Christianity is Crumbling (We May Have Time to Stop it)
Christianity is cracked, crumbling, and approaching the brink of collapse. Though many chose to ignore the fissures and use misdirection to shift attention away from them, this only serves to accelerate the timeline that leads to to a pile of rubble sitting where a great religion once stood. This article (and more to come) looks to point clearly at the structural damage that has been done. The goal is not some sort of faith disaster tourism, but a blueprint to the damage that must be addressed.
Let me be clear before I go any further, the call here is for innovation. The damage cannot repaired by a return to what got us to this moment in time. There must be experimentation, testing, ruthless dedication to change and a commitment to imagination that would make Sesame Street look like an Ikea instruction manual. If the church as a whole or some group/denomination/collective does not step up soon with a lot of commitment, people, and financial resources deployed to establish some sort of spiritual Bell Labs or Xerox Park, I believe Christianity will soon be a sliver of its former self. It may be too late already.
We lost the mojo
Christianity began as a movement within a great world religion that brought individuals into transformative community while simultaneously pushing the bounds of what was conceivable within its progenitor religious stream. It kept pushing past boundaries and breaking open access to the world of God and the spiritual realm in dangerous and offensive ways. Not only did it break out of the walls of Judaism, it broke free from limitations of gender, slavery, and social status. Now women could be priests, slaves had full access to all the religious systems and privileges, and the poor were not deemed religiously deficient because they had little.
That revolutionary expansive mojo is gone. At various points along the two thousand year journey the movement in Acts that sounds to me like Metallica turns into a lounge singer covering the greatest hits for the rich in a clubhouse and eventually loses the “lost in never never land” lyrics to a forgettable instrumental version in the world’s elevator.
I’ll let historians parse the details, but Phyllis Tickle made a good case for several moments of upheaval in the Great Emergence that I think were major moments of seismic activity that began the damage we live in today.
Christianity fought for power and lost
Religion has power of its own in its own realm, but along the way Christianity began to lust after other forms of power. It laid down with kings and politicians adding the world of politics and war to its herem. When the political power began to find its own way, Christianity fought to hold on to a power that corrupts religion, that damages it. Even now some streams chase after the memories of being warmed by political power in a cold night only to find the bed empty and the cracks in the walls worsening as a result.
As new forms of power emerged, Christianity didn’t greet them as friends and partners. It challenged them. It fought them. It tried to silence and stunt their growth. As science created a new form of power Christianity openly disputed its claims. It fought with these new scientists who often were Christians themselves. But it was doomed to defeat because it was fighting a war that it never should have entered. As science was able to cure disease and infection, able to create the radio transmitter and microchip, this war left lasting fissures in the foundation of a great religion.
Christianity stopped looking forward
As it lost ground it kept spending more and more of its time looking at the photo albums of the past. Even in times of expansion Christianity began to romanticize its past and try to re-enact things that had lost all relevance and connection. Instead of creating the iPod and then the iPhone, it kept trying to find a fresh new way to present the telegram as the world kept plowing ahead and left it behind.
Want to talk about innovation in church?
Walk into a church now and you will find odd artifacts from the past that seem completely out of place in the modern world. Pipe organs and pews are the low hanging fruit of course, but go into “contemporary” churches and you simply see a more updated form of past obsession like 40 minute lectures and some version of PowerPoint.
Christianity lost the core of its soul
This movement was about a radical acceptance of people into a transformative community. Now it doesn’t matter where you turn, both of those things are being challenged. Christianity has stopped risking theological orthodoxy to include more people like the early church leaders did when they stopped requiring male converts to get circumcised. Instead, its leaders have defined clear boundaries for who is in and who is out often based on some non-religious dichotomy espoused somewhere in the surrounding culture.
Instead of finding more ways to accept more types of people and then bring them into a messy, diverse, often disagreeing community, it shuts its doors to people, subdividing itself out of existence and losing the transformational power of a diverse community who is united by their being accepted by God.
We traded helping people for institutional preservation.
The earliest church was known for taking care of everyone in its community. Everyone had their basic needs met. Christians in some areas were so dedicated to this that they gave up individual ownership so that everyone had what they needed.
Then at some point within some groups, values began to change. There were implements of status that were desired, buildings that could be built. So they began to place less values on feeding hungry people, helping the sick get well, etc.. But eventually the numbers started to drop (this actually happened several times in different locations). And they continued to drop. And people were faced with difficult choices like, ”Do we merge with another Christian community and sell one groups property so we can keep feeding people and doing ministry? Or do we double down on the institution focusing on how to increase attendance at our out of date variety shows.” All over the world especially in the west Christianity chose the institution over the hungry and poor. And we keep doing it.
Let’s get specific
That’s a lot of high and lofty claims, but they have many specific expressions that we can point to as beginning points for imagination and innovation. This is not an exhaustive list, it’s just a list. Each of these deserves its own article (and some have one).
Our content is boring. When people were asked by researchers to describe their most recent experience with church, the most common answer was,”boring.”millennials-want-when-they-visit-church/ I have to say that I almost always agree with them.
Our content is generally too long or not long enough. People want short content like TikTok or long seasons of shows. A 40-70 minute variety show with a large helping of lecture is not it.
Our funding model is broken. We absolutely have to find a way to make an impact in people’s life without requiring them to donate some percentage of their income.
We own too much physical property. Churches absolutely have to stop buying land and building on it. The church as far too many assets tied up in physical things. As brick and mortarchurches dwindle in attendance, they hold space and tie up finances at a level that far outstrips the needs of the handful of members in almost any given location.
We own far too little digital property. The church has far too few assets like high quality content, innovative apps, web presences, etc. The modern age needs much more digital investment.
Power is too centralized. The world is moving away from hierarchy and towards decentralized, federated authority. Imagine if the internet required a single computer to disseminate all the information. Not possible. There isn’t even a single source of authority to know where a url goes. Instead, there are agreed upon, federated sources that cross-reference each other and rely on decentralization to make them dependable and resilient.
We have gotten greedy with our resources. It’s time to slash budgets, sell more property, let staff go, and use all that money to feed people. And, if we can’t fully let go of our ego and greed, we need to devote our staff and program resources to building programs that feed people and provide medicine that are so good they get massive grants.
So that’s a start. The list goes on and on. Now lets talk about what the hell we need to do about it.
A call for innovation
We do not need a two-year commission to discuss and study and debate and imagine ways we might move forward. We need the Silicon Valley of religion. We need to move fast and break things. We need to get venture-capitalist-level funding and hire top level software engineers, coders, brilliant musicians, filmmakers, visual artists, marketing professionals, and reassign a handful of pastors.
We need to release video games, databases, stock media libraries, Ted talks, meditation soundtracks, and fund some protests. But, that should only be the first 2-3 years. After spending many millions of dollars on that, we need to take what works and build on it. We need to turn Odeo into Twitter, branch out from Google into Gmail and YouTube and Nest.
And we need to do all of this innovation knowing that part of what we create will hasten some of the demise of what has come before. We may reach millions through a new app and find that some of those millions aren’t coming to listen to organ music anymore.
When we see those people moving to a new platform, we don’t shut down the app or find a way to make it encourage people to go back to the room with the organ in it. We celebrate that we are finding what is next. We celebrate the fact that instead of getting bored and leaving,we inspired them to live for something that works better.
Or we can keep finding a better way to get fewer people to give more. Or we can keep the doors open to the brick and mortar buildings until they are in such disrepair that they just have to be leveled and the adjacent cemetery maintained. Or we can work on another hymnal knowing it will likely be the last.
I hope we don’t go that way, but recent history does not make me optimistic. So this article (and the others to come) will be my prayers that something miraculous happens and the religion I have refused to give up on finds it’s way again.
