Faith March 2024

By Tom Ehrich

It was a heady time

In the twenty years after World War Two, it was easy to grow a church and to be a churchgoing Christian inside it. The nation was deeply churched. “Blue laws” protected “church time” (Sunday morning, Wednesday evening) from secular competition. For the Christian majority, it was a matter of which church one joined, not whether.

Soldiers returning home from war were flooding the cities and new suburbs with their hunger for normalcy, peace and prosperity. Though born in rural America, they didn’t return to the rural world of 1940, when 80% of Americans inhabited farms and farm towns. The jobs were now in Detroit and Seattle, Cleveland and Atlanta. The excitement was in Los Angeles and New York City. Good public schools were in the cities and, increasingly, in the suburbs. By 1960, just twenty years after the rural peak, 80% of Americans lived in cities and suburbs.

And yet newly mobile Americans looked in their neighborhoods for what they had known back in farm country. That was especially true in churches. In farm country, they had been loyal to family churches, such as Baptist, Pentecostal and Methodist. In the expanding cities and suburbs, these uprooted Americans found urban versions of those churches, as well as mainline traditions (Episcopal, Presbyterian, Lutheran) and Roman Catholicism, that had a familiar family atmosphere.

In the city, churches had little choice but to grow. Congregations that had been small outposts of European heritage suddenly swelled with children needing Sunday School, creatives needing choirs. Proud heads of families wanted to celebrate their broods. Men and women wanted to build institutions and lead them. Singles needed places to meet other suitable singles. The church that had had 100 members for decades suddenly had 500, 600 and more. Churches that had gotten by with on-street parking suddenly needed parking lots. Some added athletic fields, as well as private day schools.

It was a heady time. Young men streamed into seminaries, as a new career path opened up. Hierarchs found themselves leading grand enterprises. Denominations had publishing houses and bookstores.

Then everything around us changed

But then American urban and suburban life changed. Lifestyles became more mobile. Jobs required longer commutes, making weekday meetings and Wednesday church suppers no longer feasible. Shopping shifted from neighborhood stores to covered malls and strip malls, as well as “big box” stores. Fast food franchises replaced neighborhood diners and cafeterias. Urban houses with front-facing porches changed hands and became occupied by Blacks coming north in the Great Migration to escape Jim Crow. Suburban house owners preferred rear-facing patios. Kids were driven to sporting venues, no longer just sent out the door. Sports began to consume Sunday morning.

It was a shock to the system for people who now faced rampant racial diversity and socioeconomic diversity and were frightened by it. Anxious White parents sold their houses and moved to all-White suburban neighborhoods with all-White schools.

In the cities, neighborhoods ceased to be neighborhoods in the sense of being like small rural towns. People didn’t know their neighbors. Neighborhood stores were too small to compete with suburban retailers and were landlocked on small parcels. Woman entered the paid workforce. Kids stopped playing in the streets.

And we lost our way

Neighborhood churches were cast adrift. As their former constituents moved to White suburbs, just having an open door on Sunday wasn’t enough. For a time, newly relocated members kept coming back to the city on Sunday out of loyalty. But that got old. Their kids resisted, for now they were making friends at school and playing sports on Sunday. People formed new patterns: gravitating to their children’s schools as a locus of meaning and friendship, joining large YMCAs for recreation, preserving family time on weekends, driving more, shopping at larger, glossier stores, sharing values with people who were increasingly not living next door.

Church leaders were clueless. They hadn’t developed a church-development methodology during the salad days. They had no idea what to do now. Episcopal seminaries weren’t teaching church development, youth ministry strategies, faith discernment, values clarification, conflict management, or lay ministry development. They taught future clergy how to open doors on Sunday, but not how to draw people into them and then, adapting to new lifestyles, to nurture community.

Bishops sprinkled the suburbs with small mission congregations. But they didn’t imagine these new enclaves needing more or proceeding differently. Evangelicals, by contrast, bought 6-acre plots for their new congregations and gave or loaned them money to build. The Episcopal hierarchy took whatever small lots developers offered, and forced the new congregation to raise its own funds and recruit members without any training or tools to do so. In a similar contrast, evangelicals did what McDonald’s did: created a playbook for launching a new franchise and an infrastructure of training, staffing and marketing to make it happen. Episcopal bishops, on the other hand, sent out cadres of older, tradition-minded parishioners to populate new pews, at least temporarily, and clergy trained in former ways. They were blind to the new dynamics of suburban living and thought only of replicating what they had known in former churches.

In virtually everything they did, from education to property maintenance to stewardship to worship planning, church leaders could do little more than continue what they had been doing before. It was the easy course. Never mind learning how to nurture community among kids who didn’t already trust each other from neighborhood play. Never mind getting to know what socializing efforts would work in this new context. Never mind fashioning worship and fellowship in ways that respected diversity, new time allocations, and younger prospects. Never mind the new faith questions that suburbanites were asking. It was easier to assume that the new residents wanted from churches exactly what their parents had wanted back in the city.

What followed from this profound failure of leadership was a collapse in church membership and vitality that was so sudden, extreme and relentless that few could bear to address it. Parish leaders stopped counting accurately. Instead, they counted former members as still present even when they joined suburban churches or became Southern Baptists. They merely guessed how many attended on Sunday. Parochial reports became increasingly fanciful, with none of the painstaking attention to metrics that is essential for a dynamic institution

A new generation of clergy skipped the organizational development side of ministry and acted on their commitment to social justice and gender equity. While leaders were preaching right-opinion, their churches languished as organizations. Leaders became zealous over a narrow range of issues, but failed to ask why their stirring words and banners had so little impact on outcomes.

Women and their allies, for example, fought hard to open the ranks of lay and ordained leadership to women. But those women found themselves running churches already twenty years into decline and falling fast. Female leaders became scapegoats for a collapse that they had no unique hand in causing. Leaders in the easy days — male and female — had made bad decisions, like ignoring their new neighbors, stifling youth, resisting any form of change, siding with the wealthy. They had behaved like the privileged who were born on third base and thought they had hit a triple. When you don’t take the time to examine the larger context, or to analyze outcomes, or to learn from failure, or to learn the real lessons of success, how can changing the gender or race of a preacher make any difference?

In this new moment of sensing decline but not owning it, church leaders weren’t doing the basics of customer service: namely, asking what people wanted and needed, asking if they were getting their needs met, recognizing changes in their behavior outside church (like two-income families, long commutes to work), profiling the marketplace, and asking what voice of God their potential constituents needed to hear. Episcopal women’s guilds, for example, were still holding their meetings on Thursday mornings. They got angry with younger women for not participating.

Church leaders weren’t doing the basics of marketing: namely, evaluating their “product,” if you will, measuring outcomes, considering better ways to reach people, especially those not being reached, imagining the new.

They didn’t do the basics of management: namely, recruiting new leaders, training leaders, equipping leaders, holding leaders accountable. Seminary classes got older and older, yielding new clergy who had maybe 5 to 10 years of active ministry remaining to them in an occupation where the best teacher is experience while young. The American population skewed younger and younger, seminaries skewed older and older. Faith questions were abundant in these younger Americans, but they weren’t answered by ideological campaigns on a select handful of causes.

The business model in too many churches was to keep the doors open without doing anything differently. Success meant meeting payroll and deferring maintenance. Personal accomplishment meant being recognized as a holder of right opinion. Team-building meant helping people to fit in. Never mind the work that Jesus wanted done — dying to self, incarnating humility, tolerance, love and generosity, showing the face of God by word and example, proclaiming a Gospel of justice by doing justice, speaking truth to power, and transforming lives.

Religion thinks too highly of itself

It is the nature of religion to think its existence essential to God, its definitions correct, and its assertions absolute.

Then come behaviors that are intolerant and actions that are cruel. Religion has justified slavery, pogroms, mass killing spectacles, and endless creativity in inflicting pain. Religion has unleashed mobs to revenge alleged slights against their deity. Religion has lifted up as pillars of civilization men and women who burned, tortured, whipped, stripped and raped those whom they considered worthless.

To say all this isn’t to wax anti-religious, but to be appalled by the arrogance and meanness of those claiming to serve God. They have made a mockery of their God. They have made God a monster. No wonder so many have drifted into a secularism that wants nothing to do with the hypocrisy of the religious.

We can’t undo our past. The Spanish Inquisition happened. Christianity’s torture instruments are in museums. The theologizing done on behalf of slavery and the Holocaust has been well documented.

But we still have a battle in the US to set Christianity free from the grasping clutches of the evangelical right wing. A power-hungry White nationalism is claiming to speak for Christianity. A Roman Catholic hierarchy is desperate to have people stop talking about sexual predators in the priesthood and to wage a war of resentment over abortion and loss of traditions like the Latin Mass.

Meanwhile, a limp array of Protestant denominations wants to stop counting its failures of nerve and effort and to take solace in owning right-opinion, specifically right-opinion about who deserves to be ordained. We have perfected our ordination practices, and undone some historic biases, but that has done little to put food in people’s mouths, jobs and purpose in their lives, and justice, equity and honesty in the public square.

The time has come for religious folks to cleanse their own religions, and to ask more of themselves and their leaders. Stop letting bullies and haters claim to own the brand. Stop ignoring our flaws in the hope of being admired.

My particular focus is on rescuing and reinvigorating Christianity. Not because I consider us the only ones who deserve to survive, but because this is the faith I love and a face of God that makes sense to me. We aren’t the most cruel, but we certainly have been cruel. We have gotten lost, we are under assault from evil actors, and yet, not alone among religions, we have something life-giving to offer, something people need and our nation needs.

I want to set the record straight and encourage thinking Christians to freshen their faith and be agents of goodness and tolerance in a world beset by cruelty and intolerance.

Catastrophic outcomes

When decline set in, church leaders took the easy course of rearranging the deck chairs, rather than undertaking the harder work of reimagining the faith enterprise and seeking better ways.

The resulting outcomes were catastrophic. In 1965, the Episcopal Church counted 3 million members (though we now know that many of them were being double-counted.) Twenty years later, despite rapid growth of the American population, the Episcopal share had plummeted to 2 million. Now our share is barely above 1 million, though we often round up to 2 million. If we had just kept growing at the post-war pace, our share would have been 5 million.

For years now, dioceses have been closing more churches than they were opening, not to mention closing Episcopal hospitals, Episcopal schools, Episcopal bookstores, and seminaries. The average age of church constituents is well above 60, despite serving in communities where the average age is dropping into the 20s. Sunday Schools have consolidated classes and, in many cases, stopped educating children altogether. Churches that needed two or more clergy now have only one, and that one is often part-time. Giving has dropped precipitously. Endowment income, the so-called “wealth of dead people,” now is what enables many congregations to function at all. Parking lots are empty all but a few hours each week.

It can seem unfair even to notice and remark on such outcomes and what caused them. After all, these are good people, and many have been trying. It isn’t a matter of fairness, however. It’s a matter of delusion. I don’t know a single enterprise in America that would still claim to be in business after six decades of steady decline. Mainline church leaders seem to think themselves beyond the laws of physics.

More to the point, they think themselves beyond the imperatives of the Gospel. Lay and clergy leaders do what they feel like doing if it suits their preferences and doesn’t challenge their assumptions. They serve constituencies of the easily satisfied. They get training in the skills of attaining and expressing right-opinion, not in the badly needed skills of transforming lives, opening minds, enabling people to address their flaws and shortcomings, making a tangible difference in the world, and strengthening the operations that make transformation possible. Compare the atmosphere and honesty of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with the easygoing but tentative charm of Sunday church.

Best practices

We drive by the extensive operations of the non-denominational church — vast parking lots filled to capacity, overflowing pews, children everywhere, pastors eager to engage, trained people looking out for newcomers, and missionaries being sent to areas of need. We dismiss their music as “happy-clappy,” their theologies as mindless conservatism, and their facilities as little different from a shopping mall. In our hubris and stubbornness, we don’t see that they are simply following a new “playbook,” methods well developed in their seminaries, well executed by people who believe fervently, albeit differently, and serving the actual needs. Their driving force is small groups where people make face-to-face connections to feel known.

That playbook is available to us and to other mainline churches. It isn’t rocket science, and it certainly isn’t evil or misguided. Where Episcopal leaders have embraced the new playbook, they have experienced the same results as evangelical churches, some of them even becoming “mega-churches.” They have done so without sacrificing one iota of Anglican worship tradition or progressive theology or intellectual integrity. The difference isn’t some cheapening of the product, but drawing more people to it and doing more with it.

They pursue best practices. That’s the key. Best practices. They study what works. They look honestly at what is getting in their own way. They measure outcomes and discern which practices caused which outcomes. They don’t focus on getting people into the pews, but on touching lives where people live, responding to actual needs, and healing the places they hurt.

Best practices aren’t a moral category, or an intellectual accomplishment. Best practices are what work to nurture the enterprise. In a McDonald’s franchise, for example, managers are taught how to recruit new staff, train them, and motivate them. They don’t just fling an apron and spatula at a randomly chosen teenager and tell them to figure it out. In the franchise world, managers and workers learn that it costs no more to do it right, and the measure of doing it right is always the customer.

The typical Episcopal Church hardly notices the marketplace. Some respond warmly to Sunday visitors; some ignore them. But neither sees the faith-seeker whose entry point isn’t Sunday worship. They hold services but don’t implement imaginative ways to serve people who don’t walk in the door on Sunday.

None of this is difficult to learn or costly to implement. We just have to be committed to doing things the effective way and to push through the inevitable resistance of a few.

The cost of decline

We need to acknowledge the cost of having let our churches dwindle in order to avoid the hard work of keeping them lively. We have denied American culture our voice. The progressive voice is losing out to the angry, cruel and anti-democratic voice of right-wing haters. Without us promoting reason and fairness, submission and humility, the privileged have doubled down on privilege and created a plutocracy. When we could have been preaching to the ownership class about sharing more and making do with less, we were focused on who was getting ordained.

Episcopalians have wanted to see themselves as the good guys, well-educated holders of progressive views and humane practices. Sometimes we were the good guys, but sometimes we were the enslavers and intolerant. Rather than wrestle with that dichotomy and dig more deeply into the life of Jesus for guidance, we valued the easy course of promoting unity and keeping things orderly. We allowed firebrands to speak, and then went back about the business of inward-facing religion, with a focus on enjoying life together and modeling for our society a certain graciousness of being.

It is difficult to have such conversations now, after the horse has left the barn, as it were. The optimal time to mend our ways was in the post-war era when society was rethinking everything. American business seized that moment. Public education seized that moment. Enterprises like law and health care and housing rethought their practices. But we didn’t do it then, or when the enterprise began to stall, and we can’t do it easily now when the ship is sinking. So we have just kept on doing what we knew how to do. And when voices of justice and truth and gospel-mindedness demanded better, we have little energy to respond except by listening, sighing and blaming.

So now what?

We can keep on dying with dignity. Or, as Garrison Keillor once advised, “we can get up and do what needs to be done.” We can get to work, following best practices, doing things differently.

We can go to the ends of our property and look over our fences to see what the world looks like out there. See seniors living in dread of being warehoused and running out of money. See men and women who can’t make ends meet or marriages work. See families living in their cars. See families isolated by closed doors and closed minds, and terrified of drugs and falling behind. See workers who no longer have unions to protect them. See the ownership class hoarding the nation’s wealth. See a new mob of haters setting out to destroy America. See books being banned and women losing their autonomy. See an obsession with violence. And then realize that this is our mission field. Perfecting worship and filling our pews mean little If we aren’t helping out there where people need us.

Go also into the marketplace and listen to what people are saying. Listen to the cries of desperate immigrants. Listen to social media stealing our time and attention and normalizing untruth. Listen to teachers who have lost hope. Listen to the victims of sexual predators. Listen to the lonely and isolated. And then realize that this, too, is our mission field. If we aren’t comforting the afflicted, we are wasting our time.

Go to the churches that are succeeding. Put aside our sneering. Notice what seems to be working for them. Understand their best practices. Understand that those best practices don’t depend on right-wing ideology or White-centric attitudes. Comprehend what it would mean for us to do things the effective way, not the easy way.

Go to our neighbors and ask what they care about and worry about, and then share our own stories. Self-disclosure, not noblesse oblige. Ask them how God is revealing himself to them. Go as penitents and inquirers, not as the found.

Go to recovery meetings, whether or not we consider ourselves addicts. Hear what honesty sounds like. Hear what trust in God sounds like. See what repentance looks like. Learn the importance of keeping it simple and doing the next right thing.

Go to our own children and grandchildren and learn from them. Go to their schools and hear from teachers and students what life is like for them. Begin to comprehend what a Jesus-bearer to them would be doing and saying. Go to our bishops and seminaries and demand that they recruit people who can guide us in that work.

Deal with decades of poor stewardship, and embrace the tithe. I can’t think of a single successful church that isn’t also a tithing church. Then invest in our future, not in preserving our past.

Get into people’s lives, rather than trying only to get them into our pews. Meet in homes, meet in office parks, meet where people live and move and have their being. Meet online. Talk to our neighbors in the languages they actually use. Pay attention to their pains and needs. Be healers. Share the Gospel. Celebrate their lives and yearnings. Build bridges among socioeconomic classes. Consider our common humanity.

If we are embracing technology, embrace it completely. Don’t just live-stream the Sunday service to small cadres of the elderly. Hold group meetings on Zoom. Connect with individuals via FaceTime. Publish newsletters that do more than update the weekly schedule. Publish e-books that deal with important issues as seen through our eyes, not just through the eyes of well-known experts. Create videos. Teach new music.

There is no standard way for us to proceed. There is only the hard way, done with zest and courage. Always be paying attention to the metrics. Numbers are people, after all, and a life that shows no tangible evidence of being realigned with God at the center, probably is a life untouched.

Pay special attention to small groups. They are the key. Whether face-to-face in a living room or virtually on Zoom or in the back corner of a coffee shop, people need to be connecting, speaking, being heard, seeing themselves with fresh eyes, tasting diversity, experiencing needs other than their own. Eight to 15 people in each group, preferably with a facilitator but capable of functioning on their own, and free to venture beyond ecclesiastical shoulds. Groups will transform church life more than any other single activity.

Pay attention to giving. The decline in Episcopal Church congregational vitality has been marked by a steep decline in giving as a proportion of personal income. The Bible says 10% of gross income should be given back to God. Episcopalians give, on average, less than 2%. As a result, church budgets are meager. Clergy are poorly paid. Maintenance is rarely done in a timely and complete manner. New programs and new facilities struggle for resources. And we have little to share with marginalized people and victims of emergencies.

Meanwhile, our constituents are failing to attain the insights of the good steward, namely, that what we have comes from God and that gratitude honors God. We are recipients of grace beyond anything we have earned or have a right to expect. When we take more than we give, our taking hurts other people — and ourselves. Our society worships now at the altar of excess. We measure our individual worth by what we own. While many are crippled by poverty, we are living large. We have fallen for the great lie of the zero-sum economy and used that lie to justify cruelty to immigrants and cutbacks in public services.

What can we expect to happen?

Everything will change. Not because we have been wrong all along, but because life is about change. Life can never stand still. If a person dares to grow, they will change. If an institution dares to be alive, it will change. We should get over the idea that change is a mistake or danger to be avoided.

If our congregations dare to thrive, they will change as rapidly and unpredictably as a kaleidoscope being turned. We will find ourselves doing new things, engaging new people, and ourselves becoming new creation. We will become more open to surprise. We will become less dependent on the comforts we once enjoyed. We will become less fragile and more durable.

Our numbers will grow, but far more importantly, our hearts will grow, our trust in God will grow, our sense of who we are will grow, our voice will grow. We will have more friends. We will do more for others. We will spend our personal wealth and corporate wealth in healthier ways. Being a healthy participant in a healthy faith community is more than putting on a new label; it is living the life God wants us to live and being glad for it.

Yes, we will face challenges. Conflict will erupt between people with different opinions and different desires. We will discover not only what God wants us to do, but what we shouldn’t be doing. As we tell our stories, we will have to own the chapters that make us ashamed. Dying to self is never easy. The easy life we have known will vanish.

But then we will discover our hearts bursting with joy. Conflicts will be resolved, bad ways will be abandoned, old and shameful stories will no longer own us. We will know the peace and serenity that only God can give.

Is it, then, all about mechanics and systems? No, it is about saving lives, transforming lives, lifting up lives, standing for the victim and disadvantaged. It is about doing what Jesus did, even unto death on a cross. We have tended to see that as a personal journey. But what if it were a group, a body, a multitude? The problem with being a church in decline is that we never become a multitude at anything worth doing. Imagine being more, and as a growing force for good, entering into a broken world, not as a single voice calling for goodness, but as a multitude working for goodness. Imagine being able to have impact, to send more than a handful of people across the bridge in Selma, but a multitude capable of exposing the lie of racism.

Imagine solitary grains of wheat becoming a nourishing field of wheat. Imagine more than a few dozen in church on Sunday who are grimly holding on to what we have inherited and watching the door to see if anyone else will come in this week. Imagine hundreds in worship, indeed thousands. Imagine the great wall of sound we would create, as well as the magnificent silence that occurs when hundreds and thousands are letting God come close.

We have tried to say that our smallness is a virtue. But it isn’t. There are too many lives God would send us to touch. Too much brokenness that God would have us heal. Too much injustice and too much neediness that we can address.

It matters, you see, whether our churches are healthy. It matters whether we are growing. It matters whether we have diversity. It matters whether tears are flowing copiously in our midst. It matters whether we are so engaged with the world around us that we can hardly see ourselves coming and going. It matters whether humility from seeing around us the overwhelming evidence of God’s grace has driven us to our knees and out the door to serve.

We have tried to say that our decline is a sign of integrity, our staying true to God’s revealed way. But it isn’t such a sign. Our decline is a tragedy that we brought about through a combination of laziness, smugness and poor leadership. We can do better, and better will never be satisfied with decline. The stakes are too high.

Conclusion

No one likes to be criticized or corrected. No one likes to have past shortcomings named. No one likes to be told there is a better way. Usually, people have to “hit bottom,” as they say in recovery, before they are open to such intervention.

Well, we are there. In the Episcopal Church, we are in the final stages of a decline that has been steady, relentless, dispiriting, financially ruinous — a decline six decades long that is so catastrophic that, if not corrected, will prove terminal for most churches.

On the other hand, hitting bottom is when recovery can commence. It is when we stop thinking we have it all together. It is when we stop denying the evidence of empty pews, absent friends, moribund Sunday Schools, empty coffers, at best a survival mindset. It is when we admit we are powerless over the forces that drag us down. Bottom is when we can put our trust in God and acknowledge that God alone is able to stem the drowning tide. Recovery is when we can stop hiding from our shortcomings and ineffective practices, and instead talk about them. Recovery is when we can “make a fearless inventory” of what we have done wrong. Recovery is when we can name all those whom we hurt by allowing their church to die.

Recovery is when we can know the exhilaration of doing it God’s way. Recovery is when we can see the outcomes of hard work. Recovery is when we can turn more and more to the will of God, and then tell others how trusting in God has changed everything for us, and can change everything for them. We will speak in gratitude, without any reference to our excellence. Having told others, we will make room for them in our fellowship.

As in recovery, it is self-defeating to craft a master plan and think we can get it done promptly. Better to name one or a few tangible actions that we can take. The point of starting isn’t to get the burden off our back and find enough oxygen to breathe a little while longer. The point of starting is to keep on going, until God gives the victory in our Lord Jesus Christ.

This writing isn’t just a list of flaws; it is being specific about how we got into this mess and what, specifically, we can change about ourselves to get out of it.