We
walked along the river from the hotel to the Cobo Center early Tuesday
morning. The whole reason we are
in Detroit is to preview the site for General Assembly next June. We would be in the convention center
all day.
The
Cobo Center is a gargantuan edifice, even by convention center standards. They’re still working on it. Apparently the center is not affected
by the city bankruptcy.
In
fact, that was the first topic we heard about. Tom Hay, from the OGA, reported that many Presbyterians are
upset we are holding the Assembly in Detroit at all, what with the stories of
roaming packs of dogs, out of control fires, long 911 response times, rampant
crime, and so forth. The
population of Detroit has declined by, oh, a
million people in recent years.
Parts of the city are deserted.
Traffic lights have been turned off in some areas.
Tom
assured us that the downtown area is safe. It certainly looks so, and a walk we took in the evening
revealed a city that seemed to be pretty lively and secure. Both the Tigers and the Red Wings were
playing.
Detroit
has a lot to teach us, he said, including the consequences of “belief in an
unsustainable system.” I’m not
sure what he meant by that. I took
him to be referring to Capitalism.
He suggested that the place is a kind of reflection of our own
denomination. There is a lot of
truth in this, as we were emulating General Motors and adopting corporate
models of management through the 50’s and 60’s. And now we have suffered catastrophic declines, like the
American auto industry.
Our
sense of complacency, hubris, and entitlement meant we were completely
blindsided and unprepared for the changes that started hammering against us in
the 1960’s, and for decades we still imagined we would get different results
from continuing the same basic approaches. We thought we just weren’t getting the word out, that it was
just a matter of deficient marketing, when in reality our product sucked. By this I do not mean the gospel, of
course, but many of our traditional ways of expressing and practicing our
faith. We were like big, clunky,
inefficient, and unreliable 1970’s Buicks, when people were excited by Hondas
and Toyotas.
Detroit,
though, is still a place of amazing innovation, Tom said. The industry is finally turning itself
around.
But
the church? We’ll see… but there
are signs and even expressions of hope and mission beginning to emerge. Tom said we are coming to Detroit to
witness to God’s justice. God has
not yet said to us that we are done.
A
General Assembly costs some $2.7m.
The organizers are committed to cutting the budget where they can, but
many costs are set, given that we retain this paradigm of meeting, like a
corporation, in luxury hotels and massive convention centers. So we’re still doing the Buick thing in
this respect.
The
Assembly will have some new practices.
I like the idea of celebrating the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper at
each worship service, and worshiping in the plenary hall. The commissioners are seated in “pods” and
the seating is angled so they may see each other better. Committees will be fewer and
larger. (Each committee costs
$80K.)
Mary
Anne Rhebergen, an EP from New Jersey, gave an impassioned talk invoking the
prophet Jeremiah about how we need to pray for the welfare of the city of the
people’s exile. There will be
opportunities to serve people in need while the General Assembly is in
Detroit. Hopefully the General
Assembly will be a blessing to the city, not just a bunch of outsiders passing
through.
Later,
former Stated Clerk Cliff Kirkpatrick advocated for the Confession of Belhar,
which is coming before the Assembly.
This confession, which failed to garner the super-majority of presbytery
concurrences in 2010 (a year with a lot of other controversial stuff going on),
would be the first non-European/North American part of our Book of Confessions since the Nicean Creed. And he noted how fitting it is that we
are addressing it at this Assembly, in Detroit, a predominantly
African-American city. Originating
out of the assembly of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, meeting in
Ottawa in 1982 (which I happened to attend), Belhar was written by the United
Reformed Church of South Africa during the horrible depths of Apartheid. It has since been adopted by many
churches, beginning in Africa, and extending even to the Reformed Church in
America.
Racism
is still an issue in America and in our church. Cliff maintained that adding Belhar to our confessional
standards is critical to the integrity of our church as a confessional church.
We
heard reports from the various “special committees” working on things like
Biennial Assembly Review, Mid-Councils (presbyteries and synods), Preparation
for Ministry, and Racial-Ethnic Ministries. And we heard from the Church Leadership Connection on recent
wall-to-wall changes in the call system.
Finally,
Gradye took the podium again, this time to talk about per capita, the method
the General Assembly and most presbyteries fund their operations. We are down to 1.8m members, projected
to hit 1.5m by 2015. The
ecclesiastical bureaucracy is downsizing to fit this reality. They would like to cut per capita by
20% by 2016. For all the
controversy, he said that 90% of per capita is collected; most of the
uncollected per capita is held by some larger churches.
Per
capita is apparently an even bigger crisis at the presbytery level, where
churches’ refusal to pay this voluntary assessment sometimes goes viral. Later, in a workshop, Gradye went into
more detail. The decline in giving
to the church happens to be in inverse relationship to the increase in medical
plan contributions over the same period.
So we are being bled dry by out of control medical costs. Also, the recent recession hit the
churches at their most vulnerable time; 500K jobs were lost by American churches.
Gradye
had no big answer, of course. Much
of our time in that crowded room was invested in sharing among all the
participants. We kicked around
many different reasons for this crisis in per capita. For instance, we observed that we live in a non-joining
culture in which “membership” is an obsolete category.
One
person made a helpful analogy with a zoo, and how “clients” are differentiated
from “donors.” Some support the
institutional mission; others enjoy it on a pay-as-you-go basis. Maybe we need some version of the same
mixture, it was suggested.
One
“elephant in the room” no one addressed was the fact that we are a middle-class
church and the last 40 years of our decline has occurred simultaneously with
the stagnation of the middle-class’ share of wealth (while the 1% grew
fabulously wealthy on other people’s increased productivity). One reason we see a crisis in church
funding is that the middle-class has no money!
In
the middle ages, when there was an even wider gap between the rich and everyone
else, the church had to be funded by sucking up to the nobility. That’s how cathedrals and monasteries
got built. Is that what we are
reduced to now?
Near
the end of our discussion, I began to wonder if we aren’t witnessing the
imminent collapse of our whole system.
Maybe the whole thing needs to be rethought from the ground – that is,
local churches – up.
Gradye
finally observed that this has to be about relationships
now, not duty. The new model is
belong/behave/believe, as opposed to the present model where we expect people
to believe before we admit them to membership (and never address behavior at
all). I am reminded about how even
Craig Barnes, the new President of Princeton Seminary, admits that church
membership is a defunct category.
What people are seeking today is real community and meaningful work.
This
of course throws a monkeywrench into a lot of our system, which is based on that
older understanding of membership.
We still evaluate churches on the basis of membership numbers and
growth. And we still attempt to
fund our mission by assessing churches according to how many members they have.
Add
to this our chronic inability to speak coherently about “mission.” And our depressed trust level. And you see the problem and how
intractable it is.
+++++++
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