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.

Dream Books and Others Littering My Livingroom

I’ve compiled a summer reading list based on books I’ve found lying around my living room—you know, the ones that you just can’t get rid of, that stick in your craw, that you think you might read later, or that you love to come back to, again and again. Here they are:

So first—Coffee table books about dreams that are unlikely to come to pass. For me, this is a large pile of books about houses. I can remember designing houses, over and over again, ruler and eraser in hand, as a grade school child. Even now, I sometimes wonder if I missed my calling. I would love to design and build that one, perfect house of my dreams.

Unfortunately, living in Toronto, there simply are no lots close enough to transit to make building such a house from scratch a real possibility. But still, I imagine. My favorite house book is Susan Susanka’s The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live (Newton, CT: The Tauton House, 1998). Susanka suggests that many of us have houses full of space we don’t really need (a two-story entrance way, perhaps; or a fourth bedroom) and missing spaces we could really use (a cozy away room, perhaps, or a boot room). She urges us to consider how to make space do double duty, and then suggests the use of beautiful materials and design features that make this possible. A slew of follow up books by Susanka on themes like renovations are also very good.

My second book about house dreams that are unlikely to come to pass is entitled, More Straw Bale Building: A Complete Guide to Designing and Building with Straw (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2005). I love the idea of building with straw, especially since it is a completely renewable building material that goes very easy on Mother Earth. It is also long-lasting, safe, relatively inexpensive, and can be molded into all sorts of interesting shapes, finishes, and interior nooks and crannies. I wouldn’t be surprised if straw bales are an essential part of home-building in the near future.

Second—books about dreams that still have a chance. I’d love to sail all over (if not around) the world. I really started thinking about this as a life goal years ago when our family read, aloud and together, Tom Neale’s All in the Same Boat: Living Aboard and Cruising (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1997). The book told the story of a Canadian family that built their own boat, and then sailed it around the world. Next, a few years ago, my son signed up as crew on a 30-foot sailboat that crossed the Atlantic. He loved the experience—the stars at night, the dolphins racing along beside, the solitude of taking the night watch and the camaraderie of a small crew that gets along. And then there were the places he went: Îles-de-la-Madeleine, the Azores, and Portugal.

So I bought a stack of books about sailing. I’ve spent many hours reading, daydreaming, and putting numbers to the back of a napkin imagining how Irene and I could spend five or ten years sailing as an early retirement lifestyle. My favorite among these books is Evans, Manley and Smith’s The Sailing Bible (Buffalo: Firefly Books, 2009). The ideal scenario is Irene and I spending six months in the Mediterranean Sea with our grandson Taps as assistant to the assistant captain.

Third—books by authors I’ve loved in the past, but can’t get into now. I read Les Miserables once a year for over twenty years after first reading it in college. I still dip into it from time to time. It was my one literary compulsion. My unabridged version, probably the third that I’ve owned, is held together by duct tape, all 1400 pages of it. In view of my delight in Les Miz, I though I’d love Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame too. I bought it years and years ago, but it sits on the shelf in my living room, mostly unread. I’ve tried. I’ve made it a hundred or so pages in. But somehow, it just doesn’t grab me. Not sure why. But it isn’t Jean Valjean.

I’ve also reread—albeit only twice—Barry Unsworth’s Morality Play. I loved the novel, in part, because I’ve always been interested in how illiterate people learned about Christianity, and these morality plays are part of the story. But Morality Play is also a mystery, and a good one at that. Lots of medieval color and a surprising number of plot turns make it a page-turner. I picked up Unsworth’s The Ruby in Her Navel a few years later, expecting much the same. It is also set in medieval times, although in far more exotic Sicily. It is also full of mystery and plot turns. I did actually get through this novel—but I had to work at it. Again, I’m not sure why it didn’t sing. Maybe, it just isn’t as good a novel as Morality Play. Or it might be because it was just too complicated.

Four—novels about ministers. In particular, I have a thing for novels about ministers either finding their faith or losing their faith, and have a shelf-full of them at work. My favorite in the former category is Grace Irwin’s Andrew Connington (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966). It’s a mid-century “Christian” novel, of no great literary merit. It is however, a good story simply written. Set just after WWI, Irwin tells the story of a gifted man who is drawn to the United Church ministry because of the opportunity it affords him to do social work. At seminary, even though he doesn’t believe, students drawn to Liberal Christianity repulse him. The problem appears to be that they are not as intellectually rigorous as the old conservative scholars Connington is strangely drawn to. Connington’s lack of faith is ultimately challenged by the work he does in a large Toronto congregation. The communion service during which it all comes together for him is perfect melodrama—and maybe something more. This hard-to-find novel is also a fascinating portrait of the upper-middle-class Toronto church scene when Toronto was still Hog Town.

As for ministers who lose their faith, my favorite is Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (Cambridge: Belknap Press, Harvard, 1960). Originally published in 1896, the novel chronicles the sometimes hilarious and at other times tragic life of a Methodist Minister. He begins his ministry as a gifted speaker without much by way of formal theological training. Among other things, he soon encounters Catholics, historical criticism, beautiful women, and lousy trustees. I won’t say, exactly, what happens to his faith, but it makes for a great read that resonated with me. While I hope I am never as naive as Theron Ware always is, his personal struggle to “get it right,” in a world full of contrary opinions is actually quite moving.

One non-novel about finding and losing faith deserves mention here. It’s a dense but insightful theology book by Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God After God (New York: Columbia U Press, 2009). Kearney asks, “What might the faith of someone who comes back, look like?” Richard Kearney tries his hand at describing such a faith, especially perhaps for Christians who have struggled with questions of theodicy. I was challenged by every chapter, and am still mulling over what his take might have to do with my faith.

Five, two of the best books I’ve read since last summer. I’ll pick both a fiction and non-fiction book. On the fiction side, the best book I’ve read—a page-turner with substance—is probably Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda (London: Oneworld Pub, 2013). This novel won the CBC’s Canada Reads contest (irritatingly hosted by faux-culture-critic Jian Ghomeshi) this year, but only by a whisker over the Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, book two in the Maddaddam trilogy (which I also loved). The Orenda is a heart-wrenching novel about the Jesuit mission to the Huron Indians in the early 17^th century. None of the players—Hurons, French, Iroquois, come out of this looking very good. I wonder a lot about the historical accuracy of some of the religious, cultural, and war episodes. But overall, this is a novel that looks hard truths about human nature and Canadian history straight in the eye. I’m going to read The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King as a corrective to some of The Orenda’s excesses, this summer.

The best non-fiction book I’ve read this past year has to be Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2011) by Janet Reitman. I was at turns shocked, dismayed, and angry as I read this account of what makes Scientology click. The book also serves to remind us that most people join faith communities not because they are convinced by the truth of that religion’s claims, but because they find community among its adherents. This is a critical reality that people of all faiths need to fit into their thinking about church or temple if they are to live with spiritual wisdom in today’s world.

So that’s it. Maybe there’s something for you in this list? Or a book I ought to add to my reading list? Let me know!

How to Write a Spiritual Memoir

            I wrote a spiritual memoir a few years ago. It was entitled, Not Sure: A Pastor’s Journey from Faith to Doubt. It wasn’t easy—writing a memoir, that is. I actually have some thoughts about that. (By the way, you should read that book! It’s great! Shameless self-promotion, there. You can get it from Eerdmans or on Amazon .com or .ca site. You could also just click the cover picture over to the left of this column to land on my book’s Amazon page).

            My thoughts here are based in part on a talk I gave about the process of writing a memoir at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing a few weeks ago. I did that talk with another writer, Christy Berghoef, who wrote Cracking the Pot: Releasing God from the Theologies that Bind Him. (By the way, you should read that book! You can get it on Amazon .com or .ca.)

            But getting back to my thoughts on writing spiritual memoirs.

            I’m pretty sure that, hands down, the number one type of unsolicited article we received at The Banner over the ten years I was editor was the memoir. Most often they were thinly disguised eulogies. As such they were stories about the author’s life with the deceased. But many were pure memoirs: personal recollections of immigration, or founding a church, or conversion, or surviving World War II, or serving as a pastor, and so on.

            Some were well written, but most were not. Still, the very volume of such articles suggested that a talk on how to write a memoir might be a popular offering at the Festival. And, in fact, nearly 300 people showed up for that seminar.

            Since then, I’ve had opportunity to revise the talk a bit—after all, I only gave half of the original one. But here are a few of my main points.

            One—and I don’t say this to be prescriptive—I backed into the spiritual memoir part of the book. I wanted, at first, to write a book about how what Christians thought “faith” was has been a moving target over the past two thousand years. I partly drew on my background in Communication Theory to write that history. And I drew on my theological training to reflect on the significance of those changing ideas about faith. But finally, halfway into the book, I realized that I was writing about how my own ideas about faith had changed over my lifetime, too.

            Two, one of the most common problems with all the spiritual memoirs I received at The Banner was that they were almost all about good people always doing good things—hagiographies. Drunks dried out. Churches were built in spite of financial setbacks. Immigration led to new lives, in spite of stormy crossings.  And so on. The people in such stories encountered obstacles, but they themselves usually bathed others in love, did so with integrity and by relying on deep faith. The problem with such stories (especially when it came to publishing them in a Calvinist magazine!) is that they never touched on the hero’s, or less frequently, the heroine’s dark side, weaknesses, shortcomings, or failures. But no one’s life is so exemplary that it can stand by itself as a moral lesson. Mother Theresa had doubts. John F. Kennedy was a philanderer. Stephen Harper is a control freak. That means stories that ignore the dark side lack honesty—and usually narrative tension, too.

            Three, spiritual memoirs must have a plot! You must write so that from the first page (or chapter) people are asking, “but how will this end?” You need to put people on the edge of their seats. Readers need a sense that they ought to strap on seat belts and crash helmets. Thus, there must be complicating events, surprising (but believable) twists and turns along the way, and an aching void that lasts to the end of the story that may or may not be filled.

            Four, the writing must be good. Spirituality as a topic doesn't guarantee transcendent prose. So don’t use passive constructions. Find the right word. Concentrate on grammar, style, repetition (good and bad), and punctuation. I was always surprised by how many memoirs (and other articles) we received at The Banner, even from well-educated professionals, that failed using most of these measures. The worst offence, often by pastors, was florid writing. Ponderous decoration doesn’t fly and is nearly impossible to edit.

            Five, get used to the fact that you can never be objective about your own story. You will, after all, pick the events in your life to write about and you will colour them as you see fit. Along the way you will lie, you will misremember, and you will be mightily tempted to weight things ever so slightly in favour of your own portrait. It is impossible to do otherwise. But try to minimize this. Check with friends. Ambiguity, paradox, unknowns, mysteries, confessions, errors all have weight because they help any story become more believable.

            Six, journal. I’m not a daily, year in and year out journaler. However, at several key points in my life—when I was finishing high school, in seminary, when I started in ministry, when my brother was dying, and when I’ve gone on retreat I’ve kept a journal. They were invaluable to me for writing my book. I also had monthly council reports that always included a “personal” note, date books, letters written to my parents when I was in college, news stories, interviews to draw on. I found it painful to read some of that old stuff—but it was illuminating too. If you want to write a memoir, journaling is a great first step. And if you want to get into the discipline of writing, journaling is a great activity.

            Seven, consider employing what Kenneth Burke called “perspective by incongruity.” Burke thought that when you put two things together that don’t belong together, you will see new things. So, for example, there is Robert Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Or, how about a bus in the Alaska wilds, as in Jon Krakauer’s, Into the Wild? Or even A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain. In my own book, I draw some parallels between the faith story of a little boy growing up in St. Catharines and the faith of illiterate peasants in Europe, fifteen hundred years ago. Perspective by incongruity can by paradoxical, mysterious, or simply add interest to your writing.

            Eight, a bit more Kenneth Burke. He suggested that there were five loci that any cultural artifact will have built into it. Act (what happened), scene (where did it happen), agent (who did it), agency (how was it done), purpose (to what end). In my experience as an editor, many of my beginning writers focused almost exclusively on fleshing out the agent. It is a memoir, after all. But scenes contain and constrain acts. It matters what sort of family you grew up in, or what seminary was like, or what your neighbourhood was like. Memoirs ought to explore all five loci, but I think Scene offers some of the most imaginative possibilities.

            Naturally, this is the sort of topic that whole books could be written about. So I offer my eight thoughts as part of a much larger conversation. Still, lots of people have interesting and instructive stories to tell. Hopefully these hints will help you write yours.

The End of Denominationalism

            Most of us are suspicious of institutions. They’re big, out of touch, impersonal, pushy, and so on. Our gut says, “less government.” We don’t see bank tellers or develop relationships with them anymore. Kids get lost in today’s factory schools and are too often bullied by peers. Facebook changes privacy settings without asking us about it. Security breaches allow hackers harvest our personal data from Target and many other corporations—sometimes even from the government. And at church, we want spirituality rather than religion. This does not bode well for denominations.

            Denominations—like many religious institutions—have been in trouble for a long time. I thought I’d sit down and try to list a few reasons why.

1.  Historically, and still theoretically, denominations coalesce around theological distinctives. Where there was choice, long ago, matters such as predestination or the nature of Jesus’ presence at the Lord’s Supper or children’s baptism played a part in helping people to join different, competing camps. Of course, long ago there often was less choice than we imagine now. You joined the church of your sovereign, or your nation, or your village. And if you didn’t, you were in trouble. My own Mennonite ancestors fled persecution in Reformed Switzerland to find religious freedom in somewhat more liberal, but still Reformed, Netherlands. Their children mostly married Reformed spouses. The truth is that most people actually belong to the church they do due to accidents of birth, race, location, and even war even if the denominational roots of those churches are in ancient doctrinal conflicts. Churches have never really examined the causes (simpler) and consequences (much more difficult) of this reality, and what it means in light of its own story that it is all about distinctives. Unfortunately for denominations, the big “accident,” of history these days is secularism and religious relativism.

2.  These days, however, people know about as much about that history, or theological distinctives, as they know what is in those User Agreements you click in order to download new apps. For most people, the “original” doctrines are anachronisms. It isn’t necessarily that they disagree with them. The vast majority of denominational members don’t know much about them. If they do, they know the content of their own doctrines, but have never seriously wrestled with alternatives. The reasons for this lack of understanding in the pews are complex. The issues that led to the formation of denominations don’t seem very relevant anymore—so much junk DNA. We don’t go to war with Mennonites or Catholics. Most issues that separate today’s denominations seem irrelevant, abstract, or are not at all understood. Not nearly as many people read theology as in the old days—say from about the seventeenth century till about fifty years ago. So people are poorly informed.

3.  In the absence of deep understanding of theological distinctives, people sometimes coalesce around moral issues instead: abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex, corporate crime, the environment, poverty and so on. They find communities on the Internet, and in media, that loudly trumpet particular moral positions on these issues. These virtual communities are like silos—all filled with a single point of view, and separated from other communities with different points of view. People become very emotional about their perspectives. In this environment, denominations find it hard to keep everyone on the same page. People would rather stick with their virtual community’s perspective on these issues than bow to 

what the denomination (tries) to insist on.

4.  One of the largest groups of leaders and paid employees in most denominations, the seminary faculty, is understandably deeply engaged in doctrinal distinctives. They seem unable, unwilling, and always unimaginative when it comes to helping denominations deal with this massive shrug of the shoulders when it comes to what they as theologians care deeply about. Few know their names, look for their opinions on the internet, or can understand the relevance of a life spent trying to understand Rupert of Deutz on the sacraments.

5.  Denominational bureaucracies (including most seminaries) are deeply committed to the status quo. You can hardly blame them. Fundamental change is always controversial, and that risks (at worst) schism and (at best) the slow erosion of dissatisfied members elsewhere (or more often than not, out of church altogether). Holding the line on budgets and staff while churning out more and more memos and workshops and reports is safe, but inspires no pastor or member in the parish.

6.  You have to do the Exegetical Twist to justify denominations or their central concern for doctrine Biblically. Churches were named by the city they were in. Theoretically faith, hope and love are the most important realities. While much in the New Testament over time morphed into a thousand theological views, doctrine itself is rarely presented there as, “you must believe this version of the truth,” rather than, “that version.” I realize this oversimplifies things. But it is hard to imagine anything other than a friendly “maybe this, maybe that,” discussion between the apostles about words such as “begotten,” “virgin,” “catholic,” “descended into hell,” never mind whether or not women could preach or whether Mary bodily ascended to heaven, or the practice of naming saints. Ironically, one doctrinal matter they probably all agreed on—the immanent return of Jesus—was something they were all wrong about.

7.  Denominations have always been about doctrine, in theory. But in truth, the glue that holds people in denominations is usually ethnicity or community. Modern culture, on the other hand, is increasingly multicultural. Every new generation has a harder time understanding why they ought to go to mom and dad’s church with other Dutch or Scots or Lithuanians than the previous generation.

8.  Denominations, while having a semblance of unity and homogeneity based on their shared dogma, are ironically much less homogenous than they seem. When I worked as editor for a denominational magazine I travelled from one end of the denomination to the other. I was constantly amazed by how dissimilar the churches I visited were. Many were aligned with right-wing evangelical politics and attitudes. Others were most definitely not. Some were still very focused on doctrinal distinctives, while most were not. Some were deeply committed to being ethnic islands (though few admitted it). Others were cosmopolitan. Some leaned charismatic, others Baptist, others to piety, others to political activism or social justice, and others again to nothing much of anything. When so much substantive difference exists between different congregations in one denomination, the unity they share is more imagined than real.

9.  People might care about doing something with the Baptist or Catholic congregation down the street, but could care less about national or international ecumenical organizations. All politics, and nearly all church, is local. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but it doesn’t bode well for denominations because the lack of interest for stuff happening beyond the town line is the same lack of interest people have for denominations. This is doubly so when being on the boards or being sent as a delegate to these ecumenical organizations is usually understood as being a reward for especially well-connected clergy or church bureaucrats. It just doesn’t get traction in the pews.    

10.  Pastors are often stuck with their denominations for very practical reasons--pensions, denominational jobs, the trouble that goes with convincing a congregation to change course. And of course, there is legal recourse that denominations use to keep congregations on board, too. But pastors resent these practicalities, and congregations don't like the coercion.  
          

          So, as I noted above, people are suspicious of institutions: their coercive ways, their fine print, their focus on what seems irrelevant to life here at home. This distrust is easily projected on church doctrines and documents and rules and regulations and bureaucracies and old boys’ clubs and national personnel. I sympathize with some of these objections but worry about others. The bottom line, however, is that it is hard to imagine that much time or energy ought to go into preserving a largely unresponsive, tone-deaf, sixteenth-century, nexus focused on less than strategic realities. Real church, basic church is congregational. If we could undo the ties that bind us into denominations, I’m pretty sure we’d soon develop new ties for community and education and mission that make a lot more sense, would be far more responsive, and much less coercive than what we have now.

           Or maybe a few denominations will pioneer new ways of being denomination. The United Church of Canada is floating ideas for a radical new structure in a document called “Fishing on the Other Side” ( http://tinyurl.com/p5u9vdy ). It offers a vision for a great strategic retreat from the structures that bind us today, and bears careful examination—even by people who belong to other faith communities.