What a healthy church needs, a healthy political party needs too
This message from a retired minister in Knox County, Tennessee has wider application than southern churches:
God may not be dead, but his church is headed for hospice if we don’t get our heads out of our ecclesiastical backsides.
My wife and I visited a mainline church on a Main Street in a deep red southern town last month and found … the audience from a 1972 episode of Lawrence Welk.
Every hymn sounded like a dirge from the funeral I feared we had stumbled in on. But, no, the only thing dying was this church. We couldn’t count five people under the age of 50.
That is a problem Democrats have as well in many places. Political life in this country is dominated by a gerontocracy. That is one reason so many younger people are rejecting political parties and opting to register to vote unaffiliated. If they register. If they vote.
Churchgoing is on a steady decline. Buzz Thomas suggests that if churches don’t evolve, they will die.
That’s why things like the Southern Baptist Convention’s recent decision to oust churches that have women on their pastoral staff makes me think Charles Darwin may have the last laugh. A church foolish enough to discriminate against the gender that does 90% of the work doesn’t deserve to survive.
Thomas offers some suggestions. First churches should stay in their lane and out of politics. That will be a hard sell to white evangelicals threatened by the shifting demographics eroding their cultural/political dominance. Rather than roll with it, they have convinced themselves that God wants them to rule the rest of us whether or not we like it. They are making concerted efforts to make it so.
People with no memory of Lawrence Welk or 9/11 have a deep focus on climate change. Climate denial doesn’t fill pews:
If you want your church to thrive in the 21st century, you’ll also need to brush up on climate change. The number one issue for many young people is the environment. And who can blame them? They’re the ones who must live on this hot, stormy, drought-stricken hellhole we’ve created.
What a healthy church needs, and a healthy political party too, is to let the air in and the stuffiness out:
And perhaps the most important lesson of all. If we want to reach young people, not only must we accept them – be they rich, poor, gay, straight, black, white or anything in between. We must help them. With their careers and their marriages. With child rearing, addiction, loneliness, depression, you name it. The church should be a place where all people can find hope, a sense of purpose and a place to serve.
Church should also be fun. Joyful even.
My pastor says the church should be like an Irish pub. The thing about a good pub is you don’t have to believe in anything or behave in a particular way to go. The first thing is community. Acceptance. Belonging.
A woman here organizes a monthly Dem Happy Hour Social unconnected to the local party committee. People talk politics, sure, but there is no program, no pressure, no volunteer signup sheets. For newcomers, it’s far more welcoming. If they want to get more connected, well, I offer one of my cards.
Younger people will feel more welcome in local Democratic orgainzations if they have paths available to leadership not blocked by sclerotic bureaucrats. They won’t be handed the keys on day one, but they need to see that they’re not being hoarded either.
“If [churches] don’t make some serious adjustments,” Thomas warns, “20 years from now a whole lot of church buildings are going to be restaurants.”
One my favorites here is a converted church.