WELL, IT LOOKS like we (that is, the Christian church) have gotten through yet another Easter with its trumpets and alleluias and light, a journey we will travel together for the next 50 days.
Whether or not you see that as survival depends on your position in the world.
If you’re a member of a very big family, say, you just might be ready for some rest.
Maybe you’ve cooked, maybe you’ve cleaned, maybe you have had tiresome family members over, traditionally that strange uncle who you see once or twice a year.
Maybe the high cost of food did you in or at least the need to worry about it.
And for those who work in retail, like my sister did for years and years and years? You might have worried about your job, assuming it was permanent anyway, and you might be looking for new work now in an increasingly troubled economic and political environment. I feel for you. I’m worried about my Social Security now that I’m retired from teaching at a university in the Deep South, and I know my friends still working in that field worry about what shape their jobs might take in the face of now-successful forced attempts to eliminate diversity and equity content from their syllabi and their administrative work.
People who have held traditionally safe jobs also have to worry, a lot, about losing their jobs or may have already lost their jobs if they were in a probationary period.
Federal jobs are at high risk as the political forces in charge attempt to cut what they see as “bloat” but are in fact the sources of funding for deeply needed supplies of food, job training, help with housing, and so on.
One great thing about being an Episcopal deacon right now is that we’re not paid to do our work in and for the church (for a variety of reasons, some good, some bad) and so at least we can’t lose what we’ve never had.
For all these people and more, know the church offers you their prayers, even as our own efforts are being defunded: Some blame our declining numbers for that, and it’s a fact that mainline Protestant denominations appear to be dying on the vine.
Locally, we had two smaller parishes decline in size to the point they were shifted into a lower rank in my own denomination. That’s a potential call to ministry: grow or decide to move toward closure, but it’s absolutely sure that to do nothing is to erode further and fall behind even more. They are not alone. This is happening all over this country.
As the AP put it in an article reprinted in Spectrum News 1, a Dallas-Fort Worth paper, on April 14:
When the Episcopal Church recently announced cuts to its national staff, it was the latest in a long-running cycle among historic U.S. Protestant denominations — declines in members leading to declines in funding and thus in staff.
And it wasn’t alone.
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) also announced recent cuts to staff at its headquarters and in its global missions program. The United Methodist Church, after undergoing a major schism, has settled into a historically low budget, having cut its numbers of bishops and other positions.
And so it goes.
It’s a scary time for us who are charged with the task of feeding the poor, dressing the naked and visiting those in jail — we wonder exactly to serve those in such deep needs with fewer resources in such frightening times. And we don’t have all the answers.
No one does right now.
But this is what Sean Rowe, the new Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church had to say about the funding cuts he had to authorize: “Our goal was to meet the emerging financial reality but also to determine how we can continue to serve the church as it’s becoming something different than it was…”
Now, one might agree or disagree with having to cut mission funding, the target of the cuts Bishop Rowe had to make, but I think the second part of that sentence is key to the future of the church (and of religious institutions in general): “to serve the church as it’s becoming something different than it was…”
That’s the ticket, as we older folks used to say.
The church needs to start rethinking the way it occupies the world. When Jesus told us to be “in but not of it,” he was talking about moral difference — that one should be able to see us Christians doing the work of Christ, the healing of the world for its ills.
As I’ve grown as a deacon, I have become a bit less interested in liturgy, the formal services that only make sense to those on the inside, are mighty confusing to newcomers, and not known at all to too many folks who are not religiously affiliated at all and never have been.
In the case of the younger folks, these are becoming known as “the nones.”
While many in the mainline churches hope to bring those younger people into the fold, others of us, myself included, have little to no hope for that. They’re on a different spiritual path and one that seems successful for them.
Meanwhile, what next steps are there for those of us who remain in the church?
Two words: “Look outside.”
I served at a church over to the east a while back and it had wonderful windows that did exactly that and overlooked the trees on their property, but that’s not what I have in mind.
I mean, look to and look at the folks who — for reasons of ability, class, lack of wealth and, for that matter, clean clothes and showers and dental care due to lack of access — won’t be in most of our churches.
We’re too likely to just make things a bit difficult for them, and hope they can be happy in another place. We should be that place. And we should be out in the world.
Now that I’m not doing formal liturgy as much, I found the time to create a new thing: a not-for-profit that exists to create and fund mini-grants as more grant opportunities diminish each day.
Join me and other folks to work from the church and from outside it to change an increasingly hard world for us all to live in.
That means a radical rethinking of mission to true growth, not just numbers.
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Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. The Rev. Dr. Keith Dorwick is a deacon resident in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia.
