We are often preoccupied with teaching doctrine, the way of living our faith, but we risk forgetting that our first task is to teach what it means to know Jesus Christ and to bear witness to our closeness to the Lord. This comes first: to communicate the beauty of the faith, the beauty and joy of knowing Jesus. It means that we ourselves are living it and sharing this experience. (emphasis added)

In my last blog post, I highlighted this 2023 quote from then Archbishop Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV. I was reminded of it again just a few days later when I read a new report from my denomination, titled Strategic Recommendations for the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America). Actually, it was a report to the ELCA, as it was prepared by outside consultants, proposing to give the denomination a new direction in order to reverse its decades-long decline. I thought of this quote because nothing like Pope Leo’s sentiment is to be found anywhere in this document.

Before I continue, let me say that while this report is for a specific American denomination, something like it could be made (and probably has been in some cases) for virtually any Protestant church body in the US, or in the Western world for that matter. Historic churches throughout the US and Europe have been in steady decline and looking for some way to reverse the trend. None have found the solution.

Reading the report was, for me, surprisingly nostalgic and, therefore, disappointing. I have heard so much of it before, sometimes in nearly identical language. The underlying assumption of the denomination and the consultants is that the central problem is organizational. In other words, “We know what we are trying to do but we’re failing in our execution.” The answer then is always twofold: new programs and bureaucratic reorganization.

The ELCA epitomizes the peak of American denominationalism. When it started in 1988 as the result of the merging of three predecessor Lutheran churches, it proudly acquired a high visibility Chicago office tower on the Kennedy Expressway, a short distance from O’Hare airport. The building housed multiple floors of denominational officers, department heads, assistants, and support staff, with thousands of square feet of offices, cubicles, conference, supply, and break rooms—i.e. a typical corporate office. As the years went by, however, budget cuts led to layoffs and a steady reduction in needed floorspace, with the excess being leased to other tenants or simply going dark.

This bureaucratic shrinkage reflected what was happening across the country. Congregations were shrinking, and many were closing, resulting in a steady decline in contributions and denominational revenue. Currently, a commission is at work developing a new, smaller denominational structure, as the original one has become too cumbersome and unaffordable.

This new report is independent of that commission’s work but seems to anticipate it. Perhaps its purpose is to provide an agenda for a newly reorganized and pared down denomination. But as I indicated above, what struck me most was how little new was in this report.

For example, it says that church members are poor evangelists. They are disinclined or don’t know how to talk about their faith and invite people to their church. Yet this was being said fifty years ago! Forty years ago, when I was just starting my ministry, the two largest ELCA predecessor denominations both came out with expensive, glossy programs to teach and motivate lay members to evangelize. They were both well regarded but were eventually discontinued with little to show for the effort. Yet this new report recommends the ELCA “develop and provide widespread evangelism training for rostered leaders and ELCA members in a way that is natural for and fits ELCA theology and culture.” Well, good luck with that.

Beginning its statistical summary in 2010, the report conveys the sense that the ELCA’s decline is relatively recent. It’s not. Since it began in 1988, the ELCA has always been losing members. And that’s because its predecessor denominations were already in decline. Reversing that decline was one of the primary motivations for forming the ELCA. It didn’t work. At its start, ELCA had over 5 million baptized members. By 2022, that number had fallen to 2.9 million. In general, mainline Protestantism peaked around 1970 and its various denominations have been shrinking ever since—over a half-century. Most other denominations now are also declining but started doing so somewhat later.

But focusing on such statistics is misleading because then the shrinkage becomes the problem, rather than a symptom of the problem. And the problem, then, is inevitably organizational. “How can we do what we are doing better?” What can’t be considered is the thought, “Perhaps we should be doing something different.”

A metaphor I’ve used before is the Acme Buggy Whip Company. Faced with declining sales, the company made sincere efforts to improve their product, reduce the price, and better market it. Nothing worked, sales continued to decline, and the company closed. Why? Because demand evaporated for buggy whips with the coming of the automobile. Acme’s whips were the best but people didn’t need them anymore. End of Acme.

The booming post-war churches of the 1950s and 60s fit well the cultural zeitgeist. Too well, as it turned out. There was always a brittleness and tension below the surface. That became painfully exposed in the social upheavals of the mid-1960s and after, to which churches never have figured out how to effectively respond. As American culture has wobbled, stressed, and cracked, churches have followed suit, rather than providing a source of stability and new direction.

Taken seriously, the quote above from Pope Leo would be a hand grenade rolled down the center aisle of most churches. (Take a moment and go back and read it again.) The church is indeed preoccupied, and perhaps has always been, with “teaching … the way of living our faith.” The church wants people to behave, whether that means following Victorian standards of morality or woke practices of inclusion. It wants its members to follow one or another interpretation of “what Jesus would do.”

But however well intended, all this, in Pope Leo’s view, puts the cart before the horse.

Our first task is to teach what it means to know Jesus Christ …  to communicate the beauty of the faith, the beauty and joy of knowing Jesus.

As I wrote last time, today such simple piety may stick in our throats. It will remind many of a simplistic “feel good” Christianity of emotion, ritual keeping, and disengagement. Yet none of those things are implied when the Bible talks of knowing God or knowing Christ. Rather, to know the divine, however that might occur, is always a life transforming experience. This is the story of the patriarchs and the prophets, of Jesus and his disciples.

The past abuses of piety have been rightly abandoned. Yet, in over reaction, the church today has largely lost any notion of spiritual experience. It certainly doesn’t see it as the foundation of the life of a Christian disciple as the New Testament does. Where, for instance, does this jarring declaration by Paul fit into the life of the church today?

I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.

Paul is not talking theology here but his own lived experience. Can we make any sense of it today? We can if we know the mystical traditions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam; the Asian religions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism; and the indigenous spiritualities found throughout the world. For all of them, experiences of enlightenment, of awakening, of death and rebirth in this life are at the center of their teaching and practice.

The teachers of these traditions, upon hearing of Pope Leo’s “beauty and joy of knowing Jesus”, would all smile and say, “Yes, we know the experience to which he points.” But, as I say, where this language isn’t known is in this document of church renewal. One of its four “commitments” is to “enhance ELCA-wide efforts to nurture and strengthen faith and spiritual formation.” But rather than being seen as fundamental to the Christian life, it’s simply another strategy for resuscitating a moribund organization.

That ELCA leaders would turn to professional consultants to figure out its problems testifies to how lost it is. It’s certainly a far cry from the strategy of the Hebrew prophets who called the Israelites to repentance with prayer and fasting, sitting in sack cloth and ashes. More seriously, what about the church’s own spiritual resources? What about calling upon its theologians and Bible scholars? Apparently, there is little confidence in the church’s own tradition to provide the resources to get it back on track.

Writing this, I am aware of how bored I have become with my denomination’s (and the church-in-general’s) organizational travails. I’m also tired of writing about it, so you likely won’t hear much more from me on this topic (received with much applause, I suspect). I’ve been hearing the same story since I started seminary almost fifty years ago: the same handwringing and laments, the same questions getting the same answers.

When I was in seminary, our school hosted a conference about the feasibility and value of forming a new Lutheran church (what would become the ELCA). I still remember one speaker asking whether doing so would just be a case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. He got laughs then but decades later it was obviously a prescient question. In fact, we’ve been rearranging ever since.

It is ironic to me that this report begins with this quote from Isaiah: ““I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?” Yet it’s a “new thing” that is the one thing that can’t be imagined. Especially as that new thing may very well be the end of organizational Christianity as we’ve known it. It’s time to look for where God’s new thing is springing forth and nurture it as best we can. The state of the world is too dire to waste time doing anything else. So enough already with the chairs.

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