Churches and the Crisis of Decline (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #4)

A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age

Root, Andrew

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781493434954
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ministerio cristiano

Named One of Fifteen Important Theology Books of 2022, Englewood Review of Books Congregations often seek to combat the crisis of decline by using innovation to produce new resources. But leading practical theologian Andrew Root shows that the church's crisis is not in the loss of resources; it's in the loss of life--and that life can only return when we remain open to God's encountering presence. This book addresses the practical form the church must take in a secular age. Root uses two stories to frame the book: one about a church whose building becomes a pub and the other about Karl Barth. Root argues that Barth should be understood as a pastor with a deep practical theology that can help church leaders today. Churches and the Crisis of Decline pushes the church to be a waiting community that recognizes that the only way for it to find life is to stop seeing the church as the star of its own story. Instead of resisting decline, congregations must remain open to divine action. Root offers a rich vision for the church's future that moves away from an obsession with relevance and resources and toward the living God. This is the fourth book in Root's Ministry in a Secular Age series.

1
When the Church Becomes a Pub, and the Immanent Frame Our Map

It was a haunted space. If I paused and blocked out all the ambient noise, I could hear it. The faint echoes of life and worship, a century of suffering and joy; it all dripped from the walls. You could feel it—if you let yourself. It reverberated, ever so softly but assuredly, with all those decades of prayers, sermons, funerals, and overall yearning for God’s action.

But I’ll admit it was hard to stay haunted when the wings and riblets were so amazing. They melted in your mouth. And the beats and flow of Lizzo filled your ears from the speakers above. The overall buzz in what was once a sanctuary—now filled with tables of conversation and laughter, waitstaff racing from table to table, trays of beer and credit card slips—made it hard to hear any past voices of praise for a God who is God in life and death, loss and hope. I had to work hard to hang on to the haunting. To remember, in this room full of good beer and good fun, that indeed God is God. It seemed an unneeded acknowledgment in this space of food, drinks, and commerce, even in this space that was once a place of worship.

According to the menu of the Church Brewhouse, yet another microbrewery in this newly gentrified midwestern city, the corporate entity that owned the Church Brewhouse had taken over the building in 2019. It framed the acquisition as a service. The church building, with its beautiful stained glass, had sat empty in this supposed “reviving” neighborhood for too long. As Starbucks, bike shops, loft apartments, and boutiques marched in, taking over block by block, shining the streets with their glossy rejuvenation, the church building sat awkwardly as the ghost of a past neighborhood, desperately needing a coat of paint and a roof repair. It represented an unwanted monument to a time before gentrification. Once the anchor of the neighborhood, it was soon out of place, both architecturally and functionally. In this high-tech neighborhood the church was as antiquated as a flip phone.

The church building was the last remaining sign of the century before. Even as the congregation dwindled in membership and funds, the denomination was frozen by what to do with it. Which makes sense: places of tragic death are often left abandoned for a time, people paralyzed by what to do with these spaces now that they’ve endured such an event. Yet it’s no shame for a congregation to close—no failure, necessarily, for a pastor to journey with a congregation into death. Even when the church building has been turned into a pub, it’s important to remember that the church isn’t a building but a people.

Then again, we as people are bodies that live in spaces. Our spaces take on symbolic weight, for these spaces house our experiences and the narratives of our lives. To live is to be moving and acting in a space. Because we are bodies we can only live in a space, and so space bears the mark of our spirit of life. In the case of the church building, it marks our life in relation to the life of the living God. Churches don’t need a building. God is never stuck in a building. But church communities, because they are the body of Christ, can’t be without a space. Congregations inhabit space as the sure sign of life. For the human spirit to be alive, it must be in a space. For a church to be in Christ, it too must be alive in a space.

When Death Comes to a Church

This connection between space and life was the very reason the denomination was frozen about what to do with the church building. Both the church’s physical shape and locale had witnessed a tragic death, even the bloody vocational murder of a few pastors. Admittedly, that’s a dramatic way to put it. But the death that this church community encountered was indeed tragic, not because this community died before its time but because it stopped living long before its end.

There are two very different kinds of tragic deaths. There is the kind where the person or people are living so fully that when death enters the scene it comes screeching and snatching. It takes the person from our side. Their life was so entwined in ours, their spirit of life so connected to our own spirit, that our life had become not only our own but somehow the sum of us living with and in their life. Losing them creates a throbbing absence in our being. The fact that this person’s full life is no longer part of the orchestra of life is a thought too hard to bear. We painfully sense that they were right in the middle of a song when it was abruptly halted. The fact that they are no longer living takes some of our own life from us. This is a tragic death because it ends life. Mourners say things like, “But we had plans,” “But her laugh . . . I need it to live,” and “He was so full of life.”

But there is another kind of tragic death. It’s the kind where a person or a people stop living. Their absence, rather than throbbing, instead becomes a deeply uncomfortable awareness that one can live a life without truly living at all. We grieve not because this person is absent from the orchestra of life but because this person stopped playing long ago. They still sit in the orchestra pit, but for whatever reason they are unable to take up their instrument. They died forgetting or refusing to live. This actuality is hard for the human spirit to tolerate because we know that it could happen, and at times has happened, to us. We’ve slid into that rut, refusing to live while living. The thought that the rut could become too deep to escape, and we could die there, is painful to acknowledge.

It was this second kind of death that the community suffered by no longer living in the space now called the Church Brewhouse. The building was solemnly sold off to the corporation. Selling it felt like pawning Grandma’s wedding ring after she passed. There was no reason to keep it. It represented nothing to anyone living. Grandma had put the ring in a box, along with her will to live, long ago. For years, the church had a building but no life. The denomination finally sold it after it had sat empty for so long. To liquidate one-time symbolic things that represent life (but are no longer imbued with it) produces a certain kind of heavy, icky unease.

What Happened?

As I read the three-paragraph history of the pub in the menu, I wondered what had happened. Google says that the Church Brewhouse was once a congregation called Saint John the Baptist. The congregation was formed in 1912 and erected the building in 1920, which now proudly boasts the sign “Best Wings in Town 2020.” The same young men who worked the mills and factories just north of the city, and then gave their youth fighting in the trenches of France, built most of the sanctuary with their own hands.

When the stained glass was installed after World War II, it became the talk of all the surrounding churches. The beautiful stained glass became a space inside a space, a symbolic representation of life and death. Each boy who died in the bright blue waters of the Pacific or the menacing, cold waters of Normandy was placed into the biblical stories depicted in the glass. This connected their story of lost life with God’s own lost life. The lost boys were given an ever-present space in the life of this community that had lost them and lived on without them.

It was boys who fought and died, but it was the women who lived without them who gave them a place in the glass. As the factories in the neighborhood were shifted to producing arms for the war, the women who worked in their husbands’ absence picked up extra hours to fund the production of the stained glass.

After the Second World War the congregation ballooned in size, from about one hundred members to over two hundred. With the growth came a new education wing and an expansion to the sanctuary. The neighborhood began to change in the latter part of the century. African American families joined European immigrant families. The congregation reflected this change, though not quite on par with the demographics of the neighborhood as a whole. Nevertheless, this church punched above its weight as it fought for civil rights in the city. The final stained glass panel erected by the congregation showed John the Baptist pointing to Dr. King preaching in Chicago in 1967.

I was intrigued, so I sent a few emails to former pastors to learn more about the congregation’s story. The two world wars had imprinted themselves on the congregation, first in the impetus to build the sanctuary and then in the choice to imbue it with the stained glass of remembrance and hope. The war in Vietnam didn’t imprint itself on the congregation so much as strike and wound it. The divided opinions and multiple pains around the war resulted in a quiet but sure distrust that never left the congregation. As the 1980s and 1990s came and went, the congregation’s size hovered around a hundred members. Children of those who placed the stained glass still drove in from the suburbs, intent on having their own children involved. Yet people slowly peeled off as the factories closed and the drug trade entered the neighborhood, and churches in the suburbs (or no church at all) seemed more logical and convenient. The congregation grayed.

There is no shame in graying: it’s part of life. It may be culturally uncomfortable, but it’s nevertheless a sure sign that you’re alive and that you’ve been living. Saint John the Baptist was aging, but there was still life. Yet the church had far less access to resources. And this concerned the denomination. The congregation had always made, but never exceeded, its budget. Just enough new members arrived to offset the losses to funerals and long-term-care centers. Saint John the Baptist was as steady as the beams that the boys from the Great War had used to build the sanctuary. But the church’s flat growth worried some.

With no real sustainability plan, the church proposed hiring a new young pastor when the neighborhood began to shift in 2005, bringing in tech companies, restaurants, and single young adults. It was assumed that having someone who could attract the new residents of the neighborhood was important. And it was. But something seemed to be amiss.

From 2008 to 2017 the congregation had three pastors and two different names. A young church planter took over in 2008. I imagine that his heart was in the right place, but I also know it’s hard for young church planters to work inside existing structures. Inheriting a congregation with a hundred-year history has its problems for those looking to move fast. I’m not completely sure what happened, but it appears he burned hot and then burned up. The congregation became known as Thrive (officially Thrive at Saint John the Baptist). It littered the neighborhood with advertisements and used many of the new church growth and network building strategies. By 2011 the young church planter was gone, moving on to a much bigger (and boldly stated) doctrinally orthodox congregation with multiple sites. It’s hard to know, but reading between the lines it seems that this young church planter who was equally committed to correct doctrine and church growth burned bridges within the congregation by the flames of his own ambition.

In early 2012 a new young pastor took over. He seemed to stabilize things, keeping Thrive going, but perhaps not racing full throttle toward expansion (and protection of pure doctrine). The new pastor’s ambitions were not quite as high as the church planter’s. His goal was a growing church connected to the neighborhood, as opposed to a multicampus church that planted other churches. But in 2014 the tone of things seemed to change. Community organizing rather than church planting became the metaphor and focus. As the denomination entered debates around sexual identities and as social media galvanized people around identity issues across the country, Thrive at Saint John the Baptist, or at least its pastor, weighed in.

The congregation boldly positioned itself as a critical voice in the denomination, even taking a critical stance against the Christian tradition itself. This was quite a change from the church-planting predecessor. This new young pastor even questioned whether the Christian church as a whole hadn’t done more evil than good in the world. He was now calling the church a community of post-Christians seeking to live right in this world—not for heaven. This focus seemed to fit the ethos of the neighborhood hand in glove. Whether it fit the congregation itself is hard to know, but the congregation’s decline provided at least some justification for that not mattering. The congregation needed to be relevant in order to attract new people. To this pastor, nothing seemed more relevant (and I suppose true) than to critique the church and its tradition as a whole. Not surprisingly, even when Thrive was renamed Thrive for Justice, few young people from the neighborhood participated. Somehow songs of justice sounded offbeat to those in the neighborhood. After the 2016 presidential election the young pastor left the congregation and Christian ministry (and one might assume Christianity) altogether.

In the spring of 2017 the congregation welcomed its third pastor since 2008. Remaining were only a handful of members whose participation stretched back decades. The congregation returned to just Saint John the Baptist, seeing no reason to retain Thrive. The congregation was now terminal, though it ignored the diagnosis until the fall of 2018. But I imagine you would have had to have been in a coma to not feel it. All of its life had been burned up in the ambitions and initiatives of the previous two pastors. No matter what this new pastor did, she couldn’t revive it. By the summer of 2018, fifteen people sat in a sanctuary built in 1920 for one hundred and expanded for two hundred in the 1950s. Again, fifteen is no shame. A community of fifteen people seeking the living Christ is beautiful. What makes a congregation beautiful is its life, not its numbers, program...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. When the Church Becomes a Pub, and the Immanent Frame Our Map
• 2. Brother Trouble and Meeting the Exorcist’s Son
• 3. A Funeral for a Church—a Funeral That Remakes a Church
• 4. An Apple Tree and the Incoherence of “God Is God”
• 5. The Church Can’t Know How to Find God
• 6. The Church Is Not the Star of Its Own Story
• 7. Welcome to Crisis Mode
• 8. Wedding Blunders and Brotherly Love
• 9. Say Goodbye to Being and Give Me More Busyness
• 10. A Shady Obituary and the Need to Wait
• 11. Waiting Sucks but Resonance Is Life
• 12. Waiting Is Living
• 13. When Mozart Goes Straight Into and Through You
• 14. Pietism and Its Discontents
• 15. A True Ghost Story and the Birth of Watchwords
• 16. Getting Real with a Dialectical Demand
• 17. Deepening the Dialectic
• Index
• Back Cover