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Losing our religion?

Losing our religion?

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Still shop of beginning of ABC news story on US religious decline

Last month, ABC News broadcast a 10-minute report titled, Is America losing its religion? So, more than just a sound bite. It began with the story of a Catholic parish in Buffalo, New York, with a large building but an ever-shrinking congregation. It formally closed last summer and the property has been sold.

The reporter spoke with a priest with the title “Diocese Vicar for Renewal and Development.” Despite that title, this priest’s primary role seemed to be managing the closing of parishes too small to continue. In the past twenty years, he said, their diocese had closed half its congregations, and more closures were to come. This process was euphemistically called the “Road to Renewal.”

The report discussed how this trend was broad based and transcended denominations. Examples were given of evangelical Protestant and mainline Protestant congregations in similar straights. The now oft-repeated statistic was cited that less than half of American adults say they are members of a religious community, a dramatic drop from 75 years ago. The result: congregations by the thousands are closing every year.

When asked why all this is happening, the Catholic priest gave an unintentionally ironic answer. “We’ve become a culture that doesn’t need God as much as we think we do.” Well, I think I know what he was trying to say, and I think he is wrong. Not needing God isn’t the issue.

Several times in the report, religious leaders expressed the view that in turning away from religion, people were turning away from God. I would challenge them to support that conclusion. Surveys show that belief in God has remained steady, including among those who have left organized religion.

Personally, I know of many people who have stopped being active church members yet remain people of faith, often with serious spiritual practices and voluntary service activities. But just as important, the converse also has to be admitted. Namely, that churches have always had many members who were spiritually shallow and often did little more than attend worship services, aka “go to church.”

For churches today, that disconnect has finally become too wide to maintain and is at a breaking point. Increasingly, people with a deep spirituality are finding the institutional church irrelevant. They are no longer interested in maintaining buildings, serving on boards and committees, attending rote worship services, and the other routines of church life.

On the other hand, the people who belonged to churches out of habit and family tradition are also disappearing. The “whiff of religion” they received from church isn’t enough anymore to keep them involved. Or just as likely, their children who have become adults, see no point in going through the religious motions their parents went through. As to anyone considering joining a church, the seemingly unending parade of sex and financial scandals and the polarizing politicization of many churches are all big turnoffs.

Today, churches are often dominated by retirees who remember when churches were full and often the center of people’s social lives. They don’t understand why things have changed, or don’t want to understand. They ensure that the proposals coming down the pike year-after-year for “renewing the church” ultimately go nowhere because they don’t want the church to change. They like it the way it is. And as their numbers shrink, so do their churches. Last one out, turn off the lights.

Unfortunately, many of those recruited for church leadership roles, including clergy, hang on to the old church traditions. It was disheartening to hear this relatively young priest repeating the worn-out trope that people are leaving church because they are leaving God. He needs to get out more.

But that’s the danger of institutions: at some point self-preservation becomes their primary goal. And leaders are selected for how strongly they affirm that goal. Yet the point comes when even a sinking ship’s captain has to cry out, “Abandon ship!” and direct everyone into a lifeboat or to grab a life vest and jump. The ship of the church may not be at that point, but it’s getting close.

While those committed to the institutional church see a society skidding into spiritual darkness, I see plenty of evidence of spiritual vitality. We are certainly in a time of exploration where new language, practices, theologies, and philosophies are being tried out and tested. Much may seem strange to the traditionalists, and much will be discarded along the way. But as individuals and in groups, in person and online, people everywhere are actively searching for a spirituality that meaningfully connects their life, in all its dimensions, with the Creative Energy that is our origin and the source of hope and renewal in all our difficulties.

What options does the church have to respond to this new spirituality? I think this popular organizational maxim is as good as any: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Time for Luther to sit down

Time for Luther to sit down

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Scene from the movie "Luther"
Scene from the 2003 film “Luther”

Today is Halloween for most people. In church history, October 31 is considered the start of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. Tradition has it (the history is a little murky) that on that day, Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar, nailed a list of 95 propositions for debate on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, in the German state of Saxony. Soon, thanks to printers looking for excuses to use their new presses, copies of the 95 Theses (as they became known) were spreading across Europe, igniting a firestorm.

Luther’s list was the culmination of a running argument he had been having with church officials over the sale of indulgences. It had been sparked by the arrival in Luther’s neighborhood of perhaps the supreme indulgence seller, one John Tetzel. Let me stop here and say that if you have any interest in this affair, I highly recommend watching Luther, the 2003 biopic staring Joseph Fiennes (Ralph’s brother) in the title role. (Be aware that, by a weird coincidence, there is another 2003 movie called Luther which about a British detective.) The film also features Alfed Molina as a wonderfully twisted Tetzel, and Peter Ustinov, in his last film, as Luther’s protector, Prince Frederick the Wise.

The sale of indulgences was probably the epitome of the corruption and superstition of the medieval Catholic church. While the Renaissance and its new thinking was expanding, it was still very limited. Luther makes clear that 1517 Germany, and by implication much of Europe, was still mired in the Middle Ages.

Indulgences were essentially heavenly get-out-of-jail free cards. They were certificates authorized by the pope releasing the person for whom they were bought from a certain number of years in purgatory (more money = more years canceled). That purgatory was a thing, and that the pope could get your deceased relatives out of it, was part of the medieval world view which, like spinning plates in a circus act, was destined to soon crash to the floor.

In a touching scene in the movie, a young woman of obviously limited intellect, comes Luther to proudly show him the indulgence certificate she has just bought from Tetzel. We watch her smile drop as a crestfallen Luther tells her to save her money because the certificates are worthless. The message is clear. The church is taking advantage of people’s gullibility and anxiety to finance its various projects, which included the building of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

In truth, the church’s spin hasn’t changed much. Protestant propaganda is that the Reformation set people free from the crass legalism of the Catholic church. “We are saved by grace and not by works of the laws” is the classic formulation of this new/old gospel. But, of course, it wasn’t that simple.

For Luther, especially, salvation was something still dispensed by the church. The gospel was the church’s “true treasure”, so one had to be part of the church to receive this gift. So just show up and you’ve got it? Not quite. You have to be baptized, receive communion, and live a moral life.

Oh, and one more thing: you have to have faith. The full Protestant gospel formula is actually “we are saved by grace through faith.” And those two words have tied Protestant (and other) church leaders and theologians in knots ever since. What is “saving” faith? Basically, there have been two interpretations. One essentially equates faith with belief, an intellectual assent or conviction, which often meant having the right “beliefs”, as determined by church authorities. The other view saw faith as an experience, as a spiritual or interior “knowing”, not of doctrines but of a saving relationship with God.

In the first case, the question is: How do you know what the right beliefs are? The church will tell you. How does the church know? God revealed them in the Bible and to the early church leaders. But there are lots of churches and they don’t agree which beliefs are right. How do you know? We’ve got them right. Just trust us.

In the second instance, the question is: How do you know if your faith is real? Again, the church is the decider but not so clearly. Genuine faith wil “bear fruit” in tangible ways. You will “want” to go to church, read your Bible, do works of charity, etc. But again, whether those fruits were real or enough was open for debate. Here too churches differed in their understanding. More troublesome were the doubts in people’s minds: Do I really believe? What about my doubts? My sins? How do I know for sure that I am saved?

The history of Protestantism is essentially the story of the endless debates about these never resolved questions, and the repeated denominational divisions over them. In the meantime, Catholicism cleaned up the worst of its organizational abuses, and got involved in these debates to a degree, but essentially rested on its ancient history and tradition.

The church where I worshiped last Sunday observed Reformation Sunday, as Lutheran churches typically still do. The usual hymns and readings associated with the day were used to stir Lutheran blood, and even the Nicene Creed was dragged out (not typical for this congregation) in all its incomprehensible babble.

In her sermon, the preacher focused on a recent translation change whereby faith in Jesus Christ is now rendered the faith of Jesus Christ. It’s happened in a few places in Paul’s letters but in this case, it was Romans 3:22, “the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ for all who believe.” The Greek can be translated either way, but this version takes the emphasis off our having faith in Jesus and replaces it with Jesus’ faithful service.

The preacher (and presumably the sermon helps she was using) seemed to think this was a big deal. In the case of this passage, however, (or Romans generally) it doesn’t really help in understanding the theological word salad Paul has produced here. And there are other places where the meaning obviously is faith in Christ or God.

“Faith” is used in lots of different ways in the Pauline epistles. And it’s used differently again in the gospels—and not at all in John! Today it’s popular to say the faith should be rendered or understood as “trust,” which may be helpful. But that’s obviously not how it is always meant in the New Testament, nor in the teachings of the Reformation.

Yet none of this gets at the church’s core problem today, which is the meaninglessness of salvation itself. People just don’t care. They aren’t joining the synoptic gospels’ “rich young ruler” in asking, “What must I do to be saved?” Progressive preachers think its wonderful to declare that “salvation is a free gift!” But like a free subscription offer, most people are saying, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Free, discounted, or full price, salvation is a nonstarter for more and more people.

In short, the church needs to get out of the salvation business. Salvation was finished as soon as heaven and hell lost any tangible meaning. But even apart from that, biblical scholars and theologians have been saying for centuries that salvation is not the only lens through which to interpret the Bible, or the most important. Individual salvation gets almost no mention in the Old Testament. Nor is it obviously Jesus’ central concern in the gospels. The church’s salvation obsession is mostly based on its reading of Paul, and even that interpretation is now recognized as simplistic.

What “business” should the church be in? For an answer, the church needs to eat some humble pie and turn to another tradition, from about the time of the prophets but several thousand miles apart: Buddhism. For the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths is the concern of all people: the reality of suffering. More fully: What is suffering? Why do we suffer? Can we keep from suffering? If so, how?

I agree with those who say, especially from a Western perspective, that Buddhism is more philosophy than religion, though that isn’t quite right. In any case, many modern Christians have found Buddhism to be a very compatible spiritual partner and ally. And that for the simple reason that suffering is a major theme of both testaments of the Bible, as well.

In the Old Testament, this is especially true of the wisdom books and the prophets. In the New Testament, it is a theme of Paul (believe it or not) but it especially jumps out in Jesus’ endless concern for people’s ailments and disabilities. Jesus heals everyone who seeks it, often adding enigmatically that it was “your faith” that healed them.

But perhaps it is in John where the alleviating of suffering is most clearly Jesus’ mission. Here Jesus repeatedly offers “eternal life” as the answer to the human predicament, not as something experienced someday in a great beyond but here and now. He promises peace to his troubled disciples, and in John 16 says,

“I have said this to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation [suffering]; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

For the Bible, and especially for the centuries-long Christian mystical tradition, the end of suffering is not a promise in the by-and-by, not a theological doctrine to be believed, nor a social or political project. Rather, it is an experience of awakening and rebirth, the discovery of our true nature, and being set free from the endless turmoil of our egoic obsessions.

If we want to still use the word, “salvation” then is not from sin, the devil, or the wrath of God. Rather, the gospel is the we are “saved” by being set free from the delusions and suffering of our false self. We awaken to our oneness with God, to as Jesus says the kingdom of God within us, to our essential nature as Spirit.

In other words, Christianity has the seeds for its own rebirth. But as Jesus says in John, it has to let the old plants die for the new seeds to fall to the ground and sprout anew. Luther said he had to take a stand to reform the church. Today, it’s past time for him to take a seat.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

No going back

No going back

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I don’t read New York Times columnist Ross Douthat very much anymore, but when I do I can usually count on him to say something to make my blood boil. He accomplished that again last weekend.

It isn’t clear to me what commentary niche Douthat fills for the Times. Most of his topics fall under the categories of culture, politics, and religion, which is a pretty broad front. Religion, however, seems to be his special interest. Douthat, after a swing through Pentecostalism, became a convert to traditionalist Roman Catholicism. In other words, he leans much more toward JP II and Benedict than Pope Francis.

This weekend’s offending column was titled, “Is the World Ready for a Religious Comeback?” One of Douthat’s favorite topics is the decline of religion and the need to revive it. As he does here, he talks often about the sad consequences for society of religion’s shrinking importance.

Despite that concern, Douthat dismisses most movements for religious reform, whether from progressive Catholics or Protestants. And while he talks a lot about what society has lost with religion’s decline, rarely does he talk about that decline’s causes, like the sex abuse scandals, oppression of women, intransigence on moral issues, politicization, and generally clinging to an outdated premodern worldview. Douthat often gives the impression he would be very happy to return to the 1950s, if not much earlier.

There is so much wrong with this latest column of Douthat’s it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s a prime example of how if you don’t understand the problem, then of course you won’t say sensible things about solving it. He begins by recalling the best-seller popularity of various “anti-God” books published shortly after 9-11. Dubbed the “New Atheists”, these authors wrote high profile books about the anti-intellectual absurdity of religion, and the disastrous political and social consequences of fundamentalism, exemplified by the Al-Qaeda attacks.

Douthat mistakenly believes these books represented some dramatic turning point in modern religion’s decline. But their popularity actually showed the depth of a decline that was already well underway. No one read these books and thought, “Wow! I hadn’t thought of that before. I guess I’ll stop going to church.” Rather, most people read these books to have their previous doubts and disdain confirmed. And in that, the books were very successful.

Douthat begins with these 20-year-old books because the focus of his article are three new books showing, in his view, a way back to religion. The authors are all Christian neo-conservatives, like Douthat, who discloses he also has book along similar lines about to come out. Apparently, the publishing pendulum has swung to the other side.

I think Douthat’s biggest mistake is thinking that the crisis in Christianity is primarily an intellectual one. It does have such a problem to the extent that it clings to its ancient and medieval worldview. But that’s not primarily why people have been leaving the church. They’ve been leaving because Christianity is failing them as religion.

That’s not to say that people are leaving Christianity for some other of the world’s religions. As I’ve said before, all the world’s ancient religions are long past their sell-by dates. You can find neglected or abandoned temples and shrines everywhere. Religious revivals still happen from time-to-time, for mostly local reasons. But the fact is that for the vast majority of urbanized people, wherever they are, the traditional ancient religions simply do not connect with their modern lives. Yet people are still looking for spiritual meaning and direction.

Douthat blithely dismisses the rise of the “spiritual but not religious” as having peaked (based on one report out this summer). This is a good thing, in his view, since these spiritual seekers, unmoored from the guidance of religion, have been descending into all sorts of absurdities.

The decline of religious membership and practice is increasingly seen as a social problem rather than a great leap forward. People raised without belief are looking for meaning in psychedelics, astrology, U.F.O.s. And lately the rise of the “Nones” — Americans with no religious affiliation — has finally leveled off. So the world seems primed for religious arguments in the same way it was primed for the new atheists 20 years ago.

Douthat needs to get out of his evangelical academic bubble more often. There are no signs that churches are experiencing any kind of revival. Or that more people are finding “meaning” in psychedelics, astrology, and UFOs (!). Or that people are now “primed for religious arguments.” (Douthat is the type of evangelical who believes the answer to the church’s problems is to get more people to read C. S. Lewis.)

Despite its being disconnected from organized religion, the spiritual quest of people today is genuine and very much alive. It is necessarily amorphous and hard to measure. Those who study such things often dismiss it because it doesn’t fit into traditional religious boxes, but that’s a mistake. Something genuinely new is arising, even if its form is not yet apparent.

At the end of his essay, Douthat wonders “whether contemporary disillusionment with secularism is enough to draw people to the threshold of religion.” But why is religion the only option? Secularism was a response to the failures of religion. Yet religion’s flaws haven’t been fixed, so why would going back to it make any sense?

Today’s spiritual quest is not disconnected from the past but it is not a return to the past, either. It’s biggest difference, especially in relation to orthodox Christianity, is its dismissal of theism: belief in a divine being—God—somewhere “out there.” The bearded, robed man on a throne above the clouds simply can’t be reimagined in a way that makes sense in the modern world. Yet traditional Western religion simply cannot shake its attachment to this ancient, mythical figure. For modern people, however, it’s a nonstarter.

Yet the question which gave the initial energy to the great world religions remains at the heart of today’s spiritual searching: Who am I? In the 5th century BCE, the maxim “Know thyself” was inscribed on the Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi. That goal has been a central pursuit of philosophy, religion, science, literature, and spirituality ever since.

In the modern world, difficulty answering the question, “Who am I?”, has been the primary source of popular anxiety and confusion. Religion used to provide a workable answer for us but doesn’t anymore. To say one is a “child of God” sounds reassuring until you realize you don’t have a meaningful understanding of who God is.

The essence of spirituality is the conviction that our being is spirit, and thus we are all divine, already and always one with God. While religion believes our goal is to find and connect with God, spirituality’s goal is for us to awake to the unity we already have with God. In the words of the French theologian and mystic, Teilhard de Chardin:

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

The primary activity of worship is the verbal expression of praise and prayer to the God beyond us. The primary activity of spirituality is meditation, the growing awareness in contemplative silence of our true nature as spirit and one with God.

Spirituality is not foreign to religion. Far from it. But it has almost always been a “minority opinion,” contained in monasteries or among desert recluses. Whenever it began to expand beyond those confines, it was usually suppressed by religious authorities.

Today, spirituality is again spilling out into the world. This time, however, religious authorities lack both the power and the credibility to contain it. Instead, as Douthat does here, it is simply ignored, in hopes it will just go away. They don’t understand that it may well be our world’s best hope that it spreads far and wide.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Repurposing the church: conclusion (part 3)

Repurposing the church: conclusion (part 3)

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Storefront church
A storefront church in Toronto.

In almost any conversation about the church’s future, the elephant in the room, the thing everyone is aware of but no one wants to talk about, is God. Perhaps it’s because people take God as a given, needing no discussion, but I don’t think so. For some it may be that they would feel too awkward or embarrassed. But I think the main reason God is “off the table” is that people know it would open a can of worms. It would reveal that people are all over the map on who or what God is, and that few adhere to the church’s “official” position.

It’s been well over a century since the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead … and we have killed him.” Despite hysterical distortions by his opponents then and since, Nietzsche was basically reporting a historical fact: the notion of God common in the ancient and medieval world was no more. That God was “killed” by the creation of a science-based world that has no place for such a God. That God is now homeless and unemployed, since heaven has no place in the universe and the universe has no need for God to keep it going.

Are a scientific worldview and the idea of God incompatible? Well, yes and no. If God is a being in some extraterrestrial location called heaven, who intervenes in the operation of the universe and the affairs of humanity, then yes, you have to choose one or the other. And if you choose science, then no God. This, of course, is the fundamentalists’ assumption and the reason for their hostility to the modern world.

Yet most Christians (including most fundamentalists to a degree) want to have their cake and eat it too. They accept science and the marvels it has brought to modern life, yet somehow also want to keep a personal God existing somewhere out there. Thus, Christians live with their religion and their science-dominated daily lives in separate compartments, with interaction between them rare and, when it does happen, awkward, if not explosive.

Or at least, that’s how it’s been. For I think we have reached a tipping point where most people now find this an impossible and unnecessary juggling act. The one bond above all others which has held people to the church is finally dissolving, and that’s a belief in a theistic God, God as an extraterrestrial being somewhere out there.

I say both impossible and unnecessary because people are discovering that, despite the church’s age-old denial, there are other ways to understand and experience God. Furthermore, many Christians are discovering that within Christianity there have always been alternative viewpoints, expressed by the mystics but also more than a few theologians, not to mention countless ordinary clergy and lay church members.

The growing number of those identifying as “spiritual but not religious” is the most tangible sign of this movement. These are people who have abandoned the theistic deity of traditional religion yet maintain a belief in an essential spiritual and sacred dimension to life. As surveys have shown, many may still express a belief in God, but often this is not the God of the church’s creeds and doctrines. This is often a God of experience rather than of theological belief.

A few months ago I wrote a blog post called “God Has Left the Building” and discussed how spirituality is rapidly displacing traditional notions of religion like Christianity.

Spirituality is now in broad use to refer to the experience of the sacred and of mystery in life and in the world. Many teachers and authors of various religious traditions, and of no tradition, commonly use the term to identify this dimension of reality. Spirituality is being seen as a way to reestablish our connection with the natural world and stem our abuse of it. And, being a religiously “neutral” term, spirituality is also providing a new opening for interaction with the sciences, especially psychology and theoretical physics.

Unfortunately, traditional Christianity is largely left behind in all this. The church cannot let go of “the Big Guy upstairs”, with its hymns, prayers, and rituals still directed to this imaginary being somewhere “above” us, imploring his forgiveness for our misdeeds and intervention in our many problems. While such piety still has some appeal, it is shrinking by the day, as evidenced by the ever-increasing numbers of empty pews.

The biggest thing missed by today’s distressed church leaders is that the church’s decline is largely a rejection of worship and the theistic God worship is centered on. Shrinking worship attendance means that millions of people have realized that they can get along fine without it and its weekly reconnection to the God-out-there. This is the reason the pandemic lockdown was such a blow. Forced to stop their worship practice, many discovered they didn’t really miss it and found other things to do with that time.

The pandemic lockdown was a missed opportunity, for this was when the church could have recognized that worship’s time is over. As I go on to say in the post I quoted above, the problem with worship is the church’s problem with God. The theistic God in heaven, the “sky God” as he’s sometimes been called, or God as Batman as Sam Harris described him, swooping in to rescue us from disaster, simply doesn’t work in the world today. As long as it clings to such a notion, the church can’t say anything intelligible, let alone meaningful, about such a God.

As I have shared these ideas in various places and settings, I rarely if ever get any pushback. While some raised in the church still cling to its traditional notions, the vast majority of people, both inside and outside the church, have moved on. Yet the church has hardly budged. Especially in worship, its hymns, liturgy, prayers, creeds, and preaching still assume this yawning gap between God, reigning in heaven, and the world and each one of us.

Spirituality is the recognition that there is no gap. God, as Paul says in Acts, is the one “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” Or as St. Augustine said, and many spiritual teachers have repeated over the centuries, “God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” And as Meister Eckhart says, the man who 700 years ago spearheaded the greatest effort to redirect the church toward this orientation:

Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God.

Churches measure their vitality by how many people are in worship, yet it is worship that is dragging down the church. It is like an addiction, a habit the church can’t let go of. That many people, especially clergy, would be astonished, and even outraged, at such an idea shows how difficult breaking this habit will be. They don’t see that culture is breaking that habit for them, as churches close by the thousands.

No doubt many repurposed churches will retain a regular community gathering, though hopefully called something other than “worship”. But here is the great learning opportunity: let members reexamine church traditions and decide how they can be reimagined and repurposed, or that they just need to go. What opens us to recognize God’s presence here and now? How do we recognize the holiness of this time and place, of everyone present, and of the world around us? And how do we tell the story of Jesus, not as the Son of God, but as a child of God who lived to show that this is the identity of every person?

For this, finally, is what a repurposed church is about: following Jesus as the revealer of our oneness with God, of our true nature as Spirit, of each of our beings as a unique embodiment of God’s own Being. In that light, much of what has passed for “essential” church life will fade away or be radically reimagined. The church will no longer proclaim the “story of salvation” as Christ’s deliverance of the world from sin. Rather, the church will be a place to “experience salvation” as the awakening to our true nature, revealed in Jesus’ life and teaching.

A repurposed church will be a place to learn from spiritual masters of past and present, whatever their religious label. Here people will be guided to follow the “pathless path”, which leads them to where they already are by discovering they have never NOT been apart from God, but only lost in their egoic mind’s delusions of separateness. In a repurposed church they will be supported in a journey inward, to discover both their true selves and the God who is the core of their being. As Meister Eckhart taught,

There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven.

This may be the most difficult of the lessons a repurposed church must learn, but it is crucial. That after a centuries-long obsession with words—scripture, creeds, doctrines, theology, sermons, hymns, prayers, liturgy—God is not found in them. Rather, as Elijah learned at the mouth of his cave, God is in our silence. And in a repurposed church, silence will be its sacrament.

 

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Repurposing the church

Repurposing the church

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A former church now become a restaurant
The former Good Shepherd Lutheran Church building now serves as a restaurant.

Earlier this month, a New York Times article told the story of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in the Chicago suburb of Des Plaines, not far from O’Hare airport. Well, it actually told the story of its building because Good Shepherd no longer exists. It closed a number of years ago and its building, situated in a pastoral lakeside setting, was converted into an upscale restaurant. The article highlights one couple who came to the restaurant to celebrate their wedding anniversary. They had been married in that same building 34 years earlier.

The story goes on to tell of a number of church buildings around the country repurposed in a variety of ways.

Around the world, houses of worship have been converted to restaurants, breweries, hotels, art centers, theaters and even sports complexes. Some abandoned churches have been transformed into mixed-use developments, blending retail and residential space, and affordable housing.

A church in New York City became a disco and one in St. Louis a skate park. Years ago, I stayed in a Chicago church that had become a B&B and I’ve seen a number of church buildings converted to single family homes.

The possibilities are presumably endless—as are the opportunities. Churches are closing by the thousands every year. A sociologist of church trends is quoted as saying that 100,000 Protestant churches in the US could close this decade, which would be close to 20% of such congregations. This after thousands closed in prior years. The story for Roman Catholic parishes is much the same.

Having spent most of my professional life in churches, I can say with some confidence that this situation will only get worse before it gets better, whatever “better” might mean. For most of the people remaining in churches, better means stopping their church’s membership shrinkage and then start growing again. Na’ gonna’ happen. But it’s almost impossible to convince churchgoers of that. I know. I’ve tried.

The people remaining in congregations like going to church. Most have done it all their lives and want to keep doing it as long as they can. Talk of changing, renewing, remaking, transforming the church gets a blank look from them. “We like it the way it is. We just wish there were more of us.” But in fact, their numbers are getting steadily older and fewer. Last one out, turn off the lights.

Now one might think church leaders, who are primarily clergy, would be steering churches in a new direction but they don’t get it either. For most of them, also, the primary goal is to preserve the institution. Which isn’t surprising since clergy are essentially trained to be institutional leaders. But that’s unfortunate since it is the institutional nature of Christianity that is the problem.

In a blog post last fall, Marshall Davis, a retired Baptist minister and now teacher of nondual Christianity, sees the church’s day of reckoning fast approaching.

The church does not have a problem; the church is the problem. The church thinks the problem is in the culture outside the church, but the real problem is in the church culture. The church does not see that, and therefore it has no motivation to change. Instead it doubles down on the culture wars. Because of the church’s spiritual blindness, the only solution left to God is so drastic that no one wants to think about it.

The church needs to die, so it can be resurrected as an entirely new creation. For that reason I am not dismayed when I read ever-worsening statistics about the decline of the church. I see God’s hand in it. Like a gardener or farmer, God is turning over the soil, in order to prepare for a new season.

Most people today just aren’t interested in belonging to a church, or to any other religious organization for that matter. That’s very hard for Christians, lay or clergy, to comprehend. For them being a Christian means belonging to a church. They enjoy the worship services (mostly), the “coffee and” after worship, Bible studies, service opportunities, etc.

Primarily, though, people enjoy the friendships they have with other church members who they encounter at such events. But newcomers or people outside a congregation’s “inner circle” often find these activities are “not all that.” Add to that the scandals, political divisions, and internal squabbles that rack many congregations and folks looking in from the outside will say, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

More than the church’s organizational flaws, however, is the fact that it is simply not offering what people are looking for. In clinging to its traditions, the church has been blinded to a cultural sea change occurring all around it. The result, as Davis says in a later post, is that people are looking elsewhere to meet their spiritual needs.

I see God at work in the hearts and minds of people who are leaving the church. People are looking more closely at what they believe … and don’t believe. They are deconstructing the faith they were raised in (if they were raised in a religious tradition). Upon careful examination, many are deciding that their religious tradition is not true. 

So church decline has little to do with liberal or conservative. It has everything to do with people looking for meaning and purpose, beauty and truth, community and meaningful relationships in life. People are not finding those in churches, so they are looking elsewhere. They are looking to other religious traditions and humanistic philosophies. They are exploring other spiritual practices and beliefs.  

Throughout my ministry career, I have watched my denomination, and others like it, struggle to stem their decline. The proposals and renewal programs have been endless, and millions of dollars spent on them. Nothing has changed. But to use a commercial metaphor, all of these efforts have dealt with the packaging. No one, it seems, whether in the pews or the pulpit, dares to question whether it might actually be the product itself that is the problem.

Specifically, but only briefly, the church needs to finally acknowledge that its ancient sin/salvation shtick is over. Not only are people outside not interested in it but many in the pews—and pulpits!—don’t buy it anymore, either. The carrot-and-stick of heaven and hell are way past their sell by date. Many churches today, of course, barely pay lip service to this tradition. Yet it is still at the core of these churches’ creeds, liturgies, calendars, prayers, hymns, and education materials.

“But that’s what Jesus is all about, isn’t it?” That’s certainly the direction the early church pulled him and it’s the direction the church has gone ever since. But there is good evidence now that many early Christians were not onboard with that viewpoint and instead understood Jesus very differently (see the gospel of Thomas, for instance, where the crucifixion and resurrection are never mentioned). And throughout its history, there has always been a minority in the church who viewed Jesus as something other than a “savior from sin”, the mystics being the most notable.

More importantly, thanks to modern New Testament scholarship, and when we remove our “savior-colored glasses”, it has become easy to see that Jesus himself showed little interest in salvation religion, his “attack” on the temple being perhaps Exhibit A. Rather, his primary concern was with the suffering of people in their daily lives, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual. In Mark, the gospel’s “good news” is that God’s kingdom is here, now, at our finger tips. And in Luke Jesus declares,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

While the church certainly affirms these texts, what isn’t acknowledged is that they have nothing to do with the ancient sin/salvation mantra the church has recited for nearly two millennia. It is so ingrained that, as I said above, the church’s predicament will have to get worse before it gets better. People within the church today won’t be able to undo the doctrines, imagery, and language that have sustained the church for so long. It’s what they’re there for.

Nonetheless, I share Marshall Davis’ view that from this dying will come a new rising. The Spirit is indeed “turning over the soil.” It may not look like much now but in the spring, however long that is in coming, new growth will appear. Then, repurposing church buildings will give way to repurposing the church itself.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Untangling Jesus

Untangling Jesus

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Tangled yarn

16 For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.  1 Thessalonians 4

26 “Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. 27 Then he will send out the angels and gather the elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven…. When you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. 30 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.  Mark 13

20 Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, 21 nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among and within you.”  Luke 17

His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?” Jesus said, “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”  Thomas 113

What is the kingdom of God? How do we find it, or when is it coming? The passages above are examples of how the New Testament can contradict itself. Even more, they represent the fundamental divide in the church’s understanding of Jesus’ message.

The first quotation is from the oldest Christian writing we know, Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians. Writing about twenty years after Jesus’ death, Paul is convinced Jesus will return very soon “in glory” to bring about the consummation of all history and establish his reign over all creation. In the passage from Mark, Jesus expresses essentially this same idea. This time, however, writing twenty years after Paul, it will be Mark’s readers, reeling from the catastrophic Jewish-Roman War, who will experience this.

In the passage from Luke, however, written fifteen or twenty years after Mark, Jesus explicitly rejects the notion that God’s kingdom is coming, sooner or later, because it’s already here! The quotation from the Gospel of Thomas expresses a very similar idea, with Jesus adding the explanation that, while the kingdom is here, most people don’t see the it.

The difference in these texts is not just about timing. The kingdom envisioned by Paul and by Jesus in the Mark passage is very different than Jesus’ idea of the kingdom in the stories from Luke and Thomas. In the first instance, the kingdom represents the apocalyptic establishment of God’s eternal rule. The statements by Jesus in Luke and Thomas, however, are enigmatic. What does it mean to say the kingdom is among you or within you or “spread out upon the earth”?

I think Jesus left most people puzzled, including his disciples. The curious scene where Jesus asks the disciples who people think he is points to the popular confusion. As I wrote last time, Albert Schweitzer came to the conclusion that Jesus thought his mission was to be the spark that initiated the coming of God’s kingdom, but it didn’t happen. He failed.

There are scholars today that agree with Schweitzer but I think they are wrong. Nonetheless, I recognize that there isn’t the evidence to resolve this conclusively one way or the other. As I quoted Robert Price, we have too many Jesuses. But neither do I think figuring out who Jesus really was is our concern. Instead, I believe we need to listen to the many Jesus voices to hear what speaks to us here and now.

Regardless of what Jesus intended, most of his followers, aka the church, have interpreted his teaching about the kingdom in one of two ways. Either God was going to bring about the establishment of the kingdom with Jesus’ return and at a definite time which Christians could anticipate, or the kingdom was coming at some indefinite and unknowable time in the future.

The Paul and Mark quotes obviously are in the first category. As time when on and Jesus did not return, this first interpretation fell out of favor. But it didn’t disappear. Over the centuries, movements have sprung up, usually in times of social crisis, which believed that Jesus’ return was imminent. Quotations from Paul’s letters, the gospels, and especially the book of Revelation have been patched together to support these groups’ predictions. Most recently, large numbers of evangelicals have held such beliefs, often with bizarre consequences.

It is the second view of Christ’s return and the kingdom’s coming which has been more common, however. The church became Christ’s interim institutional representative, keeping the lights burning, however long that might be, until the bridegroom returned, as one of Jesus’ parables says. But waiting is hard (as the same parable teaches). What are we supposed to do in the mean time?

As the centuries went by, the church found it more and more difficult to come up with an answer to that question. In effect, the church itself became the answer: build up the church as an institution, recruit lots of clergy and religious, develop elaborate doctrines and theology, and create more Christians by birth or conversion. I think we all know how well that strategy has turned out.

The institutional church has gone through endless cycles of growth, power abuse, corruption, infighting, division, and reform. The folks in the pews were mostly taken for granted. “Go to church, live life as best you can, and when you die God will take care of you.” Since the Enlightenment and rise of modernism, fewer and fewer people have been satisfied with either the church or its message of salvation after you die. In the West, at least, the church is now on life support and Christianity as a religion is hardly taken seriously.

The natural response of those distressed about this turn of events is to wonder how the church and Christianity can be revived. In other words, how to turn the cycle once again. I’m not sure that’s possible anymore. More importantly, I don’t think it’s even desirable because I don’t believe it’s what Jesus ever intended.

As we’ve seen, Jesus either believed the kingdom was coming very soon, or it wasn’t “coming” at all because it was already here. The option the church chose, that the kingdom would come at some indefinite time in the distant future, was not one of the options. It made that one up. The church has had an amazingly long run with it but has finally run out of gas.

But what about that second option, that the kingdom of God is already here? Well, that actually is part of the story, as well, though one largely unknown or forgotten. In fact, it is a thread that has run throughout the church’s history.

It is the story of the monastics and the mystics. It is the story of clergy, theologians, and lay people who quietly snuck this idea into their conventional beliefs and practices. It the story of others who boldly declared such beliefs in contrast with official teaching and were persecuted and even martyred for their efforts. And it is the story of everyday piety, often simple, sometimes superstitious or magical, but which believes that at any time and in any place, we are in God’s presence.

There is a tradition found in nearly all religions, but especially in the East, that the greatest source of humanity’s suffering is our own ego. In traditional Christianity the ego is our sinful self which we must struggle to control and subdue. But there is another understanding, shared with religions of the East, that the problem actually is that the ego is a fraud. It is an imposter, a “false self” blocking our vision of our true self, our sacred sense of “I am”, the indwelling Spirit, or simply God.

To discover this is to awaken to our true nature. The ego doesn’t need to be fought in a moral wrestling match in which few succeed. Rather, it needs to be seen through, discovering in the process that we are not separate selves but we are all united as incarnations of the one Self. In Jesus’ words, we need to lose our life to find it. In describing his own spiritual awakening, Paul says that “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”

Our world of 8 billion separate egos is careening towards disaster. And the more of us there are, the more isolated, lonely, angry, and afraid we become. Yet that is how our culture wants us to view ourselves, “growing the economy” as we all scramble to get ahead of everyone else.

But what if we took Jesus seriously, and literally, when he says the greatest commandment can be expressed in two ways, which in practice mean the same thing? That our life’s purpose is to love the one God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as ourselves. That true peace and happiness are found when we unite in love with the Being who is the ground of all reality, and that when we love our neighbor, we are actually loving ourself since we are all manifestation of the one Self.

In another passage near the beginning of the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says this:

“The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the children of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.”

“Spiritual poverty” may be one of the best descriptions of life in our world today. Yet there is a thread running through the world’s religions that says it doesn’t have to be this way. This wisdom tradition says that we suffer from a case of mistaken identity, a global amnesia about our true self. The Jesus tradition, and the Christian religion which grew from it share that thread, though few have known to look for it. While mostly falling on deaf ears in the past, it is this voice of Jesus and the Spirit that we most need to listen for.

 

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Fixing worship

Fixing worship

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woman sitting alone in a churchI have been to many wonderful worship services. I like to think I’ve planned and led a few. Overall, however, I would say the quality of worship is declining because churches are increasingly uncertain what worship is actually for. But that’s only a symptom of worship’s troubles.

For most of its history, worship is the basket into which the church has placed nearly all its eggs. The popular phrase “going to church” says it all. Worship is what church is about, this saying assumes. Further, it’s an essentially passive activity. You go to worship, you attend a service, like you go to a movie or attend a graduation. You are primarily a viewer of the featured event.

With the rise of popular culture in the 20th century, churches began to realize worship was losing its hold on people. They recognized that they needed to do a better job of “connecting with their audience.” The Catholic church substituted Latin for modern vernacular languages and Protestants gave up King James English for more modern versions. Music became more contemporary. To get people more involved, communion became more frequent. A new emphasis was placed on lay worship leadership.

All of this remained, however, within the context of worship as “spectator sport” because that’s what worship is. Even if you’re singing, reading, dancing, or giving a communion cup, you’re doing it for the congregation, the vast majority of whom walked in, took a program, found a seat, and then followed directions. Sometimes they joined in the singing or liturgy but mostly they watched and listened to what was going on up front. Which is what they expected to do when they came.

All the time I was a parish pastor, one of my primary objectives was to “improve worship.” In my last years, however, I came to realize that such efforts were putting lipstick on a pig. Better worship changed nothing. More specifically, it didn’t change people.

Since at least the 4th century, Christianity has been largely a passive activity. That was its appeal: it was simple. Be baptized, go to church, believe a few things about God and Jesus, make some effort to be a good person, and you’re in. The church was a carrot-and-stick institution, wielding the threat of hell and dangling the promise of heaven to keep people coming. Worship was the main place that wielding and dangling took place. It was there that you got your ticket punched to eventually be admitted to the main event “upstairs.”

With the advent of the modern world, that scenario went into a long, steady decline. The carrot and stick stopped working. Worship became a feel-good act of nostalgia, supplemented with some contemporary entertainment and self-help advice. Coffee hour and potlucks became as much of a draw. Now, though, few remember or long for the church of yore, and thousands of congregations close in the US every year.

To cut to the chase, religion assumes an enormous gap exists between God and humanity. There are many explanations for why this is so (“original sin” is the most notorious), but it is religion’s job to bridge that gap for us. Worship is essentially an endless reiteration of the story of Jesus as the “gap-bridger.”

Spirituality, on the other hand, assumes that we are actually one with God, but we are blind to that reality and do not experience it. Here the culprit is our identification with an illusory separate self, created in our mind, often called the ego. This is the mask we wear, our persona (the Greek word for mask), which is actually hiding our true being. In Christian terms this is God’s own Spirit. It is our sense of “I am”: silent, imperturbable, and eternal. It is what Paul describes as “the peace that surpasses all understanding.” It is God’s own being incarnate in us.

This is why Jesus says that we must lose our life (ego) in order to find it (spirit). It is the essence of Paul’s experience of the risen Jesus, described in Galatians 2:

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

Unfortunately, power brokers in the early church drained these teachings of their spiritual content and twisted them into a legalistic framework of sin and forgiveness. Jesus’ death ceased to be a metaphor and model of the ego death we must all undergo and became instead the God-required atoning death for human sin, whose benefits only the church could provide.

In the gospels, Jesus is the human face of God. Early on, official church teaching added and he is the only human face of God. But there are plenty of stories that contradict this. For example, Jesus says both that he is the light of the world and that we are the light of the world. Why do we hear so much about the first but little about the latter?

In the closing parable of Matthew, people are judged for how they treated “the Son of man” when they encountered him in the poor, sick, hungry, naked, and imprisoned. Jesus also says the kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed because it’s already here, within us and all around us. And Paul challenges his readers, “Do you not know your body is a temple of the holy Spirit?”

In its ancient and indigenous forms, worship renewed and celebrated people’s experience of the sacred in their lives and in the world. The church needs to rediscover that tradition. To do so, it will need to get rid of its carrots and sticks once and for all. It will need to drop the notion that people are coming to find God and realize instead that God arrives with every person who walks in the door.

In poetry and prose, spoken and sung, worship must find new words (and rediscover old ones) that open people’s eyes and hearts to the eternal spirit that surrounds and fills them. But just as importantly, worship must enable the most profound experience of sacred being, which is silence. For only in silence do we realize that we are not the ego’s endless chatter and thoughts. Only in silence do we recognize our true nature as boundless awareness and eternal peace. In silence, we know ourselves as God’s own spirit. Even the ancient Israelites are directed in the Psalms, “Be still and know that I am God.”

 

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Why worship?

Why worship?

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Church interior with people sitting in pewsMy last blog post crossed what would traditionally have been a theological “red line.” I came out, in essence, as a (qualified) a-theist. As I said, I do not believe in a divine being existing someplace “out there.” In the context of the Trinity, I rejected “God the Father” as an ancient concept that makes no sense in the modern world.

And what was the response? Silence. Well, mostly silence. I did get a few positive comments but nothing in disagreement. No one unsubscribed. One person made a donation. But the truth is that a statement which through most of Christian history would have been viewed as heresy, with possibly dire consequences, got nods of agreement or, perhaps, yawns of indifference.

Now I know that my audience is not a representative sample of the population or of Christians. Certainly, some Christians reading my post would have a fit. But I think it’s significant that this group of mostly mainline Protestant and progressive Catholics were open to what I said, either as a new idea or as confirmation of something they already believed. I don’t think they are unusual.

In the seven months since we moved, I have been to a church worship service six times, the last on Easter Sunday. The two nearby congregations my denomination don’t work for me at all. There are a few churches of other denominations I like, yet after worshiping at them I haven’t felt any real desire to go back.

After I left their services, my reaction was that they were just too much. Too much what? Too much talk, mostly. Paraphrasing the emperor’s criticism of Mozart in Amadeus, there were just too many words: hymns, prayers, liturgy, readings, sermons, and assorted miscellaneous commentary.

In the last years of my ministry, my goal was for a Sunday service to not last more than forty-five minutes. This past Advent, I attended an Episcopal service which lasted an hour and forty minutes! I couldn’t help but think of Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 6: “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words.”

Increasingly I have wondered, “What is worship for?” Traditionally, Christian worship has been very theistic. Its various actions have been directed towards the God-out-there: praise, prayer, confession, lament, etc. Creeds and hymns usually presume a theistic God.

More recently, however, worship has become increasingly directed towards the congregation, with a wide range of entertainment and self-help components, plus the clergy’s inclination for chit-chat (yours truly included). The intention is to make worship personal, relatable, relevant, accessible, casual, etc. All of which is an admission that traditional worship is now failing most people.

So, what should worship look like if, as I wrote last week and I think many people intuitively believe, God isn’t “out there” but right here, within us and all around us? If, as Paul is quoted to say in Acts, God is “the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being”? Let me use again a quote I cited in a recent video. It’s from the story in John 4 of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. She asks Jesus whether the Jewish temple or the Samaritan one is the right place to worship. Jesus replies,

“Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem, … when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.”

What does “in spirit and truth” mean? From the rest of John, as well as from the other gospels, I don’t think Jesus has in mind anything to do with sitting in a building in rows of seats, focused on the action on a stage up front. In fact, this story is the only place in the gospels where Jesus actually talks about worship, and in its traditional sense, he essentially dismisses it. Jesus shows little personal interest in worship and rarely, if ever, directs anyone else to worship.

Traditionally, worship was done for God because presumably that’s what God wanted. Nearly everyone worshiped at their local congregation because that’s what you did. You might have opinions, pro or con, about the minister, the building, the music, etc. but it had nothing to do with deciding whether or where you were going to worship. Today, as I said above, the focus is on what the congregation wants. Where people worship, or if they worship at all, is very much dependent on what they like and whether they are “getting anything out of it.”

There is a story told about a medieval stonemason creating an intricate carving for a high and inaccessible space of a cathedral. He was asked why he was putting so much work into something no one would see. “God will see it,” was his response. He was almost certainly sincere but I can’t imagine anyone having such an attitude today.

To “worship in spirit and in truth” is much like Paul’s admonition to “pray without ceasing.” It isn’t about reciting prayers, performing rituals, or attending a weekly event called worship. Rather, it is a life stance, an attitude, an orientation. It is to live with a constant awareness of the sacredness of life: of ourselves, of every person, and of the world around us. This is the meaning of spirituality.

There are, of course, what are typically called “spiritual practices” which help develop and maintain such an awareness. Their purpose is not to “please God” but to awaken us to God’s presence within us, as us, and all around us. Meditation, or contemplative prayer, is usually seen as the basic and essential practice for spiritual awareness. But again, rather than something to be done, most spiritual teachers agree that ultimately meditation becomes simply part of who we are and how we are present in life.

Traditional worship is not about this. Worship is about fulfilling a religious task. In worship, some may experience moments of spiritual awareness, but they are not assumed or expected. Nor is it assumed that worship will lead to metamorphosis, to transformation, which is what both Jesus and Paul mean by salvation. It will not awaken us from the illusion of duality and separation to the fundamental truth of our oneness in God with all creation.

In a recent church newsletter, the pastor said that the single most important reason their church existed was to provide the space and time to worship. I have no doubt many or most pastors believe this, as do many of their churches’ remaining members. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people share that interest, and for good reason.

Today, people don’t want to go through religious motions but to know spiritual truth, as Jesus says to the woman at the well. They want to know “the peace that surpasses all understanding,” the silent sacred presence that is at the core of our being. People no longer want to imagine a God out there but rather, they want to know the God within.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

 

God has left the building

God has left the building

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Intoned in a dramatic voice (by lead actor Kelsey Grammer), many of the episodes of the long running TV comedy, Frasier, concluded with the announcement, “Frasier has left the building.” If he had known the phrase, the iconoclastic 19th century German philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche, might have used it and declared, “God has left the building.” Instead, he famously (or infamously) said, “God is dead … and we have killed him.”

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday. It is an odd “feast day” because it is the only one dedicated to a doctrine. The Trinity has been argued about throughout church history. The meaning of it has never been clearly stated, so that Jews and Muslims both view it as a polytheistic heresy. Nearly every group that has separated from orthodox Christianity has done so, at least in part, over rejecting the Trinity.

Nonetheless, century after century, the church has clung to the Trinity like a life preserver. But as is always the case when we need to rise to a new level of maturity, it’s time for the church to let it go, and swim.

Typically, the problem with the Trinity has been with “persons” two and three: Jesus, as the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit. How could the human Jesus be divine? How can the Holy Spirit be a separate divine entity? But I don’t think that’s the real problem. The “problem” is actually with the first person, God the Father, because he’s the one that’s “left the building.”

When I was in seminary in the late 1970s, there was great controversy over “God language” and the maleness of God. “Inclusive language” should be used to refer to God, it was said, as God was not male or female. Or God was both. It was never clear which it was. Old prayers and hymns were revised to reflect this, and new ones were created. Even the Bible was retranslated. But the results of all this were often awkward and stilted.

What was rarely discussed, however, was who, or what, this God actually is. In other words, Nietzsche’s announcement from over a century ago was not part of the conversation. In debating God’s gender, were we actually talking about anything at all?

“God is dead… and we have killed him.” That second phrase often gets left off. What Nietzsche was referring to was the transition to the modern world. In ancient and medieval times, superhuman divine beings existed in a nearly invisible heavenly realm above the clouds. The three-tiered universe was like a layer cake, a lower realm or “underworld” of the dead and/or hell, earth was the middle layer, and above that was an upper realm called heaven. It was often believed to have several levels of its own, where God, or the gods, and various angelic-type beings all existed.

As I said in my latest video, all this, of course, was swept away by Galileo and his scientific successors. The being called God, or God the Father in Christian terms, disappeared along with God’s abode. How can there be a God if there is no place for God to be? That this is now universally accepted is demonstrated by the fact that no one is breathless waiting for the new Webb telescope, peering further into space than ever before, to discover heaven at the edge of the universe. God the Father has left the building.

The belief in God as a supreme being existing somewhere “out there” is called theism. To not believe in such a God is called a-theism. In American culture, it’s one of the most disreputable labels a person can be given. But that’s because it’s misunderstood to mean not believing in God, when it actually means not believing in the theistic being God-out-there.

Recently, pollsters have expressed confusion about why the decline in religious identity has not been matched by a rise in atheism, which remains in the low single-digits. That’s because many of these people also think atheism means “no god.” In reality, many of them likely are a-theists because they have dropped a belief in a God-out-there. But that doesn’t mean they don’t believe in God.

What do the “spiritual, not religious” believe in then? What are the alternatives to God the Father, to God-out-there? Not to be flippant, but it’s the God-right-here. Such an understanding of God is found around the world and throughout history. In fact, archaeology indicates such a notion of God has been around a lot longer than that of a God-far-off.

Early archaeology and anthropology were dominated by Christian Westerners. We still live with their prejudiced judgments. They scoffed at, what was to them, the primitive and clearly inferior animism and pantheism of prehistoric and indigenous peoples. Yet the notion that God pervades reality and that we live in a sacred, spirit filled world has been the a more common view than theism. Today, contemporary indigenous spirituality is viewed much more positively, often as something modern people can learn from.

There has also been renewed interest in the centuries-long tradition of Christian mysticism. To borrow the title of the popular 17th century mystical work of Brother Andrew, in simple terms mysticism is “the practice of the presence of God.” Mystics (who are present also in Judaism and Islam) generally have little interest in traditional liturgy and theology. They are usually not concerned about achieving forgiveness of their sins, but of knowing God’s presence within and around them, and of being awakened, enlightened, transformed by that experience.

What’s surprising to many is that such a description could also be applied to Jesus. In the gospels, Jesus shows little interest in temple ritual, believing rather in God’s presence within and around him. Unfortunately, the church got the notion that this made Jesus unique because he was the Son of God. Yet the case can be made (and increasingly now is made) that Jesus viewed himself as a child of God, like everyone else. His ministry was demonstrating a life possible for anyone who has been awakened by the Spirit to their true identity.

Today, much of the language of the Bible and traditional religion is too pious and antique for modern ears. Indeed, in the 1960s, the renowned Roman Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, said the church should stop using the word “God” for fifty years because it had been so abused and misused! What we need to remember is that all words are metaphors and approximations. There is a valuable Buddhist saying that all words and teachings are like a finger pointing at the moon. We too easily get obsessed with the finger, when what we need to be looking at is the moon.

Surprisingly, and significantly, “spirituality “is now in broad use to refer to the experience of the sacred and of mystery in life and in the world. Many teachers and authors of various religious traditions, or of no tradition, commonly use the term to identify this dimension of reality. Spirituality is being seen as a way to reestablish our connection with the natural world and stem our abuse of it. And, being a religiously “neutral” term, spirituality is also providing a new opening for interaction with the sciences, especially psychology and theoretical physics.

Unfortunately, traditional Christianity is largely left behind in all this. The church cannot let go of “the Big Guy upstairs”, with its hymns, prayers, and rituals still directed to this imaginary being somewhere “above” us, imploring his forgiveness for our misdeeds and intervention in our many problems. While such piety still has some appeal, it is shrinking by the day, as evidenced by the ever-increasing numbers of empty pews.

God the Father has left the building. Yet rather than being dead and gone as Nietzsche assumed, God is increasingly recognized as a sacred spirit, the unifying and energizing dimension of all reality, embodied must fully in human consciousness.

In the biblical story, this spirit brought creation out of chaos and the first human to life. At his baptism, the spirit awakened Jesus to his sacred identity. Knowing this spirit, he taught that the “realm of God” was not a unique place far off somewhere but here and now, within and all around us. Centuries later, that vision may finally be coming to life.

 

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Church optional

Church optional

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Pictured here are Tim and Kathy Johnson, sitting at their kitchen table. Just four years ago, that space held the communion table of Zion Lutheran Church in Benedict, Nebraska. The Johnsons bought and remodeled the building when the church closed. At one time, they were members of Zion. Their son was married there, and grandchildren have been baptized there. Now it’s their home. Here “a house full of memories” has whole new meaning.

The Johnsons’ experience is part of an excellent report in the local Nebraska journal, Flatwater Free Press. Of course, the story of church closures is a national, and even international, one. The regional focus of this article makes the story more personal and more poignant. I was a pastor in Nebraska for several years and can easily imagine the towns and congregations mentioned here.

Nebraska has been what you might call “church country.” I often heard of small towns with multiple congregations of the same denomination. That’s all changing. Some of this, of course, is due to shifting populations as rural and small-town people move to the cities and suburbs. But surveys show that the remaining residents are just as likely to have little or no religious involvement as their urban counterparts.

The Flatwater piece shows that the decline of Christianity is not just about individuals but also communities. A Canadian agency recently declared it a national emergency that so many historic church buildings are being abandoned across that country. Anyone who has traveled to Europe is aware how many church buildings have essentially become museums, even if a small worshiping congregation remains. Many others, as in this Nebraska story, have been converted to some other purpose: houses, condos, B&Bs, stores, galleries, restaurants, bars, gyms, etc.

But not every church building is convertible or worth saving. Some are on land that is too valuable to retain the original building. In Florida, where I just moved from, the closure of a downtown Miami Lutheran church resulted in a multi-million-dollar sale, with the proceeds going to a synod ministry development fund.

The church closures in Flatwater’s report span the denominational spectrum: Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Roman Catholic. Also included are the now familiar but still stunning numbers on nationwide religious decline. A ten-year increase in those saying they rarely if ever attended worship, from 43% to 56%. A twenty-year decline in median worship attendance, from 137 to 65. This latter figure goes a long way in explaining the closure of congregations, and why the trend will continue. Increasingly congregations simply can’t afford to maintain their buildings, and/or don’t have enough volunteers to maintain their organizations.

Are congregations essential to Christianity? Many probably can’t imagine it any other way. Yet there have always been Christians who lived where churches were not available. And few, if any, other religions are as congregation oriented as Christianity. Some have shrines and temples, but worshipers aren’t necessarily “members” of them. Many Jews have only a nominal relationship with a synagogue, yet annually attend high holy day services and faithfully light Shabbat candles at home.

One of my interpretations of the recent “great de-churching” is that it has been a rejection of corporate worship. When people leave Christianity, in practical terms, it means they stop “going” to church. I still think that is true but perhaps that’s too narrow a perspective. Perhaps leaving organized religion is really a rejection of belonging to a congregation.

In my experience, Christians often have a romanticized image of their churches, viewing them more favorably than is warranted. Such responses usually come from the active core who worship often, sing in the choir, participate in church organizations, volunteer for committees and governing boards, etc. For that reason, they usually know each other and often count such people among their friends. Yet they are always a minority.

My last congregation had a vibrant and celebrated coffee and fellowship time after Sunday worship. I joked that we had a coffee hour preceded by a worship service. Yet fellowship time participants were only half the story. Each week after worship, I stood at the door shaking the hands of at least as many heading to their cars to leave. Most of these were largely unknown to those getting their cake and coffee.

Every church I have known has members who declare, “We’re so friendly here.” Yet those same congregations have other members who will say, “No one ever talks to me.” When I started in ministry, denominations were in a push to make their congregations more welcoming, especially to visitors. Many churches sprouted big “Welcome Place” banners or put something similar on their signs. Yet to the end of my ministry, it was still common to hear stories of people visiting other congregations where no one said a word to them.

Church leaders have a habit of “whipping the crew until attitudes improve.” Why don’t people sing? Why won’t people read their Bible? Why don’t people volunteer to help? Why aren’t people more friendly? Each question leads to new programs and challenging sermons to bring about the desired change, usually to no avail.

I think congregations will be what they will be, and often that won’t be so great. They will tend towards being cliquish and self-absorbed. There will always be a few who want to run things. Many will never get enough attention for their needs or recognition for their accomplishments. Brick and mortar and landscaping will usually be prioritized over human needs because people want to be “proud” of their church and want something tangible to point to: “See what we did?”

In other words, congregations tend to behave just like any other organization. And for many, that’s just what they’re trying to get away from, or at least don’t need more of. They’ve had their fill of committee and planning meetings, budgets and fund raising, cleaning and maintenance, squabbles and conflict resolution. Even that holiest of gatherings, corporate worship, is more than many can bear given the prevalence of mediocre music, mediocre preaching, and mediocre spaces, plus all the inevitable challenges of being with people in an enclosed space, multiplied now in this pandemic time.

What is Christianity? What does it mean to be a Christian? For a growing number today, “belonging to a church” is no longer the obvious or necessary answer. Most clergy and active laity can’t wrap their heads around this. I think they better learn how. This trend isn’t going away.

Amid the Nazi horrors, and near the end of his life, German theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, speculated about the need for “religionless Christianity.” He was responding to the mediocrity of German churches and the passivity of their memberships in the face of Nazi oppression and atrocities. Bonhoeffer had come to realize that belonging to a church had little effect on how people thought or behaved.

“But when you pray, go into your own room, shut your door and pray to your Father privately.” Matthew 6:6, J. B. Phillips

Jesus was ambivalent, if not outright hostile, to the organized religion of his day. Whenever he went to the temple or synagogue, there was always a row. The early church’s biggest problem was that Jesus had laid no plans for a new religion. Perhaps those wannabe church leaders missed his point. As the saying goes, “Jesus came preaching the kingdom, but what we got was the church.”