The Problem Is in the Pulpit

I’ve been thinking a lot about denominations lately. I’m a switcher, a pastor who has moved from leadership in an Evangelical church to a Mainline church. One of the first things I noticed in making the switch was that while the local theology in the last two congregations I served is very different, the denominational woes are exactly the same. Both denominations are struggling with significant decreases in giving and widespread boredom with and distrust of large institutions. Both denominations are losing members—albeit they are at different points in the process. Both denominations are promising more help for local congregations, but are basically not delivering, as their agencies just can’t get out of the PR and fundraising modes. Both denominations are spending lots of internal time and resources on major institutional restructuring. Both denominations are seeing an exodus of young members.

In the Christian Reformed Church I used to belong to, they are wondering whether or not “denominational culture,” is a key factor behind the malaise. Maybe. In the United Church, the new structural plan, which would save the National Office, but do away with Presbyteries (local groups of churches) and conferences (larger groups of local churches), seems to suggest that the problem is that local members don’t care about neighbouring churches. That might be right, but it is hard to understand, then, why those same members would care about the national church.

In the end, however, I doubt very much that membership malaise and decline have much to do with denominational culture or structure. Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to have top-notch culture and structure. The thing is, as helpful as these realities are in a healthy church, they are not the root causes of membership loss and malaise.

What is?

Well, the bottom line, I think, is that the problem is with local churches and leadership. The heart of the worship service (or, at least, one of its key foci), the sermon, is not giving people a reason to stay. And naturally, if that is the case, giving and attendance drops and interest in far away national offices or agencies isn’t going to light any fires either.

I don’t want to be too hard on preachers. But honestly, if there is one complaint I hear over and over again from my friends who are thinking of not going to church, or who have stopped—and I have many of them—it is that they are mad about the preaching. It is too judgmental. It is too pragmatic, as if the sermons were lifted out of the self-help section of the bookstore. It is, especially, boring and irrelevant. It doesn’t get people to strap on their seat belts or put on crash helmets.

Now, we might respond to such a charge defensively. I have responded that way myself, when people have stopped going to my church. Or, we might say that the problem is not with the preacher—but with the gospel. People just don’t buy it anymore, and the siren songs of the weekend away, or the materialistic lifestyle, or Twitter and Facebook are just too compelling to invest in sermons anymore. We can come up with a hundred and one reasons to deflect the blame away from preachers. And the hard truth here is that the problem is complex, and there are some very good preachers who still struggle with the malaise out there, and we can all think of people who left church for different reasons—lack of community, perhaps; or the widespread perception that churches are anti-gay, or anti-women, or anti-science. And many are.

However, I believe that our preaching is a big part of the problem. As pastors, we don’t work at it hard enough. We don’t pay enough attention to how we speak, to the rhetoric of persuasion, or the poetry of words. We don’t pay enough attention to what our parishioners are really wondering about in the dark of the night or when the bills come due. We are too comfortable with the status quo. We offer one meal after another of beans and rice and no one can remember what we said two weeks on. We preach out of dry barrels of sixteenth century doctrinal concerns like infant baptism or how the atonement works rather than to the crises of our era. I do it too. And this is what I lie awake thinking about at night. This is what forces me to spend more and more time preparing messages rather than less and less.

It may be that we are entering into an era where things are so good, for so many, that the gospel seems quaint and old fashioned. We may well enter an era where one of the crises of our day—global warming, poverty, religious fanaticism, racism, terrorism—so overwhelms us that people come back to church in droves, looking for the faith, hope and love to get them through. But for now, people are hanging up their church hats and leaving in droves. And not missing church at all. Especially not the sermons. And if nothing else, that should suggest that our preaching the same old stuff isn’t doing the trick.

We need to talk about this. What’s the problem? Denial? Are our preacher egos too sensitive to get honest about how we’re doing? Does the preaching ministry fail to attract the brightest and the best, like it did 100 years ago? Too much Greek (or too little?) Too much seminary (or too little?) Too much distraction from social media and the internet to concentrate on real writing?

Maybe all the above. But until our local churches are firing on all cylinders, especially from the pulpit, the whole debate about what to do with denominational structures is very much beside the point.

How Liberals and Conservatives Talk

            You’ve heard Liberals and Conservatives—and their extreme cousins, Radicals and Reactionaries—talk. Conservatives say, "Slow down! We need to hold the line on change for a while. Let’s wait till a consensus to emerge before we move ahead with new policies." Liberals, on the other hand, say, "Let's go! We are way behind the times. Let’s move ahead with ordaining practicing gays (or allowing kids at the Lord’s Table, or demanding that the government act more vigorously to alleviate poverty). Reactionaries—extreme Conservatives—say things like, "Now you've done it. I'm out of here. I want to start over with a new church that eliminates all recent changes. I want no part of them." And Radicals—extreme Liberals—say things like, “You haven’t done enough. I’m out of here. I want to start over with a new church (or no church) that changes everything.

            In this somewhat academic blog post, I want to explore how we, as Liberals and Conservatives (mostly) and even Radicals and Reactionaries (well, at least a few of us) talk about the church. Or, better yet, I guess I’d like to write about how our talk about change helps us understand our Liberal or Conservative selves.

            So first I need to define a few terms. First, structure. The structure of a church is its legal, organizational and cultural aspects--everything from confessions to church orders, from congregations to ethnic habits. Second, drift. Drift is how the pendulum swings within culture. Over the past fifty or even one hundred years, most commentators would agree that within most denominations, regardless of their starting point, that drift has been leftward. So, in Canada’s United Church, for example, the Primitive Methodist current has mostly been swamped by Unitarian and other theologically Liberal currents. In the United States, the original isolationist currents of Fundamentalism have been overtaken by political activism and media savvy. And, where Fundamentalists used to dress differently, watch no TV at all, and discourage higher education, they now (even at the beach) dress the same as everyone else, watch the same TV, and have many of their own institutions of higher education.

            My thesis is this. Conservatives and Liberals both accept current church structures. But while Conservatives and Reactionaries are suspicious and concerned about the current drift to the left, Liberals and Radicals are not. Ironically, however, Reactionaries and Radicals, unlike their more moderate partners, both reject current church structures. They want to break them down or start over. Reactionaries tend towards independentism or building new church denominations while Radicals tend to drift out of church all together. The following illustration might help keep these distinctions straight.

*******

A.

<<-----------------------Religious Structures----------------------->>

Radicals              Liberals        Conservatives             Reactionaries

(reject                   (both accept structure)                 (reject

structure)                                                                        structure)

B.

<<-----------------------------Religious Drift-----------------------------<<

                                                                                                 

(Radicals, Liberals                                   (Conservatives, Reactionaries

Accept the drift)                                       Reject the drift)

******

            Now, those on the left and the right have favored ways of trying to get their point of view across. While certainly not limited to these strategies, more often than not, these are the fallback positions.

            Liberals and Radicals, depending on how far left they are, tend to argue from circumstance or situation. They say things like, “We need to fix the inner city’s poverty,” or “Look at the suffering in the Sudan! What can we do to alleviate it?” Liberals are motivated by difficult realities like crime, illness, racism and illiteracy. They get to work to fix such things. Conservatives and Reactionaries tend to argue from purpose or principle. The say things like, “the Bible is inerrant!” or “Everyone has to subscribe to our denominational confessions,” or “we need to find the truth.” Conservatives and Reactionaries are motivated by the great ideals that have been handed down to them, by the laws of the universe, and by the rules that embody them. The get to work in order to bring people back to or rally people around their ideals.

            People on the left and the right also have peculiar ways of working together (or not). In the middle, the Liberals and Conservatives who want to stay with current church structures treat issues one at a time because they and the world we live in are complex. They understand the dangers of oversimplifying. Thus people who hold to middle positions tend to see many causes at work in the church rather than just a few. Causes that both Liberals and Conservatives are concerned about include secularism, less literacy, wealth, new interpretations of old passages, youth culture, TV, leisure, social pressures, and so on.

            The extremists, on the other hand, Reactionaries and Radicals, tend to treat all issues as related since the world, in their mind, is really pretty simple. Extremists love simplistic slippery slope arguments that suggest everything is headed in one direction. Thus they tend to reduce the causes to a very few, usually negative, ones: refusing to take the word of God seriously, or refusal to take alienation or poverty seriously.

            But Liberals and Conservatives are also different in how they tend to communicate. Conservatives and Reactionaries on the right argue deductively from principal (ie, if scripture or the confessions say so, we must accept that). Liberals and Radicals on the left tend to argue inductively from experience. So, if there is suffering, then we better do something about that. The right argues from written documents and cultural memory: laws, confessions, and traditions. The left argues from relationships and people, striving to improve the lot of people via equality, progress, or openness.

            The bottom line is that I think the past generation or two has seen a marked shift away from the center and towards the fringes. As people read and study less they are also less able to describe complexity or put up with bureaucracy. So they reject the structures while holding every more extreme opinions that make conversation ever more difficult.

            So what do you think? And where do you fit in?

(This blog post was informed by the scholarly work of the late Bernard Brock, a mentor and teacher for me. As a communication theorist at Wayne State University, he was especially interested in the political arena. But his ideas can easily be adapted to the church setting, and that is what I’ll do here.)