Moving to a New Normal

Yesterday my wife made a simple request, “Can you move my desk over to that part of the room?”  What sounded like a two minute project (how hard can it be to move a small desk?) turned into an all evening affair.  Moving the desk meant moving the bookshelf…and the filing cabinet…and the papason chair.  Then the dresser had to move downstairs and a night stand from the bedroom came in to fill the gap.   That left a hole in the bedroom, meaning that the bed had to rotate and the other night stand and the dresser had to swap places.  By 9:00 that night anxiety hit as I reached the tipping point…there was no going back to the way things were, but I was surrounded by a disaster, with the mattress shoved against the wall and piles of things in transition unceremoniously shoved into corners.   I worried that the new layout wouldn’t work. But then, with a few last things put in place, it all came together.   Many of those piles found their way back to their new homes.  Hope came that I could finally go to bed!  There’s still work to do…but I can see that it’ll all work out OK.

In the past years ‘organized religion’ has hit this kind of tipping point.  Churches had a layout in our culture that worked pretty well for a long time, but things have begun to change.  Over the past decade worship attendance has dropped in nearly every Christian church body: from Baptist to Catholic to Lutheran to non-denominational.  Nearly twenty percent of Americans now claim to have no religious affiliation.  As recently as 1990 that number stood at ten percent.  Of those 30 years old and under close to one third don’t identify with any religion.  This is a major shift in our culture.  Anxiety is growing!  Congregations that used to fill their large worship spaces now have rows and rows of empty pews.  Many pundits claim that ‘the church’ will become increasingly irrelevant in our society.   This is a major disaster for organized religion…right?

Perhaps what we live in is a not the death of the church, but rather a transition to a new ‘layout.’  Instead of looking at the way the church used to be, it’s time to prayerfully consider what the church will become. 

What might this ‘new layout’ look like?

·         People will join communities of faith, not because of any societal expectation, but because they feel called by God to do it.

·         Instead of obsessing on how to run the institution of the church, communities of faith will have a strong focus on serving their neighbors and making a difference in the world.

·         People will feel free to voice their questions and struggles in faith and won’t simply parrot ‘churchy’ slogans which sound nice but mean little.

·         People will engage in the questions of how science and faith relate to one another (it’s God working in the world after all!) and won’t worry that science might undermine faith.

·         Communities of faith will spend more time worrying about who to invite and include than who should be shunned.

·         People will serve God by serving the world, not just by serving in a church.

We live in a time of transition to new models for communities of faith.  I don’t place my hope in church structures…I place my hope in Jesus Christ!  As long as Jesus is Lord there is hope for God’s church.  It can be hard to sense that in the midst of this time of transition.  We sometimes only see the ‘messes in the corners’ that we don’t think will ever get sorted out, but God leads us to new ‘layouts’ of faith.  Times are changing and there is no going back to the way things used to be.  How can God lead us to a ‘new normal’ as we join in God’s exciting mission in this world?