You know the line from the film Field of Dreams: "Build it and they will come." Thats not at all the way life is in American mainline Protestant churches where membership and attendance have been declining for a few decades now since the attendance bubble in the 1950s. It has proved that the institutional dovetailing of Christianity with politics against atheistic communism along with the rebellion against institutions in the decade between the assassination of JFK and Watergate have been forces working against an already weak set of conditions for sustainability much less growth. What I have learned from pastors and other folks who work in the church, is that the why question is far more pervasive than any answers that are actually factual. That was also the impression I received from four years at a flagship Seminary. What we get are forecasts that make no sense even if they garner emotional appeal. So here are a few ways to look at it.
Baptism, Confirmation, Marriage
These are three key life-cycle components in how churches create social structures to support people as they grow up. If you do infant baptism, confirmation usually happens in early adolescence. If you do adult or believers baptisms, that happens when other denominations perform confirmations. It resembles when Jewish bar mitzvah and bat-mitzvah rituals take place. It was a right that functioned as full inclusion into the church as well as a transition into adulthood. That cycle does not work anymore.
It works when people live only until their 40s or 50s and young adulthood must, by necessity, start younger. If young adulthood starts younger and also ends younger, marriage will also happen earlier followed by earlier child-rearing – which is also symbolic of adulthood. It does not work when people are getting older and live until their mid to late 70s. Colleges, with a few exceptions, have abandoned the notion of in loco parentis and have focused on developing people ready to be productive workers rather than upstanding adult citizens. This leaves still adolescent kids alone to develop as they see fit without training to be adults. They then find a career after college and get married about about age 27. Kids only follow a year or two after that. As these life cycles extend, it also means that transience and the lack of desire to become "settled" increases.
Where was the church during this? Probably waiting for them to come back home which was what would be expected in the pre-affluent days of the 1940s and before that. But left to their own devices for a good 10-15 years, kids are not trained to value religion as a core institution in their lives. The best outlets they have are campus ministries and para-church groups. All of which is to kiss the home congregation good-bye. In that stretch of time, religion in the institutional sense has become one option for individual fulfilment and spiritual wholeness among a host of other options.
Mobility
Once you get out of college or if you decide to start pursuing a career earlier, you will move much more than ever before due to how corporations treat employees at the lower ranks as expendable workforce. To move up anymore, it is rare to stay with the same company. The sense of shared loyalty between company and employee is not there. As boundaries and capital flows change in volatile global economic systems, so peoples social locations change in order to seek more stability. That stability is likely to finally hit sometime when your kids are growing up.
You are now 35 or older and finally "settled" if you are fortunate. You will also have to "shop" for a church that more or less fits your own self-created idea of how religion shapes personal spirituality and "wholeness." You might start with the denomination like the one in which you grew up, but its not a given that you will return to it. the one that you will continue to attend will likely have been the one to foster the strongest set of social connections to help you feel embedded in a community. It will also be the one that is most flexible to changing demographics of people who are looking.
Where are All the Children?
Because mainliners tend to be more affluent, more socially mobile often out of necessity, and more educated, it all means that they are having children at a rate that will not replace the population at any moment in time. More conservative evangelical congregations tend to have more babies for the opposite reasons. They may also retain members better due to a clearer theological urgency to reach out for new people and couple that with higher social demands for people to remain connected with a given community. The polity in these churches tends to be more localized and therefore more adaptive to often very different geographical regions with different cultures and social structures in which people are embedded.
So where does that leave the mainlines? Maybe I will address that in another post.
Thanks to Bruce and Mark for the Twitter conversation that generated some of these thoughts.
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People are already living longer than that ("their mid to late 70s") and staying healthy and productive. The actuarial figures for those now in their 60s and basically healthy — or for me, at 45 and basically healthy — are astounding. And actuarial predictions aside, the reality of the actual people in my community (at St. Andrew's in Newport Beach) is living proof that we can't just put "the elderly" out to pasture until they lay down and die. There are many here who are intellectually and physically active into their 80s and 90s.
So the model needs to focus not only on retaining and drawing the younger generations, but also on keeping the older generations actively invested . . . and so there needs to be a much better understanding of how we integrate the different cultures of our different generations, so that we don't have the see-saw effect of either being attractive and relevant to the one end or to the other. I think this is one of the key challenges to the PCUSA.
agreed. especially since it is both the aging boomers and the golden agers who are if not retired already, soon to retire at some point (if ever) and will have more time to invest in things that need to be done outside of a work schedule.
also, young adulthood stretches to around 45 and that needs to be in the fore of people's minds lest church end up looking like one big youth group every week!
it really is about cultivating relationships and building friendships that will retain members. the relationship is the media foe the message and even *is* the message in a real sense. the preaching is not what Calvin thought it was for most mainliners at this point except for a select few preachers who are *that* captivating in the pulpit.
I agree also about the media for the WORD — that it is living out what is "preached" in relationships in the community that really communicates. Even for preachers who are very captivating in front of crowds — and we have a handful of excellent preachers in our 3000-member church — it all breaks down if the person doesn't live up to the flashy words, and people soon disconnect even when the words continue to be captivating. I don't think this is new, but I do think it is more evident than in earlier centuries because of different social dynamics — in particular our expectations now of equality, mutual respect, and less of an exclusive and authoritarian polity.
Drew – really resonate with the post, especially with the Baptism, Confirmation and Marriage piece. Too many other options out there the church is facing and we can't "compete" (for lack of a better word). Looking forward to that other post!
Thanks for stopping by Byron! Look forward to future interaction as well…
Related to the last sentence, I was actually thinking on that this morning. One the one hand social structures that the church exhibits fail to compensate for crucial lifecycle changes. On the other had, my fear is that the church will "over-produce" its market on social structures with populist appeal before appeals to the transforming power of the gospel.
I was thinking of this as reading through Wade Clark Roof's important book The Spiritual Marketplace. Yes, the spiritual and religious market is geared more towards the individual and existential crises we are still sorting through from the 1960's. But if the church responds to that mentality with populist appeal (making things more centered on individual experience) rather than communal transformation and rootedness in A people – the people of God,I wonder how much of what we do becomes a slave to market style rather than a resurrected Christ who rejects style at every turn…
But saying this is never good or useful without proposing an alternative and that's what I am thinking about and working on. Peace.
Thanks for stopping by Byron! Look forward to future interaction as well…
Related to the last sentence, I was actually thinking on that this morning. One the one hand social structures that the church exhibits fail to compensate for crucial lifecycle changes. On the other had, my fear is that the church will "over-produce" its market on social structures with populist appeal before appeals to the transforming power of the gospel.
I was thinking of this as reading through Wade Clark Roof's important book The Spiritual Marketplace. Yes, the spiritual and religious market is geared more towards the individual and existential crises we are still sorting through from the 1960's. But if the church responds to that mentality with populist appeal (making things more centered on individual experience) rather than communal transformation and rootedness in A people – the people of God,I wonder how much of what we do becomes a slave to market style rather than a resurrected Christ who rejects style at every turn…
But saying this is never good or useful without proposing an alternative and that's what I am thinking about and working on. Peace.