My Church: thoughts on why it's dying

 As with many a first or second Saturday of Advent I've spent a fair portion of my day at Church. Today the choir sang, solos and duets were heard and a play performed. As many watched, ate and gave money for missionaries. It is the tradition at my church and has been done for longer than I have been alive. Why on a day like today the Sanctuary is full but on a regular Sunday our church can barely boast 60 people in the congregation. For years we have been told we are a dying church and x, y, or z, are the reason. I've been told the reason we aren't drawing people is because churches no longer have: Sunday school, women's ministries, choir, sanctuaries (they are now called auditorium). And that to have them or not have them is a sign to Millennials to stay away. I have always wanted to laugh in the face of people who give me such answers. I typically muster an, "are you serious?"  or "really?". And the more years go by the more a chuckle at their use of the word Millennial because I don't think they realize the people graduating high school and college are no longer Millennials. I also, laugh because as they espouse their wisdom about Millennial's  they were always talking to one; never once did any of them stop and ask for my thoughts. All of these church leaders have been telling me the reasons why the church is dying and all of them have told me who to survive we must aspire to be and they point at something. A new church program, a new church set of rhetoric, and so on and so forth all demonstrated in some book or by some church down the road. Every single time this comes up my heart is crushed a little more because Friends mine is not the only church that is dying. They all are. Gone are the days of us filling new churches with the Christiana we birth. Frankly, I want more out of our faith than one that only works if you grew up in it. We are dying. We are dying. WE are dying. And I wish I were sadder about it. But, at least in terms of my church, I don't see how it has earned the right to live. As I look around, I am met by the same face after the same face. And all I can say is we have wanted to the comfort of what we understand to such an extent we have closed our doors to anything else. 

Our previous pastor, he was a theologian, always used grand words. His words were so large in fact I wonder if they were only meant to hide what he did not know. In the end he proved himself to be a man without the skills of a leader but yet as a theologian he still garners much of a following. This I believe is the fundamental problem with church of this age. We are chasing after a theology that allows us to be challenged but not by anything real only by academia. So, for years our congregation felt challenged by the process of understanding his sermons; never once really questioning what his sermons called us to truly. That's not actually true all the people I know who questioned him eventually left. The pastor himself ended up leaving too. And now we are a church that has been fed off nothing for years who has lost 50% of its staff within the last 2 years. And then a pandemic hit.

I believe my church is dying because God has been calling us to be something different and we have refused. I believe my church is dying because  we are situated in the heart of a diverse neighborhood (in every sense of the word) and the people in the congregation all look the same. I believe our church is dying because it does not acknowledge it's on culpability and complicity with racism. Our church was in this place before white flight and is in this place during gentrification (though we will see if this corner is fully gentrified). And our calls are for the anticipated arrival for our new neighbors. With nothing ever being said about the ones we have lost.

My first week in seminary I took a long lunch because I attended the funeral of the parent of some members of the youth group. She is the first person I know who died of gentrification. As housing prices rose she got priced out of her area but she wanted to keep her kids in their schools. So she moved into the motel. There she died. I do not care what other life factors contributed to her death but had she been living in a safe stable home. I would not have been at a funeral that first week of January. Two years later one of our students in the after school program had to move away and a pastor came up to me and said, "it's the first one we've lost to gentrification". Oh, church I wish I had your eyes. I wish I could ignore all of the people we have overlooked and left unseen and unheard because they didn't meet our criteria for respect or truly personhood. 

My church is dying because to them to be a Christian is to be like me. 

I led a Sunday School class years ago and asked them: What would Jesus think of this Church? How would this church respond to Jesus? Fundamentally I was trying to get us to wrestle with how we quantify a 'good church'. In the end they decided we'd know we were a good church when the pews were full and after church we'd go out into the community and spend time with the people. Does anyone else see what is wrong with that? The pew would be full but NOT with people of the community!

So often I have heard the leaders of my church profess hollow and empty promises. They are all so excited for the people to move into the new high-rises because that is an untapped pool of potential church go-ers. currently less than 1% of my church congregation lives within 1 mile of the church. That has been the statistic for the past 10-20 years. Why do they think that will magically change when new people move in? Maybe because the people who have been pushed out by gentrification weren't the right type of people and the high-rise dwellers are? The reality is my church is delusional when it comes to people. The only people it can learn from are a homogenous bunch and that just is not good enough.  My church still has not figured out why "the Millennials" never rejoined the church after college or after they had kids like the generations before. They blame things like: the use of old language i.e. Sanctuary, or modernity e.g. that is we live in a culture that just doesn't go to church.  Frankly, my church spends the majority of it's time blaming the people not walking through it's doors for not walking through the doors.

It's true we no longer live in an era where people are shunned for not attending church. I am grateful for that. It is true we no longer need to look at the church to answer questions science has provided for us. Again, I am grateful for that. But as Christ followers, isn't our faith and worship supposed to be about something far greater? 

My church has been on this corner for 125 years and it has built buildings and it has changed languages and it has done many things but as with all Christianity rooted in white-culture there is a fundamental sin we refuse to acknowledge let alone attempt to dismantle. As white-Christianity we are powerful and we have never needed to change to bring others in. As a mixed Christian I can tell you the white washed Gospel does not serve me. It does not bring people to Christ it is heresy and as such must be allowed to die. Maybe I should be more actively attempting to kill it...but I can't my heart breaks even as I watch the walls of my church crumble and splinter. As I watch our congregation attempt to hold us together in a way as similar to who we were as possible. And I refuse.  I weep at the death of this church because it was my first home. I weep because I thought it would be here for many more years. But mostly I weep because it was called to harvest the fields here and it refused. I weep because we prefered to have racism preached from the pulpit than to remove those leaders. I weep because even though all of that I have stayed. I weep because we excuse bad leadership in the name of having the position filled. I weep because still I stay. I weep because as much as I am glad the church is dying I still hope the church will change because the Lord has not abandoned this place. We can still repent and change but that means  changing everything. That means a leader who has vision and one who has already wrestled with their demons of racism and white-Christianity.