The Gallup Poll just released a new report about the declining membership in churches. It basically says that for the first time since they have been measuring it, fewer than half of Americans are members of organized religious communities. Here is the link, if you want to read it.
My Facebook feed has been exploding with commentary about this, mostly from my minister friends. The report is nothing new; we’ve been going through this slow-motion train wreck in the Church for about 50 years. The last year that the Presbyterian Church USA or its predecessor denominations saw an increase in membership was, I believe, 1972. This crisis overshadowed my entire career.
And every few weeks or months another study comes out quantifying this decline, and everyone gets all hand-wringing and apoplectic about it. Blame is placed and remedies are proposed. And then nothing much changes.
The assumption is that this decline in membership means we are not successful. Is that true? It depends on how we understand success.
To me, success is defined by Jesus Christ, who is the Lord of the Church. We cannot look to models of success imported from secular society as appropriate for the Church. Metrics like the traditional “3 B’s:” butts, bricks, and bucks — that is, numbers of members, size of buildings, and amount of assets — are irrelevant to a community that professes to trust and follow Jesus Christ. Jesus doesn’t command us to do anything for the sake of increasing these quantitative categories. Indeed, he seems positively allergic to “success” in terms of popularity and wealth.
That doesn’t mean they are unimportant, but they are derivative and secondary. Gains in the number of participants are a by-product of mission, not its purpose. The Jerusalem church reportedly gained 3000 members after Pentecost, but that wasn’t what the apostles set out to do. They simply proclaimed the gospel.
The Church’s mission is, according to Jesus himself, “making disciples” (Matthew 28:19-20). That is not necessarily the same thing as getting people to come to, let alone join, a church, though it is related. The important action is “teaching them to obey everything” that he has commanded us. It doesn’t matter how many people come to church if this is not happening when they get there.
What he has commanded us, of course, is summed up in several commandments to love God, each other, our neighbor, and even our enemies. Churches are supposed to be schools of love. Jesus intends them to be places of healing, forgiveness, acceptance, and liberation. If churches are are largely not doing that we should not be surprised if fewer and fewer people want anything to do with us.
At the same time, love requires, as Jesus says, that we in some sense lose our selves, our lives, our possessions, our habits, even our relationships. He says this in very strong and even off-putting language. As Bonhoeffer put it, “When Christ calls someone he bids them come and die.” That is a hard sell.
Anyway, my point is that the Church needs to be in the business of making disciples. Period. We need to be agents of God’s transforming love, beginning with the renewal of our minds. We need to be instructing and nurturing and cultivating and welcoming people into a community where this love happens. Then it needs to overflow in care and advocacy for the least among us out in the world. This is our mission.
If doing that makes us popular and attracts new members, so much the better. If doing that means we lose members, well, Jesus says to shake the dust from our feet and move on.
For it is not what we are losing here that is important. If we can be a smaller church that is at the same time much more effective at expressing the healing, transforming love of Jesus Christ, that is way better than being a “successful” church with lots of members, but few actual disciples. Our life has to be about missional focus, integrity, authenticity, and unity.
If a church is making disciples, that is people who actually follow Jesus in lives of compassion, justice, and shalom, it doesn’t matter whether their worship is traditional or contemporary, or whether they are gaining or losing members. It is the disciple-making that means everything.
The Gallup report is indeed bad news. But it is not bad news because we are hemorrhaging members; we’ve known that for decades. It is bad news because we continue to be obsessed with how many members we are losing. It is bad news because we are losing members for the wrong reasons. If we were losing members because our radical discipleship to Jesus was placing us in a counter-cultural position, that would be acceptable. But we are mainly losing members because we are either boring and irrelevant, calcifying in our own inertia and nostalgia, or we are fake, vacuous, and hypocritical, doing whatever we think will be popular, or we are nasty, hypocritical, self-righteous, and judgmental, doubling down on our racism, homophobia, and nationalism.
If we were making disciples, what the Gallup Poll says would not bother us.
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