us. Offer us support, either morally or financially (or both).
We can make a difference in the world. We just need to find our place, our church home where God can speak to us, teach us, and guide us to br the next leaders, the next sharers of God’s hope, grace, love and mercy to those who need it in our communities.
In closing, I want to apologize to the traditional church for not noticing this before. I want to apologize for times when maybe I made you feel like you were failing me and not realizing this is the church you need. I ask your forgiveness and ask if you are willing to pray for me as my generation seeks to build it’s own church, something we can all be proud of as we show the world Jesus Christ is still Lord of lords and King of kings, Saviour for us all.
So, Gen-X, Gen-Y, Millenials and so on, what are you gonna do about it? This is the challenge we face today…
Where is our church? What is our church?
On Anniversaries
Yesterday I celebrated my 3rd anniversary of ordination in the United Church of Canada. That day rewarded the end of a very long, difficult, challenging, isolating process.
The problem is, not a lot has changed. I am of a certain theological perspective that is not often welcome. So the same problems I had in a liberal theological school continues in the liberal denomination I serve in. There have been times when I’ve been taken to task over what I have said on this blog. There are times when I’ve known if I speak my mind in certain company I would lose my head.
I’m not afraid. God’s placed me here for some reason. After 3 years, I’ve seen glimpses of great hope. But I’ve also seen much anger and division. Can glimpses of hope shine light in a great gathering darkness? I don’t know.
I love the congregations I serve. The people are full of love and hope for a brighter future. They give me strength to go on. They want to engage the risen Christ in their midst, and are seeking ways in which this may happen. We have a long way to go as a church, but we are seeing what we can do to move forward.
The very near future of the United Church of Canada on this island I call home is very much in doubt. We need greater glimpses of hope, brighter rays of light to shine among us so we can see more clearly our way out of the darkness.
So, three years in, I may have more questions than ever before. God has gifted me with great passion and a heart full of love and hope for the future of His children. I pray for wisdom and guidance for what comes next.
“What the future holds, a mystery. Unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.”
The Ministry of Ministry Recruitment
With a title like that for a post, I feel like I should break into some sort of Monty Python skit. But I shall resist.
Today my denomination is advertising a position in the national office with the title, “Program Coordinator for Ministry Recruitment”
The description follows:
The General Council Office of The United Church of Canada is seeking a Program Coordinator for Ministry Recruitment in the Ministry & Employment Unit on a full-time permanent basis.
This position will work with the unit team members at the denominational office in Toronto. The Recruitment Program Coordinator will bring a fresh approach as the denomination identifies and fulfills its current and future ministry leadership needs.
The General Council and Conference Offices of The United Church of Canada, as part of the wider church, support the mission and ministry of the congregations, presbyteries and mission units, working towards identity and connectivity both inside and outside the church. Within this context, the Ministry & Employment Unit oversees church-wide programs related to the recruitment, assessment, and preparation of candidates for the church’s ordained and diaconal ministers and designated lay ministers.
The Program Coordinator for Ministry Recruitment works collaboratively with General Council staff colleagues and elected members as the denomination identifies its current and future ministry leadership needs, and determines the appropriate qualifications and training for vocational leadership. He or she will particularly work with staff for theological education, intercultural ministry, ministry leadership, admissions, youth and young adult programs, and the network for ministry development.
Cool! This is a pretty good idea! We need some more recruitment for our denominational leadership in the coming years as we see our churches losing ministers to retirement dramatically over the next 10 years. I can only see one problem.
It won’t work.
Believe me, I wish it would. But it doesn’t stand a chance.
Aside from maybe some clergy transfers from another denomination, I don’t know of anyone who came to be a minister in this denomination because of the national church. Sure there might be a few, I’m not ruling it out, but the number would be few.
The call to ministry results from personal development and support from a local congregation. And since every congregation is different, you cannot prescribe a “national program” to change this. We should have learned this from our experience with our “evangelism” ads that tried to bring young adults into our church. What the ads showed was nothing like what was seen in our local churches.
The way our church functions, from a grassroots movement that bubbles upward to the national office will not work in the opposite direction. My church is different than the church next door, and because we are structured the way we are, this is the way it should be.
What will increase our ability to recruit new leadership is a better job of discipleship and evangelism in our local churches.
In short, Jesus Christ becoming the primary, sole, ultimate focus of our congregations will move us in this direction.
We can’t program this from above. Jesus came to earth, walked among the people, talked with them, lived with them. That’s how he recruited his leaders. We must do the same.
If God can’t prescribe something from above, then what hope do we have?
We must encourage our current leadership to embrace a model of discipleship and evangelism, which will encourage others in our churches to do the same. Which in turn helps bring people into a fuller understanding of God in their lives, which may lead to new leadership.
How do we do this? Give them opportunities to experience and explore this on a regular basis (several times a year) and at not too far a distance to travel. Experiencing worship, support, Christ in the lives of our leadership will help.
Less bureaucracy, administration, spirit-deadening work and more Christ please.
Bottom up folks. It’s the way to go.
It’s Pentecost
We’ve got a problem…
The Promise to Come…
“The Promise To Come”
Romans 8:22-27, John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15
This is Pentecost Sunday, the day we celebrate what became the birth of the church. The day when the Holy Spirit was unleashed on the disciples and Peter went out into the street to preach about Jesus Christ. The day when 3000 people joined the church.
But I’ve chosen to not speak on the traditional reading from Acts 2, the one we read every year around this time, instead I thought we’d look at the Gospel reading for today.
The reading where Jesus tells of the promise of the Spirit. The promise of what is to come, before the disciples can even know fully what is about to happen.
For 3 years Jesus walked and taught these men. They have seen things no one else has ever seen before. They saw miracles upon miracles being performed; they saw people brought back from the dead; the saw thousands of people fed with just a few loaves of bread and a couple fish. They were eyewitnesses to it all. They’ve grown pretty attached to this teacher they have been following behind, learning the way in which they should live their lives.
So when Jesus tells them in John 14 that he will be leaving them, they are sad. It’s the passage where Jesus tells the disciples he is going to prepare a place for them, and Thomas asks, “How do we know the way?” and Jesus tries to explain it to them.
As his death approaches, Jesus is trying to prepare the disciples for what is coming. He’s trying to make sure they know what to do, and what will happen, once he leaves them. This morning we read of the promise of the helper, the Holy Spirit.
Jesus acknowledges their pain saying, “But because I have said these things, sorrow has filled you hearts.” Jesus knows emotion, he himself has felt the pain of losing a loved one, but he also has intimate knowledge of where he will be going, and what will be coming in his absence. read more…