Death and Resurrection
Imagining the future of the Church
This week I had the opportunity to visit with a colleague, a retired Episcopal priest and psychotherapist, whom I had not seen in person for three years. He is a very hale 93 year-old. Over lunch, we caught up on our families and travels, and then our conversation turned to the state of the Church.
My colleague didn’t grow up in any particular religious tradition, but felt compelled to seek deeper meaning and purpose in his life when he was in his late 20s. This led him to the Episcopal Church, seminary, ordination and eventually a long career as a pastoral psychotherapist, integrating spirituality and psychology in his work with clients. He noted that the spiritual longing that he experienced as a young man hasn’t changed. Young people are still seekers.
But his coming of age was at a time, the late 1950s, when mainline Protestant churches were still in the midst of a post-war boom. The Episcopal Church was planting new congregations, engaging in liturgical renewal, and experiencing a revival of interest in contemplative spirituality. There was life and energy in the Episcopal Church, culminating in major changes the came to fruition in the late 1970s with Prayer Book revision and the ordination of women to Holy Orders.
All this is not to say that I have any nostalgia for some mythical “good old days.” I don’t wish to return to the unselfconscious racism, class privilege, and sexism of what was, in many ways, the establishment Church in our country. What I do want to underscore is that the context in which the Church finds itself has shifted rapidly, and the models developed in that boom time are no longer relevant.
Today, young people are still seeking, but what do they find if they come to the Episcopal Church? It depends, of course, upon the particular congregation they attend, but the general trends are clear. They are likely to find a small, aging congregation with few members their age. The Episcopal Church has the oldest average age of membership among U.S. mainline Protestant denominations (59). They are also likely to find a very homogenous membership, as 87% of Episcopalians are white in a country in which white-identified folks are 62% of the population. They don’t see people who look like them.
Overall membership has declined from a peak of 3.4 million in the 1960s to 1.6 million as of 2019 – before the COVID-19 pandemic. Given current life expectancy rates, our membership will decline another 50% by 2040, absent an influx of new members. That seems unlikely, given that the fastest growing religious identification in the U.S., especially among young people, is “none of the above.” The Rev. Dwight Zscheile, an expert on church renewal and decline, commented in an Episcopal News Service article: "The overall picture is dire -- not one of decline as much as demise within the next generation. ... At this rate, there will be no one in worship by around 2050 in the entire denomination."
Lower membership means smaller budgets. Fewer congregations can afford full-time clergy leadership. Our buildings are aging along with our membership, and property is becoming a liability rather than an asset. Many congregations can no longer afford their maintenance. Congregations are closing and selling their buildings, or repurposing them.
The institutional decline we are experiencing is shared by other religious denominations in the United States and Europe, albeit at slightly different rates. The Church most of us have known is dying. I am of the mind that it needs to die, so that something new can be born. We are a people of the Resurrection. But it doesn’t make the dying any easier, nor the uncertainty of the liminal space in which the new is being born.
There is a pervasive sense of grief running through our congregations. I certainly feel it. It is painful to let go of a form of Church that has nourished so many for so long. We are going to have to be brave and creative, humble and collaborative, open and receptive, as we imagine together the new thing that God is doing in our midst.
I am not worried about the Church’s survival as the bearer of Jesus’ message and path of spiritual transformation. Its institutional form, however, is very much at risk. The old is passing away, and I cannot yet see the new, but a few things are beginning to come into focus. The Church that is being born will look different.
It will be more iconic and less literary, communicated more through images rather than words. It will make more space for silence. Its focus will be less on dogma and more on practices that support the transformation of consciousness and of culture. Less about what we say, and more about what we do to raise our level of personal being and collective spiritual power.
It will welcome the rebirth of the Divine Feminine as a corrective to the unbalanced masculinity of patriarchal culture. The reintegration of the divine feminine and the divine masculine, God the Mother as well as God the Father, is necessary for the healing of our fractured consciousness and our suffering planet. We will imagine God, in whose image we are created in all our beautiful diversity, in more than one image.
It will be a Church identified with people and places, local ecosystems, rather than with parish boundaries and buildings. Worship will move outdoors and into people’s homes. Becoming Church will be understood as more than going to Church. It will be about a spiritual practice that connects us to the people and places where we are.
It will be a poorer, less politically influential, and more humble institution. It will find itself on the margins, where Jesus is always found. As we move through a profoundly destabilizing era of climate crisis and civilizational decline, local faith communities will play an important role in preserving what Margaret Wheatley calls “islands of sanity,” where moral truth and spiritual wisdom are transmitted. Christianity will continue to evolve in dialogue with the other great wisdom traditions of the Earth. This will change us in ways we cannot anticipate, as all genuine dialogue transforms its participants.
These glimpses of the future are just that. They are not predictions. They are aspirational. I realize that Christianity is not monolithic. Parts of the Church are responding to decline and civilizational discontent with a reactionary regression to religious nationalism and sectarian violence. These various futures are not mutually exclusive, and they are probably going to intensify the polarization we are experiencing in our society.
Jesus never said that following him would be easy! But beyond the grief and despair many are feeling about the decline of the Church, there is a new birth coming. We are in a period of gestation, where much growth is happening hidden from our sight. We have to attend to the inner movements of the Spirit and watch closely to discover and nurture the signs of new life.