What’s Happened to My Dear Old Church?

State of the Church Address

Mark 7:1-23

 

First Presbyterian Church March 10th Worship Video

 

Fiddler on the Roof is one of my all-time favorite Musicals. Do you remember the opening scene which begins the musical? Tevye, the dairyman who is always carrying on lengthy conversations with God, says to the audience: “A fiddler on the roof.  Sounds crazy, no?  But in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck.  It isn’t easy.  You may ask, why do we stay up here if it’s so dangerous?  We stay because Anatevka is our home.  And how do we keep our balance?  That I can tell you in one word - tradition!  Because of our traditions, we’ve kept our balance for many, many years.  Here in Anatevka we have traditions for everything - how to eat, how to sleep, how to wear clothes.  For instance, we always keep our heads covered and always wear a prayer shawl.  This shows our constant devotion to God.  You may ask, how did this tradition start?  I’ll tell you - I don’t know!  But it’s a tradition.  Because of our traditions, everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do.” [2]

The word tradition comes from the Latin traditio, or “handing over.” We are here this morning because somebody cared enough to hand over the faith to us and trust us to hand it over to the next generation.  We hope people will be worshipping and serving God here in this church a hundred years from now because we handed over the faith to them.  There is the story of a small boy who came to his parents one day with a guilty look all over his face.  He said, “Mom, Dad, do you remember that valuable vase that has been passed down to our family for generations?  Well, this generation just dropped it!” It is possible for our generation to drop it, to fumble the ball, as it were, and become the weak link in the chain of tradition that gets the Gospel across the gap from one generation to the next.  It is a bit sobering to realize that there will not be a Christian Faith a hundred years from now if we do not care enough to hand it over to future generations.  It is as simple as that.  That is what makes teaching and preaching and the reading of the Bible so important to the Church. We need to stay grounded in the Word of God.

There’s a grand old hymn the Lutheran Church sings.  I stumbled across it while doing research for my sermon.  The opening words are these:

“My church, my church, my dear old church, my father’s and my own.

On prophets and apostles built, and Christ the cornerstone.

All else beside by storm or tide may yet be overthrown,

But not my church, my dear old church, my fathers’ and my own.”[3]

We in the church believe that our church, my church, your church as we have known it will go on forever.  We sing change, not my church, my dear old church. But change it must, my dear old church or it will go away! Have you ever wondered what’s been happening to the dear old church today? It appears many people are. We all should be concerned.

A young coed being interviewed on television about her religious beliefs said, "Oh yes, I believe in God, but I'm not nuts about Him." According to the Gallup Poll that is a good description of how most Americans feel about God. Ninety-four percent of us believe in God. When it comes to translating that belief into action, however, most of us are clearly not nuts about Him.[4]

This week we had the State of the Union. I must confess I did not watch or even listen to it. I am far more interested in the State of the Church. If I owned a business that had the statistics for growth the dear old church has, I’d be looking to sell off the business or close the business, and head for the hills. Here are just a few striking statistics for the State of the Church for you to mull over:

Overall Key Statistics

 20% of Americans attend church every week (Gallup)

 41% of Americans attend church once or more each month (Gallup)

 57% of Americans are seldom or never in religious service attendance (Gallup)

Baby Boomers have been the heart of most churches for decades. This is true of mainline and evangelical churches and growing churches and declining churches. Born between 1946 and 1964, Boomers have been the center of the megachurch movement too. They not only led them, but they’ve served, given, and attended in droves. In 2023, the oldest Boomers turned 77, and the youngest celebrated their 59th birthday. The relative age of the Boomers is starting to impact trends big time.

Since March 15, 2020 Boomers have become the least likely demographic to return to church. 22% of Boomers have stopped attending church entirely. Only 16% of Millennials have stopped attending.

Similarly, while 54% of Millennials attend primarily in person, 65% of Boomers say they only attend in person.

This means that, unlike Millennials, Boomers don’t track with church when they’re not in the building. Millennials and Gen X are quite comfortable with the hybrid church, while Boomers, for the most part, haven’t embraced it.

Millennials in 2023 were 28-43 years old and 39% of Millennials report attending church every week up from 21%, according to Barna's recent State of the Church report. This is a significant increase over years prior and places them at a much higher rate of attendance than Generation X and even the Boomer generation, which had previously been more faithfully in attendance than their younger counterparts. What’s changing?

Many Millennials never had strong ties to religion in the first place. Millennials were not brought up in the church in the same numbers as generations prior, leaving them without much connection to the church as they entered adulthood.

Millennials are also reportedly turned off by the high-profile church leadership scandals, I am too and the increasing political polarization in many American congregations, causing many to lose trust in churches and religious institutions altogether.

40% of Millennials are religiously unaffiliated (Pew Research Center) I look at that statistic and think "Mission Field." There once was a shoe salesman sent to a South Pacific island to open a new market for shows. When he got to the island, he called the home office and said, “Don’t send any shoes nobody wears shoes here.” The home office was determined to open a new market, so they sent another salesman. After he arrived, he called the home office and said, “You are not going to believe. Nobody wears shoes – send me a large shipment immediately of running shoes, casual deck shoes, basketball shoes.” Sometimes it is all in your perspective, what one salesman thought was an insurmountable problem the other saw as a golden opportunity to sell shoes. No boys wore shoes!

How Many People Leave the Church Each Day

Pre-pandemic, approximately 3500 people left the religious congregations every day. That's a rate of 1.2 million walking away from church every year. It has got to be higher now. While each church is unique, leading experts say a church should expect to lose about 10%-15% of its members every year. If that is true, our church will lose more than five people in 2024 leaving us with about 45 members, assuming no biological growth. We will continue to lose 5 members each year with a rapid decline in numbers after we reach 35 members and since our church is pretty much a Boomer church when you factor death rate, we will be closed by 2028. Forget about factoring in biological replacement, it is just not happening. We have negative growth with more dying each year than those being born in the church. Pretty sobering isn’t it?

It seems to me that in today’s scripture reading Jesus is talking about something much deeper than maintaining our dear old church. I think Jesus is pushing the Pharisees here - and us as well - to discover again just what is the true propelling, compelling, and motivating force of our faith. This morning Jesus is saying to us that we may all have comfortable and acceptable practices and traditions, that reflect what we believe is important, but I can tell you these practices and traditions are not likely to be important to current and future generations. However, Jesus would tell us it is not because of our traditions, that we can respond to God in worship and in service to one another. Traditions often miss the mark. It is only by the grace of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit that we can respond by faith, that we can live by faith. So many times, our traditions have become an object of worship and faith. “My church, my church, my dear old church: what’s happening to my dear old church?"

Let’s be honest we all act like the Pharisees from time to time, at least I do. Jesus described, in our scripture for today, the Pharisees’ chief problem was like this: “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” Mark 7:6–7 (NRSV) Jesus’ motivation was to bring the people in conformity with Scripture.

Duncan King writes “For the Pharisees religion was primarily external. It was a badge of accomplishment, not a gift of grace. It was a means of dividing society into layers, not uniting it in love. It was a means of putting other people down, rather than a motivation for lifting them up. God on their lips but not in their hearts. Are there people today who have such a counterfeit faith? Yes, there are.”[5]

There are the Traditionalists. These are people who have replaced genuine faith with earthly tradition. This was the mistake of the Pharisees'. They no longer needed God because they had created a tradition, written a law, and practiced a ceremony for every situation. We can be very similar in that because of our traditions, we feel secure and virtuous.

Tradition is a powerful force in societies. The Pharisees practiced a tradition, custom, or habit in substitution for the presence of the living God. No generation is immune to traditionalism. It rears its head in many ways, at many times, and in many places. 

Jaroslav Pelikan once said, "Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." I think Pelikan offers both a word of caution and a word of encouragement for the tradition-rich seasons like Lent and Easter. He says that tradition is the “living faith of the dead.” I will admit it’s a weird phrase, but I think he is referring to the dynamic Christian faith that endures through the ages. “Even though followers of Christ from previous generations are now physically dead, their faith lives on still.”[6] This is the idea behind Hebrews 12:1: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses…”

Traditionalism, on the other hand, is the “dead faith of the living.” That’s clearly not a good thing! There is a sense in which we can put off God using tradition and keep other people at a distance as well. Before long we get comfortable with our rituals and procedures, our schemes of how to do things, and soon we are no longer open to God’s moving and empowering spirit. God then remains on our lips, but not in our hearts. Tradition Yes! Traditionalism No!

Then there are Christian Secularists This group is composed of a group of nominally committed individuals who fill the rosters of most churches. They bring their children to Sunday School. They use the church to marry and bury. They visit us at Christmas and at Easter. They are not atheists or agnostics. They, like that young coed, believe in God, but they're not nuts about him. They give to the church, but not so much that it hurts, not so much that it causes any inconvenience to them or their lifestyle. They want to be identified with the church when their obituary is printed, but they don't want to buy into what the church is trying to do in the world. Christian secularists are people who want to stick their toe in, but who will never be ready to plunge in all the way into Christian commitment. God is on their lips but not in their hearts.

What do we need to change our churches into vital places of worship and growth? We need committed spirit-filled people who are on fire for Christ who use traditions wisely and let each generation create their own traditions, their own music, their own worship style. We need people who hand over the cherished Biblical faith-based traditions like Easter, communion, and baptism. To name only three. We need people who have God on their lips and in their hearts. We need people who are ready to plunge into Christian commitment.

It makes all the difference in the world if your heart is in what you’re doing! A lot of us are trying to live our lives with our hearts in nothing or, we should say, with nothing in our hearts. We have Christ on our lips, but he's never made that journey further down to our hearts. That's why we are bored with church. That is why the church is in decline and dying. How do we move Christ from our lips to our hearts? 

One, by facing the world’s great need for people on fire. It may take a spark to get a fire going but takes multiple sparks for the fire to turn into a raging wildfire. Change and handing over the faith to the next generation begins with us.

Two, by confronting the futility, the boredom, and the feeling of emptiness that halfhearted living brings. We must seek a living spirit-filled life, not a life mired in traditionalism.

The world desperately needs people who are on fire for Christ. Halfhearted living means emptiness and futility and despair. Why don't you make a new start and accept Christ's invitation? Put your hand in Jesus’ hand and begin anew. Like the old song:

Put your hand in the hand of the man

Who stilled the water

Put your hand in the hand of the man

Who calmed the sea

Take a look at yourself

And you can look at others differently

Put your hand in the hand of the man

From Galilee

This is what my home church, Forest Park United Methodist Church, is doing and that means it is not my dear old church anymore. There are fragments of the dear old church, but it has changed and will continue to change, it has to.  In the process, it has become a racially and ethnically diverse congregation. I can’t say they are thriving yet, but they are trying and as the community is changing the church is poised to change as needed and yet keep many of the traditions alive and they are ready to let go of old dead traditions. The pastor of the church, Rev. Kabamba Kiboko, has asked me to come this summer and preach. I hope it goes better than Jesus’ experience in his hometown.