An Emerging Church
We are told, “the church is dying.”
Perhaps.
Several years ago, I helped develop a two-year internship program that gave those discerning a call to ministry an opportunity to do the work, a notion rooted in the idea that having some sense of what professional ministerial life looks before you head to seminary is helpful.
Since our program was grant funded, I was required to attend a two-day conference designed to help us learn important tools to evaluate growth and success.
On our first day, we were presented with an organizational model that argues that the exact moment an institution or program reaches its apex (in terms of power/influence/etc.) is the exact moment it begins its decline. The decline side of this organizational theory is a kind of managed hospice, whereby the program or institution is brought to a careful, empathic, and dignified end.
That moment of death, programmatic or otherwise, is not the end. We learned that a key next step is disintegration, for it is in the complete decay of that reality that the soil becomes rich, fertile, and ready for the birthing of a new thing.
Christian theological themes abound. Lent is nearly upon us, and for those Christians who keep it, we are reminded that, “we are from dust and to dust we shall return.” Or, as my mentor Ed Bacon used to say, “we are from stardust and to stardust we shall return.” But even as I prepare for Lent, I am already keeping an eye towards the empty tomb.
In the broader cultural sense, this cyclical view of growth, death, and re-birth offers a helpful corrective to a strictly linear view of time, that ancient Zoroastrian notion of a creation unfolding under the gradual realization of divine power, climaxing in a violent, cataclysmic ending, a view that found not only a welcome home in 4th century BCE Jewish apocalypticism but also later Christian thinking.
There is the temptation to quickly jump to diagnosis – it is quite possible that the best thing we can do with an organizational theory like this is to learn the skill of simply paying greater attention. There are moments when my own life feels exceptionally linear, and other (generally brief) moments where I catch a glimpse of a much larger and transcendent reality. Part of life may simply be accepting the varied ways we understand ourselves.
The idea of a dying church might be more aptly described as the realization that we who are a part of leading it are coming to terms with how little control we have over it; and the further learning that the degree to which we lean into one another, into the Spirit, into the rich and fertile soil of our personal and communal intersectional bonds, the more we will be paying attention to the new thing that emerges.
