There is a sign in my neighborhood that reads, “Plants Grow by the Inch and Die by the Foot.” It’s a gentle reminder that the city’s landscaping has been designed for water conservation. Growth takes a great deal of energy. It is slow going. It takes constant awareness and protection. With enough tending, the plants will grow with enough resilience so that no misplaced step will be a concern. But until then, new growth remains tenuous.
The church as I know it has two landscapes. One is like these new plants. But the other is established, strong, and hard to prune. It still relies on seeds that went into place over five hundred years ago across Western Europe. These seeds bore the fruit of Reformation. Rather than being pruned back, they have become somewhat reckless, creating an overgrown landscape that is resistant to new growth.
The other landscape, the one like these emerging ground of seedlings, will take some time and space to be established. But, this protection is not always offered. And without this safety and nourishment, one wrong step — and they go back into the ground. New programs, emerging churches, new worshipping communities, digital communities of faith, the list goes on — of seedlings working to make their way into the light. The question for us is, are we willing to do the pruning necessary for new life to take root?
Landscapes find balance by entering into mutuality. Old wood transforms into nurse logs to make space for new saplings to extend into the soil. The harvesting of wild grasses can send signals to generate new growth. The way a space gives itself up to some in order to make room for others is the delicate dance of life and rebirth. But the established and long-lived landscape of the current church has been resistant to entering into this circle of life.
Yet, the last three months have brought us to the breaking point. Like a giant windstorm, the breath of God has shaken down these former giants and we have yet to assemble the clean up crews. We wonder how we can rebuild. What is there that is worth keeping? Perhaps the gift of this moment is clarity. We can see what needed to fall apart, and we can recognize where the new growth is. The temptation will be to return and rebuild what was before, as if we can architect a forest of dead wood by props and incantations. That is the work of insanity. The work of opportunity is learning to be attentive to new growth, and protecting it from every angle.
There are eight ways that the church can begin to move towards change in these next twelve months. But as this work happens, this protection is essential. The long established roots of the past will need to be collected and repurposed for the sake of growth.
1. The church will need to strengthen an identity that is not rooted in public worship.
The practice of public worship is an arm of the body of faith, but it is not the whole body. Much of my living memory calls to mind conversations that conflate faith and public worship. Even the denominations themselves are situated around differences in the practice of public worship. But public worship is not faith. And faith is not public worship. It is time to explore the places of being Christian that are not hitched to a form of public worship.
2. With all of that energy that is not directed toward public worship, the church will need to engage in some experiments with its resources.
I work in a small church and have been an ordained minister of the PC USA for seventeen years. I have had a long time to develop and sustain the muscle of producing and curating worship services. But still at times I am overtaken by the pure power of the production. The bread goes here, you stand here, I say this, you say that, this song comes next, end it after this verse, etc. Then there is the pre-production work of organizing, emailing, printing, and, for the Reformed folk, the ever-growing pressure of the sermon. In some contexts, this work takes the bulk of the work week and the lion share of the budget.
If this was down-scaled to at least one-third of its current efforts, where could that other energy be used? This is the question that can hold space for new growth. Could we fund Community Organizers? Public School Teachers? Researchers? Artists? Chefs? Restaurants? Community Relief Funds? Anti Racist trainings? Hold Healing Circles for Therapists?
Conversations along these lines often get stopped short. Like one giant misplaced step in the effort of baby plants, so the resistant committee meeting can thwart young entrepreneurial efforts. New growth takes protection.
3. We can train our bodies to listen to our inner life.
When I talk to people about nourishing their spiritual life, the most frequent responses that I get are Sacred Text Devotional Reading and Prayer. These are valuable practices, but they are not the only ways to listen to our inner life.
Leaders of the spiritual communities in our ancestry talked about the importance of practicing the presence of God with every breath. A practice is something that we have not perfected. It is something that we work on, and the focus is not on the result, but the process. How can we set up ways to recover this practice? Can we recover the practice in different movements of daily life from cooking to picking up pizza to grocery shopping to putting gas in our car?
4. We can become people of healing.
Spiritual communities have been an asset to humanity because they provide the healers. In the indigenous world, the healer is connected the spiritual in a unique way. Even in the West, the spiritual leaders had a part in pioneering the work of modern medicine.
While the conversation is now much more nuanced, and has deep and heavy complexity, the idea is still important. Most spiritual leaders are not trained physicians or therapists, and must hold boundaries and respect for these sciences. Yet, spiritual leaders can be catalysts for leading people to places of healing. They can hold the doors open for other professionals to do the work of healing.
Additionally, healing is not limited to the medical and therapeutic world. There is healing of culture, of communities, of history, of the way in which we understand ourselves. All of these healings can be supported through spiritual awareness and practices.
5. We can challenge our leaders to lead the faith and not just lead the church.
It is desperately hard for pastors to chart the course for new understandings of faith when their work is mostly dealing with helping committees to get along and come to consensus. While this work of facilitation is essential, it cannot absorb all of pastoral function. Committees should feel as if their pastor is supportive, but not essential, for their work.
It is often hard for church members to understand, but the pastor operates as both manager and entrepreneur. These roles are usually at odds with each other, and this is part of the work of being pastor. The pastor that leans into the entrepreneurial spirit of the work will find themselves in all sorts of interesting meetings, relationships, neighborhood parties, and volunteer roles. Committees will run the risk of feeling like the pastor is never quite doing enough of the management. This is a realization to be celebrated! Leading the faith is often a completely different job than leading the church.
6. We can understand our buildings as an arm of our work, rather than conflating the building with our work.
Churches are saddled with buildings that exist for one reason: Sunday worship. Sigh. But the good news is that we can re-think the purpose of the building. I look forward to a day when sanctuaries are torn down to make space for after school centers, community antiracist training, and town hall meetings. But until then, we can do the work of detaching our faith from our building.
7. We can advocate for change in church polity.
Pastors are essential workers. They are needed on the ground, and in a diversity of environments. When freed from working only on the order of worship and Sunday experience, pastors can provide a richness to the public sphere. Good pastors know how to bring people together and to gather resources that others can’t see. Good pastors have no problem reaching out to others for the sake of bringing people together under a common purpose.
But, the process of becoming a pastor has become unsustainable. It requires years of training in the old model. Leaders with a calling later in life find the system daunting and overwhelming at best, not to mention just plain unaffordable. We need to decide if pastoral work is for the educated elite, or if it is for the educated and called. If it is for the educated and called, then polity changes are necessary and cannot come soon enough.
8. We can prioritize creativity in all practices.
Artists are prophets. They see something in the world that others simply cannot. The church can become the creative community that nurtures this voice and gives it space to flourish. Art can make us uncomfortable. It is often visceral. We have a physical reaction to it, and we don’t know why. We just say we like it or we don’t.
This is the beginning of the journey into our spirits. While we don’t need to see or agree with the perspective of artists, their presence reminds us that there is a wildly different way to see the world. It can feel radical at times. But the creative voice is the most powerful aspect of being human. Tapping into this creative space, tending it, and learning to appreciate the voice of others is the work of becoming people of depth.
At this particular moment in our life on this planet, these words feel anemic and thin. They don’t deal with the radical urgency that we are facing when it comes to race. Or the desperation that we each continue to endure in this pandemic. They are boring, business-as-usual words. And yet.
The church still exists. And the buildings where we meet still exist. And many of those communities still have pastors that are working from home trying to navigate this moment with meaning, while keeping the community together in some form. If and when we all come back to the table, whether it’s over Zoom or wood, we will be facing massive budget challenges, a spiraling decline in numbers, and a recurring fear of church attendance. Yet this is not the worst part. The question of our identity — the very stuff of why we exist — is hanging in the balance. And if we cannot know the why, we will not survive. We do not deserve longevity when we cannot account for our purpose.
The most difficult moment can also provide our best opportunity. Most curious Christians, inspired by their faith, will want to return to a church of sorts — but the church they wish to return to is in need of a massive overhaul. Perhaps this is the moment for deep consideration of a real path for the future. The opportunities, while hidden, still remain. The emerging seedlings are just waiting for enough light to leap into their new lifecycle. Can we let this old growth finish its work by falling to the ground and opening up a new pathway of light? Can we guard this new growth by encircling it, claiming it, and signposting that this is where we’re putting our energy?
Perhaps if we considered that neighborhood sign once more, remembering that new growth needs guarding, and without that, death comes all too quick and easy. Then we might see the urgency to protect these new expressions and we might all engage in the deep pruning work of letting the old expressions change from taking the light to returning to the soil.