The 20th century: a rift in the cultural continuum.

At its National Convention in July of 2011, the denomination I serve  was asked to consider a drastic restructuring plan. In (very) simplified terms, the plan was to close 40% of the regional offices that support our congregations and make the best of the ones we would have left.

In any other organization, this would be cause for great concern, yet our convention barely raised a collective eyebrow.  Everyone knew this was coming.  They knew it was coming because our church has been steadily and precipitously declining for a generation.  They also knew the reason:

Our church has largely failed to engage its own children and grandchildren.  


As one of those grandchildren who has been trained and ordained, and who presently has 4 years of ministry under his cincture, I feel that I have the responsibility to offer some thoughts and observations on behalf of "my people".

First: I need to make a confession.  Although my father is a Lutheran pastor, and I went to a Lutheran university, then a Lutheran seminary, and at 34, am as much a poster-boy for the ELCIC as anyone else is - the truth is, the church that raised me never quite felt like something that I could fully belong to.  My sense of non-belonging has not come from discomfort with our theology or our heritage. In fact, I'm extremely grateful for both of those things.  My sense of non-belonging also is not about the individual people in my congregation.  They are wonderful, welcoming, faithful, and kind and yes, I'd say this even if I wasn't afraid of offending them with this post.

The reason I barely feel I belong in this church is because the culture of the church is that of my grandparents and (to a lesser degree) my parents.  And their culture is completely different from that of my generation.

Prior to the 20th century, it was unimaginable for a child to have a different culture from their grandparents.  Yes, the generations pecked at one another as children sought to differentiate themselves from their elders, but the variations were still well within the scope of a single unified culture. 

When the 20th century hit that world, it hit like a tsunami -- everything changed and it changed fast.  Consider that:

• At the beginning of the 20th century, most people in the world made their homes in rural settings.  As of 2008, for the first time in all of human history, most people in the world live in cities.
• In the early 20th century, it was rare for women in North America to work outside the home.  Today, it is rarer for them not to do so.
• In the early 20th century, short of sending a very expensive telegram, the only way to send a message across the ocean was by mail, which took weeks if not months to arrive. Today that same message takes milliseconds and costs virtually nothing.
• Prior to the Wright Brothers' flight in 1903, it was assumed that heavier than air human flight was essentially impossible.  A mere 66 years later, Apollo 11 would bring pieces of wood and fabric from the Wright Brothers' Flyer with them as they landed on the surface of the moon in their 16 ton spacecraft.  Commercial air travel, unimaginable in 1900, has become beyond commonplace.  At any given moment 250,000 human beings are cruising overhead.
• Computers, once rare beasts the size of buildings and requiring brilliant engineers to run them, are now several orders of magnitude smaller, cheaper, more powerful, and easier to use.  Fisher Price now makes a baby-proof case for smartphones so that children as young as six months of age can use them.

Most of the people in my congregation are old enough to remember the world as it existed before it was hit by this tsunami of technological and cultural change.  They were formed and shaped in a different world with different norms and opportunities.  They are committed to this culture in the same way an adult child remains committed to their parents.  It's hard to find any fault in this instinct.  It seems like the most natural thing in the world to me.

But here's the thing...

I was born after a great many of these changes were already well entrenched.  I was born into a different culture, one defined not by homogeneity and stability, but by diversity and constant change.  I don't have any memory at all of life on a farm.  I have no experience of war (unless you count the kind fought with an XBOX controller in hand). The social circles that one belonged to when I was in junior high school were far more likely to be determined by the music we listened to or the brands we wore than the colour of our skin or our country of origin.   At least 5 languages were spoken in the halls of the high school from which I graduated.  At the small Lutheran university I attended, I had the privilege of having 4 different friends (all exceptionally wonderful people) confide in me that they were gay, and I'm certain that there were others I didn't know about.

It was a rich and complex environment in which to grow up, and the cultures that emerged in that environment were nuanced and diverse.  My generational cohort came by its culture naturally; I do not recall any point at which we all agreed to jettison our grandparents' culture so that we could adopt a newer and better one.   But both for better and for worse, our culture is definitely different from that of our grandparents.  And it's going to stay that way.
  

The reason why the church is in such a slump compared to the way it was 60 years ago is because there is a huge cultural rift between people who were formed by the culture of the pre-20th century world, and those who are too young to have had any direct experience of that world.  Had these two groups sought common ground rather than wage war with one another, the church might be in a very different position today.   Today, the victors of the worship wars of the 1980's and 1990's are sitting in their shrinking churches wondering where all the young people are. Far too many congregations will soon go to their graves believing that they have been fighting to uphold the sanctity of their faith, when in reality, many of them were not fighting for faith at all -- rather, they were fighting to preserve the monolithic culture of their youth.

This is a shame. 

Christianity is not now, nor has it ever been a faith that is welded to any particular culture.  In his ministry, Jesus was constantly crossing cultural boundaries and transgressing cultural norms so that God's purpose could be fulfilled.  This is a tremendously important part of the good news of who Jesus is.   Similarly, the apostle Paul was far more dedicated to the content of his proclamation than the package in which it was delivered.  He was well aware that getting through to people living in different cultures would require different tactics, and he adjusted his presentation accordingly.   Paul describes this process in 1st Corinthians 9:20-23: 

To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law) so that I might win those outside the law.  To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.  I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.

 All of my grandparents are now dead. Their culture will soon be extinct. In order for my grandparents' faith to continue to bring new life to a radically different context, my church needs to stop behaving as if Christian faith and my grandparents' culture were a single, inseparable entity.  It needs to learn from Jesus and Paul how to circumvent barriers and traverse rifts for the sake of the Gospel.  Moreover, this must not be done grudgingly or seen as a compromise made so that the church can merely survive in a diminished form.  Rather, it must be understood as an expression of profound faithfulness and commitment to the calling that the church has been given in every time, every place, and every culture - to convey the Good News by any and all means necessary and in so doing, to share in the Gospel's blessings.