Ebb Tide.

Ebb Tide: Reflections on Ministry During a Time of Decline.

In the movie, Born on the Fourth of July, Tom Cruise plays Ron Kovic, a paraplegic Vietnam veteran.  There’s a scene where Kovic is at a bar with other veterans, many of whom fought in Korea or World War II.  At one point it becomes clear that these older men don’t like Kovic and the others coming back from Vietnam.  They consider them failures and losers who did not get the job done.  They shun and disrespect them.  I remember this as Kovic’s low point in the movie.

Sometimes I relate this to my own experience as a pastor relative to my dad’s generation.  Like me, he was also a pastor.  He began his ministry in 1958.  In those days, we couldn’t build churches fast enough to meet the demand.  He oversaw the construction of two churches in New Jersey.  

My ministry began in 1981.  Through my entire career the church has not been able to close churches fast enough.  The last year the Presbyterian Church did not lose membership was around 1972.  I started seminary in 1977.  No one, least of all at Princeton Seminary, foresaw the 40 years of steady and sometimes precipitous decline to come.

Sometimes I wonder if my generation simply did not get the job done.  My dad’s cohort handed us a booming operation.  Did we drop the ball?  Did we not have what it takes?  

I served in ten churches in my 38 year career.  Four of them are no longer in operation.  The other six are at various levels of health.  At best they are holding their own, as it were, and not hemorrhaging members.  But none are booming, as far as I know.  

Just as Vietnam was a different kind of war, compared with previous conflicts, the last quarter of the 20th and the first quarter of the 21st century are different from the 1950s and 60s.  Just as we tried to fight one war with an arrogant mindset based on earlier victories, maybe we in the church just assumed that what worked in 1956 would continue to work in 1986.  My generation was trying to do ministry with the tools and ways of thinking of earlier and very different decades.  That stuff just didn’t work anymore.  We had to reinvent the church for a radically different time on the fly.  Building the plane while it is in the air, as it were.

Trying to finish it before we hit the ground.

That’s what it felt like, anyway.

But maybe even that frame of mind was a bit too frantic.  It was always hard to get away from the ghost of the church growth we knew from childhood.  Certainly, many churches and members remained swathed in, if not paralyzed by, nostalgia.  Ever pretending that this would all turn around if only we were more effective in getting the word out.  Like this was all just a communications problem.  We were still imagining that we just needed to build a new church near that housing development and people would fill it.  Maybe grunts in Vietnam also fantasized they could roll through the Mekong Delta like Gen. Patton churned through Europe.

But maybe, instead of comparing ourselves unfavorably with past heroes, we could awaken to something else going on.  For there is a rhythm to ecclesial life, like the tides of the oceans.  Maybe my time in ministry was like living during an ebb tide, a time when the flood, the action, the energy has receded.

A couple of years ago we took a vacation to Cape Cod.  One day we drove over to the bay side.  It was low tide.  We were able to walk practically half a mile into the bay in the soft, wet sand.  The thing is, during a low tide, you can find all kinds of things you cannot see when the water comes back.  Small puddles full of tiny, busy fish.  Scuttling crabs and other shellfish of different types.  The carved contours of the seabed.  Large rocks, probably dropped there by glaciers.  Gnarled appendages of driftwood.  Seaglass and pebbles.  Lots of shells and pieces of shells.  And of course, plastic….

The church has also discovered a lot of interesting things in the mud, exposed and made available by this low tide in our history.  It reminds me of Phyllis Tickle’s great 500 year rummage sale, where we rediscover treasures in our attic, and consign other formerly important objects to the dumpster.  Had the tide never receded we would not have had any incentive to do anything new.  We would still be worshiping and doing mission according to the models and resources of the 1950’s.  

So, most of my ministry has been about what I could pull up from the wet sand.  I discovered that the ebb tide is a gift!  Once we got over trying magically to conjure the return of the sea, we looked down and noticed what the sea had been hiding.  There is power and potential in the silence and the openness of ebb tide. 

Without this ebb tide, would we have discovered Celtic Christianity?  Would we have recovered practices that the Reformation discarded, like lectio divina, icons, labyrinths, the liturgical year and colors, and nearly forgotten mystic saints like Eckhart, Hildegard, Julian, and others?   Would we have heard the Spirit and the Scriptures calling us to ordain women?   Would we have learned about the Enneagram, the missional church, or liberation theology?  Would we have tried praise music and new technologies?  Would we have even heard the gospel when it challenged us and coaxed is into new and weird places?  

Would we have noticed the pollution and waste that was the by-product of those supposedly great years?  Would we have noticed who was getting run over or left behind by our “success”?  Would we have had the courage to identify the racism in the 1950’s church?  Would we have realized the damage done to faith by an identification with nationalism, capitalism, and militarism?  Or would we just have stuck with the “tried-and-true” strategies, as if they were working?

The future of the church is going to be founded on the beautiful and functional artifacts we dredged out of the sand of ebb tide.  So that when the flow returns, we will find ourselves in way better shape to be, make, and keep disciples.  Will be better equipped to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God, and each other, on the Earth. 

That’s the way I am framing my nearly four decades in this line of work.  I hope I helped churches to stop missing what they don’t have and wishing it would all be the way it was, and begin to open themselves to the wonders we are discovering that we overlooked or never knew about before.  I hope I encouraged churches to look to what God is going to do in the future, and is starting to do now, that is new, wild, and fruitful.    

As for Ron Kovic?  He went on to be one of the most authentic and eloquent voices for peace in his generation.  

God is always turning our failures into triumphs.  That is the message of the cross.  And the meaning of life in an ebb tide.

+++++++