As churches fade …
An editorial cartoon sums up the situation: a “FREE WiFi” banner hangs across the front of a stately church with soaring spire. Standing in the cavernous, open doorway one pastor says to another, “Americans are abandoning religion. We had to do something…”
Despite our gradually growing population, attendance at worship services is aging and steadily declining in numbers. Of 11,000 randomly selected congregations representing all faiths, 40% of parishioners told pollsters they attended church at least monthly. But head counts at services during the same period found that only 17% had darkened church doors. The difference between head counts and self-reporting is called the halo effect.
Catholic churches have experienced the most significant attendance drop. Only 11% attend regularly. Due to decreased donations and attendance, the New York Archdiocese recently announced that one-third of its churches will be merging with other churches. In a period when sixty new parishes were started there, three times as many closed.
Churches are buildings generally used for formal worship. They are also religious communities with shared beliefs based on dogmas regarding God as creator and sustainer of the universe, the purpose of life, and codes of human conduct. Whether or not there is or ever was a God can neither be conclusively proven nor denied. The elderly have generally made peace with that issue.
For the young, the debate is irrelevant to the problems of daily life, like work, relationships, substance abuse, birth control, unwanted pregnancy and gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender justice. For them, church orthodoxy is reduced to platitudes and clumsy directives that cannot accommodate life’s complexity.
In other words, applying doctrines top-down to existential problems, traditional churches can’t help but fade. Adding free WiFi won’t help. We are ripe for innovation toward bottom-up approaches to nurturing faith and managing life’s problems.
Though they report not being connected to any religion, young people are nevertheless interested in the spiritual aspects of their lives. Enter “Tiny” and Christie Moore and Impact Nondenominational Community Church.
After nine years as youth pastor and children and youth program director at Trinity Methodist Church in a middle class suburb, the Moores’ jobs were abruptly terminated early this year. Church attendance had been steadily declining. There was a $77,000 budget shortfall last year. The board is contemplating selling the building.
At the urging of friends and younger parishioners, Tiny and Christie took a leap of faith, rented an empty bank building downtown, and opened Impact. It has folding chairs, a homemade dais and randomly placed pallets as a backdrop. Services include humor, singing, instrumental music, and Scriptural messages like The Good Samaritan.
In a newspaper article soon after it opened, Tiny was quoted as saying we’re all human and he’s no different or better than anybody else who walks in the door. He expects the culture to change from week to week. If someone doesn’t come in with a tattoo on their face or a gang sign somewhere, he feels Impact isn’t doing its job.
A few weeks later, he told me he sees new faces every week. Attendance is growing and Impact has almost half as many at Sunday services today as Trinity used to have. It also has a thriving children and youth program on Wednesday evening. Impact promotes service and balancing impulses toward compassion and helping others with personal struggles against temptations to greed and excess.
A coming Sunday service will be titled, “The church has left the building.” People will gather, sing a few songs, disperse throughout the community to perform random acts of kindness like picking up litter as opportunities present themselves, then return to the building to share their stories.
Impact’s Facebook page includes such comments as “Church doesn’t have to be boring; there’s no pretense or showiness here; there’s a family feel – our spirits were fed; I finally feel spiritually connected.” There’s also a Soren Kierkegaard quote: “Christianity isn’t a doctrine to be taught, but a life to be lived.”
As traditional churches fade, innovative communities of the faithful emerge to nurture trust in our higher angels of goodness and unconditional love.
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