“Religion is not keeping pace with social change or the people it purports to serve.”
A couple of decades ago, the United Church of Christ launched a marketing campaign with the phrase, "God is still speaking." For people of faith, some version of that idea—that even in our modern world, faith still matters, the divine is still real and present, the wisdom of our traditions has something to say about our modern predicament—keeps us believing, praying, and acting according to our faith values and principles. Of course, some of our theologies proclaim that regardless of what we do or don't do, that God will find a way. Some of our theologies also teach, though, that we are the way, co-creators with the divine. So if we listen, if we pay attention to where faith is moving today in this time and place, what might we hear?
In their recently published Awakenings: American Jewish Transformations in Identity, Leadership, and Belonging, Rabbis Joshua Stanton and Benjamin Spratt offer a wealth of insights about the challenge and opportunity facing American Judaism. In a series of online interviews conducted last summer by Spencer Burke called The Next Sunday Summit, a group of predominantly Christian innovators suggests that American Christianity faces a very similar challenge and opportunity. Both Awakenings and The Next Sunday interviews point to some key principles that can help us shape the future of religion.
1) Religion “delivery systems” are broken. That means unprecedented opportunity, not doomsday.
“Even fully ablaze, “the bush was not consumed.” The bush is glowing in new colors today. A longer gaze and a broader view show us what makes it wondrous: the fires do not consume it, but transform it into a beacon of purpose.”
While not all religious institutions are in decline, the aggregate picture in the U.S. does not look good. Congregational attendance has consistently trended downward over several years, and many congregations have had to, or will shortly have to, close their doors. Whether cause or consequence of the decline, Stanton and Spratt note that “our sacred edifices become a purpose unto themselves, rather than the manifestation of more important missions…. they distract us from the reality that so many of our institutions lack a mission in the first place.” Additionally, in a time of decline, “institutional survival has become an incessant distraction from the search for higher purpose.”
We are unlikely to reverse this downward spiral, but we can stop engaging it and instead turn our attention to how new forms of life are emerging or could emerge. Stanton and Spratt, and all the Next Sunday participants, point to unprecedented opportunity—a chance to let go of what’s not working and engage sacred listening, imagination, and creativity to help shape what’s next. As Stephen Lewis, President of the Forum for Theological Exploration, puts it, “every generation has the opportunity to partner with God” (The Next Sunday interview).
Stanton and Spratt identify diffusion of power as the source of this generation’s opportunity: “Lines of leadership are being redrawn… power increasingly resides in countless individuals, called to spiritual leadership and inspired to take on new roles in communal life.” The general societal trend of distributed power may be destabilizing institutions across sectors, but this same force offers “a path toward our promising future.” When everyone can lead, opportunity multiplies, including for institutions and the clergy that lead them. Stanton and Spratt specifically propose that legacy institutions have the opportunity to serve as incubators for change, to lend their wisdom and assets to seeding the new, even seeding their successor institutions.
2) The value of religion is not what it brings to its adherents, but rather what it brings to the world.
“Our wisdom can indeed be a “light unto the world,” if only we allow it to shine beyond the walls of the institutions and community buildings that seek to contain it at the expense of those who do not venture in.”
If an institution understands its objective as serving a particular group of people, then when that group shrinks, so does the relevance of the institution. But no religion started as an institution. In other words, as Tim Soerens, co-founding Executive Director of the Parish Collective, asserts, “church doesn’t exist for the sake of the church” (The Next Sunday interview). Religion starts as story, story of a community’s understanding of and relationship to the world and to each other and/or prophecy of a better world to come and how to get there. The ambition and promise of religion was not to build and maintain an institution, or even to collect adherents. It was to help people, at large, to make sense of the world, to make meaning, to thrive. The institutions aren’t dying because fewer people want the product they offer anymore. They’re dying because they’re failing to help people and communities flourish.
The sooner we recognize this the better. Spratt and Stanton emphasize that “we must reaffirm our potential to serve a purpose beyond our own survival.” Poetically articulated by Darnell Fennell, Director of Social Entrepreneurship for the National Benevolent Association: “[It’s] not how we will sustain the monument but how we will keep forth the movement” (The Next Sunday interview).
The people who reliably enter houses of worship every week still matter, but not because they keep the institutions alive, or because they are holier or more faithful than anyone else. They matter because they still believe the institutions have something to offer. But the institution should exist to do more than serve those particular people. It should exist to transform lives, communities, the world, regardless of whether anyone walks in the door.
How much time do we spend on sustaining buildings and pleasing the people inside the building versus having impact in the communities where our buildings sit? Fennell implores us, “We have to disrupt the idea that social entrepreneurship/being in the community/community impact work is some à la carte option for what it means to be church. It is what it means to be church.”
3) It’s a moment for humility.
“…we will see diversity of identity and ideology as a source of growth, rather than a threat to integrity, and become all the wiser for it.”
Rev. Jen Bailey, Founder and Executive Director of Faith Matters Network, defines humility as “being grounded in that which we know while also bowing to the mystery and uncertainty of that which we don’t, and being willing to allow that which is not known or uncertain to transform us” (The Next Sunday interview). Whenever an institution shows signs of faltering, its stakeholders understandably worry that the purpose for which that institution was created will also falter. But we worry about that only because we have come to equate the two. Rev. Kathi McShane, co-founder of the Changemaker Initiative, explains: “we’re stuck in the structures we’ve been used to, which are not the essence of our traditions. God works through many structures. The church is just one instrument” (The Next Sunday interview). We can stay rooted in our traditions while also letting go of the structures we’ve grown used to.
The same goes for ideologies that have snuck into our expressions and narratives of faith, as well as identities that we think fit or don’t fit into those narratives. If ever there was a time for us to release the sacred from the tiny little boxes in which we have tried to contain it, now is that time. It’s terrifying, yes, but with enough humility that the old ways don’t have to be the only ways, that the uncertainty of this moment can lead us to new transformations, we can find our way. God is still speaking.
Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash