Focusing on Congregations: Why the Decline?

We all know that congregational life is dying. These are hard words for preachers or would-be preachers to hear, but they must be heard nonetheless. This is particularly true of Lutheran congregations in North America. It is factually accurate to assert that, for most Lutheran congregations, their days of maximum involvement and maximum relevance to their communities was sixty or more years ago. This is not to say that some Lutheran congregations have formed in the last few decades and have been quite successful. It is only to speak the obvious: In most communities in which there are Lutheran churches, there is less attendance in worship and fewer events happening at the church than was once the case. 

We can speculate as to the immediate causes of this. Clearly, school systems and sports programs do not respect the autonomy of congregational programming like they once did. We know that soccer fields on Sunday morning are filled with kids who believe they must be at the soccer field and whose grandparents recall that when they were young the expectations of being in church on a Sunday morning were as great as the coach's expectations now that the kids are on the field for practice or games. 

We can also easily point out that the local congregation once served as a place to meet neighbors and friends during an otherwise busy week. Farm life was difficult 100 years ago, and the idea that once could see friends or neighbors at church and coffee or lunch afterwards was a powerful draw for church attendance. Accordingly, the congregation once served a social function it no longer has. It is perhaps difficult for us to grasp clearly how important this social function was. At a time before the worldwide web and cellphones, there was little community outside physical community. Moreover, 100 years ago it was difficult sometimes for adults even to have physical community. Where would they go in small towns across America to meet others and talk with them about their dreams and fears? Families did not go to bars to meet others in 1924; they went to church. Their friends belonged to their congregation or another one in town, and there was sometimes visits of friends to other congregations. 

It is possible, I suppose, to say that the loss of the congregation as a center for social life is a good thing because it allows us to see clearly what it is that the congregation actually offers and has always legitimately offered. We could speak in the way of Aristotle and say that while the congregation as a center of social life is merely accidental to the being of the congregation, its function of proclaiming the Word is essential to it. The word 'accidental' simply means that the congregation can still be what it is apart from its social function; the word 'essential' claims that it is part of the very being of a congregation that it proclaim the Word of God to those who sit in its pews. 

Some thus welcome today the clarity that the loss of social function in congregations bequeaths. It is clear now, in a way that was not the case before, that the congregation exists to do something else, something quite unconnected to filling one's social calendar: The congregation exists as a place where the Word is preached to sinners, and where these sinners gather around the communion rail to eat and drink the Body and Blood of that Word incarnate, the Body and Blood of Jesus the Christ. 

I think this way of looking at things does not, however, pay adequate attention to human motivation. The son did not come home to the father because he repented, but because he spent all his money and could no longer party or even eat properly. The Father welcomed the son knowing that the son's motivations were not pure. While the Danish theologian NFS Grundtvig never tired of reminding us that we are human first and then Christian, something quite controversial in its time, I can paraphrase Grundtvig with confidence and say that we are sinners first and then Christian. Accordingly, there are all kinds of motivations why we might want to go to church on a Sunday morning, and very few of them are pure. We go to church to be seen by others, to make business contacts, to do the right thing for our children, to show solidarity with our community, to show others that we are good people who care about the community, to show our spouses that we can do what they want us to do, to display to others our new car or clothes, or to manifest clearly that we are not on the side of soccer programs on Sunday morning. The list goes on and on, and has from the first days of congregational life gone on and on. Who truly can say with confidence that their only motivation for attending church is properly to worship their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and that they have no other motivation at all other than hearing the Word?  

Congregation life in North America tacitly accepted what was obvious: People participated in the life of the congregation for many reasons, only some of which had to do with what theologians call soteriology, those matters pertaining to salvation. They came to show their new hats, but perhaps heard what Jesus said about humility. They came to connect with potential insurance clients and heard that God's grace extends even to the unlovable.  In other words, the congregation was structured the way we are structured. We are sinful and unclean and cannot free ourselves because we ourselves always get in the way of what it would be to move past ourselves. We are self-centered even in our humility. Accordingly, we know that only God's external act of grasping us can protect us from our perpetual grasp of ourselves. Christ draws us to Himself through our activity of avoiding Him and embracing ourselves. Christ chooses us; we don't choose Him. When we say we have chosen Him, we can be sure that we have chosen someone or something that is not Him.  

The same is the case within congregations. In the days of congregational social activity that often seemed far away from theological concerns, Christ showed up to claim His own while watching his own run from him in the many ways that fully social beings can. Robust congregations of yore were not filled with Christians of deeper commitments to Christ, but with more people that might hear the Word and be grasped by it. What congregations of 100 years ago had that we don't is people. Whatever the motivation might have been, there were more people in the pews to whom the Word was being preached then than there is now. That is the problem facing us, and no amount of getting clear on the "true motivations" of those now attending services will help us. Human beings run away from God; it is our wont. God through Christ turns some of our retreats around so that we might be put in a position of hearing the Word. The problem for us today is that since there are fewer people participating in congregational life, there are fewer opportunities for people to hear the Word.

So we are back where we began. As congregational life abates in North America, the chances for people to hear the life-giving Word preached in its purity and the life-giving Sacraments to be administered properly decreases. What is requisite, I believe, is to advance a program of actual congregational revitalization. Even though the death of Christendom is upon us and there no longer is the cultural momentum generally to begin or maintain Christian structures and institutions in our society, there still exist sinners who need a life-giving encounter with the Word. Congregational revitalization means that we want to build active congregations in multiple communities that maximize the possibility of encountering the Word.  

What is needed is to get clarity on what ILT qua ILT can do to help congregations be those places of possible Word encounter. We need clarity on what specific activities we might do to move congregational life forward. 

While I have no empirical studies to point to in support of this claim, I do believe that a change in our social imaginaries is making the very idea of congregational life less attractive to many.  Charles Taylor in his epic A Secular Age speaks of these imaginaries, ways that people within a community and society project as possible ways of living fully. Once upon a time in America people assumed that there was a God and that human salvation involved an embrace of transcendence, some state of being that goes beyond this life. Most often, they believed in an afterlife, and thought that their loved ones entered such an afterlife immediately upon death. But the social imaginaries of a benevolent God and future bliss beyond death no longer inform our institutional structures and, increasingly, our primary communities. I would argue that the primary impediment to congregational revitalization is not that other institutions (e.g., the schools or sports programs) are crowding out congregational life, but that participating in the life of a congregation simply makes less and less sense to people. 

It is difficult to play baseball without bats, gloves ands bases. I contend that, in the same fashion, it is difficult to participate in congregational life when the social imaginaries of a benevolent God and future bliss are absent. How does one play the game of congregational life when the very presuppositions of that game have been fundamentally shaken? This is the primary question of congregational revitalization, and it is one that I think ILT can address. In our next post we shall have more to say about the precise nature of this address, but for now I simply want to point in the general direction of that address: Our present social imaginaries are in considerable tension with some of the deepest drives of the human spirit. What is needed now is simply to subject these social imaginaries to an interrogation by that spirit.