The Quest for Holiness of Heart and Life

These three words strike fear into my wife.  I am overwhelmed in the cereal isle of the supermarket!  We are presented with so many choices everyday.  We tend to become paralized by choice; ultimately we may not have a choice because there are so many choices to be made.  Alvin Tofler, in his book Future Shock call this "overchoice".  Barry Schwartz wrote a book about it called, Paradox of Choice.  The church is not immune to this phenomenon.  While it may be impossible to determine how many Christian denominations there actually are (I have seen estimates in the tens of thousands), there is no question that people have incredible choices in terms of where and how to live out their faith.  This is a fact that has not been lost on the Catholic and mainline Protestant churches.  There are more "unaffiliated" (20%) than there are mainline Protestants (between 16% and 18%) and they are fast approaching the Roman Catholics (23%).  For those under 30 the percentages are even higher - between 25% and 30%!  None of these figures bode well for the long established denominations.  If the United States still has one of the highest rates of church attendance in the world, and the numbers of its citizens who belong to Catholic or mainline Protestant churches adds up to around 40%, where are people going and why are they abandoning the established denominations?  Some possible reasons:

1.  Church membership is, and always has been a voluntary affiliation.  This is not always recognized by well established denominations.  There is a tendancy to believe that people choose membership because their families have "always been Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian....fill in the blank". Or, while not overtly expressing it anymore, there still exists the idea that "outside the church there is no salvation", ergo, you must belong or risk losing your immortal soul.  This results in a lack of effort to evangelize.  Pastors and priests become "prisoners of the temple".  Rather than go to where the people are and proclaim the good news, they build magnificant churches and expect people to just show up.

2.  Church is seen as  an anachronism.  The world is a much different place than it was 60 or 70 years ago.  It is more diverse and more pluralistic.  People are more well traveled and better educated.  The church, on the other hand, has remained rooted in the 16th century and in many cases, continues to fight the fights of the Reformation.  Where strides have been made, there are efforts underway to undo the progress.  Witness the conservative take over of the heirarchy of Roman Catholic Church and their moves to turn back the clock on the Second Vatican Council.  The people are moving forward while the church is moving back.

3.  Is the church serving up what the people are seeking?  People affiliate with a church because they are seeking an experience of, and encounter with, the Divine.  What they usually are given by the established churches are dogmas, doctrines, and programs.  None of which provide meaning to people's lives.  There may have been a time when people could be swayed by such things, but that time has passed. For example, according to a Gallup Poll, only 30% of Roman Catholics believe that Christ is really present in body in the Eucharist.

People are starving for spirituality and they are being given religion by the established churches.  Until these churches proclaim the gospel in a way that truly changes people's lives, they will continue to lose members and become increasingly irrelevant as people exercise their choice by voting with their feet.

My wife, Paula, and I have been discussing "thin places" alot lately.  A thin place is where the veil between this world and the next is especially thin.  Thin places are predominant in Celtic spirituality. At a thin place a person can experience the Divine or glimpse the world beyond especially acutely. I experience thin places frequently in my work with the dead and bereaved.  When I meet with a family before a funeral or memorial service to learn about the deceased; when I see pictures displayed of the important and not-so-important moments in their life; when I see art or craftwork that they may have done placed around the chapel I feel as though I have reached through a thin place to the next world.  And when, at the end of the service I place my hand on the casket or urn and pray the prayer of commitment, I feel as though I have touched the person through a thin place. Thin places exist all around us.  We just need to be more intentional about recognizing them.  We all have had those moments when God has seemed especially present to us or around us.  Those are moments when the veil is being lifted so that we can sense beyond our earthly existence.  There are many things that defy explanation - what is love if not a thin place?  So, I encourage you to be open to those experiences that "pull back the curtain" to reveal what lies beyond.  Trust them.  If you would like to read more about people's experiences of thin places, Westminister Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis publishes a monthly journal called Thin Places on the web at:  www.thinplaces.us.

Well, I don't consider myself a "prodigal", but I HAVE returned after a two year absence from this blog.  I have missed this forum.  Much has happened to me in the past two years, the biggest of which is that I retired from active teaching and have begun a new chapter in my life.  I don't golf or play tennis so what to do in retirement?  I discerned that God was calling me back to ministry and so I founded Ministry Consulting Services.  I consult with churches on program development and small group ministries, but my main ministry involves "burying the dead".  I am working with  three funeral homes to assist people with funeral/memorial rites.  I officiate at some and coordinate others.  It has been a life changing experience for me and will have a big impact on what I reflect on in this blog.  There is an interesting tension created in reflecting on one's life in retrospect while at the same time living it forward.  So, this sets the stage for my further reflections.  I hope you read my entries in this blog with that context.

In my last post I referred to Harvey Cox's Feast of Fools and the idea that the church has lost its sense of festivity and fantasy at a critical juncture in history.  Both are necessary to creating new, more effective paradigms for the church.  As I continued to reflect on this it occurred to me that the church has also lost two other critical dimensions that characterized the church in the first few centuries, namely the prophetic and the charismatic dimensions.  In this post I want to focus on the prophetic dimension.  With the loss of the prophetic the church loses three elements that are critical to its future.  The first is voice - its ability to hear the voice of God and to subsequently be God's voice to the world.  If the church does not echo God's voice, in whose name does it speak?  Second, imagination.  With the loss of imagination comes the loss of the ability to invision the Kingdom.  The church then turns to other means to measure its "effectiveness" - size, number of services, the beauty of its physical plant, income...all of the external trappings of success that the prevailing culture uses to measure itself.  Finally, the church looses its ability to recognize miracles. We live in a world surrounded by miracles; and yet we fail to see them.  The mundane becomes the ordinary.  We lose our capacity for wonder and awe.  Only that which passes the test of scientific inquiry is real.  That world is not all that exciting to me.  I would rather stand in the shoes of the prophet.

"There are only two ways to live your life:  one is as though nothing is a miracle.  The other is as if everything is.  I believe in the latter"

Albert Einstein

I was purusing my bookshelf recently and my eye was caught by a copy of Feast of Fools by Harvey Cox.  I decided it was time to revisit this forty-year old gem.  Cox hits the nail on the head with his observation that we and our institutions have lost our capacity for festivity and fantasy and our world is a much poorer place because of it.  The fact that he wrote this book forty-one years ago and his observations are as, if not more, pertinent today as they were then reinforces how impoverished we are.  Our world values hard work and intellectualism, but has little time for play and imagination.  No where is this more obvious than in the institutional church.  What passes for festivity has become rote, predictable ritual.  Much of its meaning has been lost to expediency and efficiency ("get them in and get them out in time for the parking lot to clear for the next service".  Even the term "church service" is telling).  Fantasy and imagination has given way to orthodoxy and buracracy.  In the words of Harry Trimble in The Magestic, "where's the magic"?  I believe we are on the cusp of a number of paradigm shifts.  We need fantasy and imagination to make the most of these opportunities.  For as Cox says, "fantasy [is] the faculty for envisioning radically alternative life situations".  This is a faculty we require in our ever changing world, for the definition of insanity is: to continually repeat the same behavior and expect different results.