Deck Chair, Anyone?

Last night there was a meeting of Hamilton Presbytery, and I came away, as I often do, with the idea that we are spending a great deal of time re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Even though, at several administrative intersections, people yelled, "THE BOAT IS SINKING" (metaphorically), we went right on doing business as usual. This is especially troubling after spending the weekend with one of North America's foremost consultants in church matters, namely, Alice Mann of the Alban Institute. Towards the end of her presentation, while she was fielding questions about the "emerging church", I asked her if it wouldn't be better if the "mainline" church (which is rapidly becoming the sideline church) just had the good sense to lay down and die, and let whatever will replace it "emerge", since all of us, including Dr. Mann, admit that we have no idea what the "emerging church" will look like. I was reminded of the lines from "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran that says "You may give them your love, but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams." Alice confided to her driver, on the way back to the airport, that the question was one of the few she has been asked that left her without a ready answer. I admit that it sounds like a really negative view of the church, and I will further admit that I have not been immune to that attitude, but I didn't mean it in a negative way. I really want to know what we can realistically do to midwife the birth of the emerging church that will keep it from being dragged down by our more traditional view. Was Martin Luther being negative when he resisted the theology of the Roman Catholic church? Was John Wesley being negative when he abandoned his institutional predecessors? Is Bob Nightingale negative in saying that the institutional church is more in the way of the emergent church than helpful to it?

In the meantime, we talked about re-aligning small rural churches so they can feel better about themselves, and making upgrade loans to small churches so they can stay open a little longer, or morph into something the founders would never recognize as a church. We talked about cutting costs across the board, changing the way in which newly ordained ministers find a first pastoral charge, and chatted about the sad plight of university chaplaincy funding. The truth is that we are growing smaller and yet we are still asking those fewer, older people to funnel a greater and greater number of dollars into the upkeep of an institution which, again, everyone tells us is not relevant to the next generation.

It's time we started to ask the tough questions, I'm afraid, about what the church is, what business it is in, and how business is going. Closing churches is not the answer. Anyone who thinks we can close churches and maintain ministry is living in an urban centre where they don't know the person in the next cell. Spending money on youth work that is designed to entertain instead of convert is not the answer either. More and more, I think we should understand that the church of our parents, of the fifties and sixties, is on palliative care and treat it appropriately. Let's take care of the people in our pews, mostly seniors, and the people in our community that need our help, as much as we can, and slowly slip into the coma where we barely keep our metaphorical lungs and heart moving until the release of death. There is great grief in this, I know. But where there is grief, there is comfort. This way we don't saddle the next generation of Christians with Gothic buildings, obsolete instruments, arthritic administration, and antediluvian forms of worship that we struggle with. If we are going to die, and if we need to die in order to make room for the next generation to become the church, then let's get on with it and stop crying about it. If there are tears, let them be for ourselves and not for the future. If their is sorrow, let it be that we are sorry we held on so long to what we valued but our children and grandchildren never did. If there is pain, let it be the birth pangs of a new church, conceived in faith, nurtured on God's love, and growing into a new reality. It feels GOOD to think about that. I may go down with the ship. That's OK. It was my ship. But my grandchildren will rescue themselves because I gave them the room to do so.