The Great Resignation.

I have been hearing people refer to what is going on in many churches this days as “the Great Resignation.”  It is, apparently, a thing.  

As they come out of Covid, many churches are finding that volunteers are no longer interested in showing up.  It is becoming harder to get people to sign-up for the usual tasks that keep ministry going and the institution functional.  I am even hearing of an increasing number of ministers seeking new calls, some saying it is because people in the church have grown nasty and intolerable.  I have witnessed some of this kind of behavior first-hand.

Most of the evidence for this trend is anecdotal and circumstantial, and some do report that, for them, things are more or less normal.  But when something is enough of an event for people to give it a name, it usually means it is real.  

This circumstance meshes with things we are seeing happening in the larger society.  People are quitting or not returning, and seeking alternatives to their pre-Covid lives, changing jobs, homes, relationships, even families.    

I don’t think we realize the degree to which the pandemic shook things up and traumatized us.  We lost 600,000 people.  That’s far more deaths than in all our 20th century wars combined.  Covid touched all of us, and many of us know people who have died.  My wife and I both got the disease; I was merely sicker than I have ever been in my life, while she was in the hospital for a week.  Three friends and colleagues of mine lost their lives from it.  

The disease also exposed fault-lines and weaknesses in our culture.  It occurred during the regime of our most incompetent and divisive President, who managed to turn an opportunity to unite us in a common cause into a deepening gash of political polarization.  It framed the most significant outpouring of civil rage over racial injustice in a generation, when George Floyd was tortured to death on the street by a smug police officer.  Then we had the most secure national election in our history, with record turn-out, only to have the losing party refuse to accept it and institute laws to suppress future voters.  And of course the culmination of all this was in the violent and deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by an armed mob on January 6.

It was a difficult year.  And now it’s 120 degrees in Arizona, the western wildfires have broken out early… and the new government is paralyzed by the filibuster. 

And the Delta Variant spreads.  Which means this pandemic isn’t even over yet.

Like everyone else, the church is shaken and confused.  Some just don’t understand why we can’t go back to the way things were.  Some of these folks are the ones quitting and staying home, others are seeking a new way forward… and getting viciously attacked for it.  These are some one of the reasons things can’t go back to the way they were.  Words have been said, actions taken, gestures made.  These cannot be undone or forgotten.  Relationships have shifted.  We’re in a new and different place.

The Church has been in decline in America for 50 years.  It has been steady except for several inflection points when the bottom seemed to drop out for a while.  One of these was 9/11, which some thought might actually bring people back to church.  It didn’t.  Another was the 2008 Recession, during which many of the norms and standard procedures in the church were simply jettisoned.  (This is when we revised the Book of Order to accommodate the continuing disintegration.)  Now we have the Covid time.

It is too early to tell how (and whether) the church will put itself together after this trauma.  But one thing is absolutely certain: there is no going back.

In fact, I suggest that giving any attention at all to “the way things were” is toxic and possibly fatal.  The redesign has to happen.  From scratch. 

This probably should have started half-a-century ago.  Indeed, the church of Jesus Christ needs constant redesign in light of our encounter with the Word of God.  That is the meaning of that Reformation motto we like to repeat, as if saying the words inoculates us from having to do the work (a common Presbyterian malady): Semper reformanda.  We are “always being reformed” by God.  

How has the pandemic reformed, transformed, changed, and transfigured us?  

Bob Dylan once sang that if we are not busy being born we are busy dying.  How are we busy being born in this time after Covid?  How is Jesus Christ busy being born among us?  How is the Kingdom of God revealing itself in our midst?  How is the Spirit blowing with and within us now?  How is the church of eternity emerging into our lives today?  

Until we address these questions, we will continue the slow-motion shipwreck of the old church until it finally disappears under the waves.

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