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One Generation Away From Extinction

Dear Friends in Jesus Christ,

I promised some further reflections on “Church Development” following our (Gail’s, David’s, and my) return from Start Up/Start Over in South Carolina. The premises of Start Up/Start Over have to do with the centrality, the necessity, of transformation through Jesus Christ within loving churches. I want to offer some thoughts that will hopefully help us continue our conversation about this church’s life and mission.

I was blessed to know and work for a priest named Chip Nix, a big, kindly, strong-willed, and Godly priest who not long ago. I gained a great deal of wisdom and insight from working with him. I can remember several times hearing him say this: “Mark, the church is always one generation away from extinction.” It struck me as an odd thing to say, not quite in line with our ongoing conversation about growing and thriving. We don’t typically think of our two alternatives as thriving or dying. But then I realized that this is simply reality: in any living system, misunderstanding or ignoring the need to thrive, develop, and grow is the first stage in decline and eventual death. It’s hard, in a small congregation, to get a sense for the larger, universal church, and the challenges it faces. And even if we do “get it” for our congregation, it’s difficult to understand how one small church within the greater whole can really make a difference.

It is certainly true that our congregation does not hold the fate of the catholic (meaning “universal”) church in its hands. But it is also true that every congregation in every generation is faced with challenges of all kinds in trying to refocus on the mission of Jesus Christ in our time and place. Certain things remain constant, and certain things change and evolve: the Great Commandment and Great Commission remain our principal touchstones for life and mission, even as the culture we inhabit changes. This means that we must seek new ways to engage ourselves and our neighbors with the eternal, unchanging Gospel. Churches that don’t embrace this challenge become museums: if you’ve been to Europe, you’ve probably visited a few. I have. They’re beautiful, but they are also sad reminders of the church’s current condition in those cities.

A few months ago, after sitting with my daughter Fiona watching and explaining baseball during the season, she and I decided to write to a few of the players we like. Actually, she dictated and I wrote. Then she wrote her name at the bottom and we sent the letters to the three players she chose: Three letters to three different players on two different teams, complete with a picture of Fiona for each of them! This was more than six months ago. No response.

I would say to you that quite apart from the enormous salaries, the steroids, and the high cost of tickets; quite apart from the commercialism and the corporate names attached to stadiums, that the leading indicator of Major League Baseball’s unhealthiness to me is their failure to connect with a child who wants to feel like she’s part of the dream. That might sound silly, given the size of the organization in question. But it means that these two teams, and possibly even these players, have at least partly forgotten why they do what they do. When baseball fans just become dollar signs or ego boosters to the teams and players, baseball has forgotten its mission, which is to convey through its competition something more than simply good baseball playing. Rather, baseball is a deep experience of relationship: delight in the movement and skill of the game; pleasure in the companionship, food, and drink; elation or disappointment in the performance of the team. Baseball is an unfolding story in which the spectators are participants, too. Without that relationship between the playing field and the stands, no one would care about the game.

Right now, baseball relies upon the nostalgia and loyalty of people who already have that deep connection. (Or who were raised by them.) But when an organization loses the ability to connect with people in this way, it puts in place one important factor in beginning its own decline; maybe not immediately, but almost inevitably.

I believe this is the case with baseball because they failed to answer any of three letters from my daughter. Yet even more, I believe this is the case with baseball because the same thing has happened to the church all over Europe and Canada, and it is in the process of occurring in this country. So many churches have lost the ability to convey the life-saving, life-transforming Good News of Jesus Christ; people still have a sense that God is out there. Yet they don’t know the story of God as their story, essential to understanding and living life fully. Belief doesn’t become faith if a person doesn’t understand the deep web of relationship throughout all time between God and all of Creation, and that joins all believers to one another profoundly through Jesus Christ. Scripture and the church have called this the “Body of Christ,” meaning that our connection is as essential to our purpose and identity as any part of a human body is the whole, and the whole to the part.

Start Up/Start Over integrates the reality that the Gospel is essential and life-transforming with the notion that we have to be thoughtful in our mission. We must, in other words, communicate with people around us using language that they understand, media that they use, and songs and poetry that stir them. Is the Gospel exciting, relevant, joyful, and often risky? It certainly has been for me! Then why, does church often come off as a disconnected, boring, dutiful slog through Sunday morning, a time when I might just as well stay home and sleep in for all that I’m going to experience in worship?

Every day, people gather together all over this nation and the world and manufacture, invent, create incredible things: portable electronics, pharmaceuticals, magazines, television, weapons, industrial equipment. They build organizations and corporations and shape all of society toward this purpose. And we accept that someone can spend a lifetime devoting their time, energy, and imagination to this stuff. Start Up/Start Over is really meant to press churches to recognize that these people are already in our midst, and that God expects His followers to attempt to be as effective in sharing the Gospel as the world is in these other things. Corporations and governments devote tremendous amounts of time and treasure trying to understand young people, for instance. They understand, in many ways better than we, what motivates and inspires them. They have spent the time and money to do this for all different kinds of people. They have to spend that time and money because, like professional baseball or any other large corporate structure, they don’t very often have a direct, intimate relationship with the people they’re trying to reach.

We, at least in theory, have that intimacy with hundreds of people through our members. We have reservoirs of trust and love as people in relationship with spouses, children, family, friends and neighbors. We also have a tremendous wealth of experience from our professional lives, and spiritual gifts given to us by God. I want our church to grow into a place that brings these two customarily separate spheres of life into connection, to become a church that is Christ-centered, outwardly directed, loving, relevant, adventurous, and committed to really great worship and mission.

With all my prayers,

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