In the best of times, the fall season is a little worrying to me. Don’t get me wrong, I love the weather, I love getting back to the activities and real work of the church, I even love the oncoming feel of winter creeping into the air. It is the church that worries me each fall. Like most New England churches, First Parish goes into a kind of hiatus during the summer, almost a hibernation. People’s lives get very active, but most of that activity is directed elsewhere. I’m used to that. But when September arrives, every year I worry about whether everyone will come back. Will people discover that they don’t really need the church? Will they have gotten out of the habit? Will they have found better things to do with their Sunday mornings?
A few years ago, those worries used to be quelled instantly with a big crowd arriving ready for the new church year on Rally Sunday. Now, not so much. Things are changing in our culture and in our church’s culture. Now, the church year seems to build, ever so slowly, week by week, as people drift back to winter routines reluctantly. This year has been the worst.
We know the reason for some of this. These days, Sunday morning has become the epicenter of the travel sports team schedule. Most of the kids that might normally be coming to Sunday School have more athletic things to do on Sunday mornings and many of their parents go off the watch their kids kick a soccer ball or play football or whatever. It’s worse in the fall, but that trend now continues in every sports season. In the world of pre-high school culture, sports loom large and church is often an afterthought. For years we have fought the battle of trying to compete with the Sunday sports scene, and we have clearly lost. Every year it gets a little worse.
But that’s not the only problem. It becomes harder every year for us to find adult volunteers to fill committees and to do the work of the church. People will make short-term commitments here and there, but few want to commit to a board term of three years or even one year. People volunteer to do a job, but are afraid to take on an ongoing responsibility. Many church activities simply cannot be sustained for lack of full participation. We are not alone in this. Most of our fellow congregational churches struggle far more than we do, but we are now beginning to struggle more and more.
Even on Sunday morning, attendance is increasingly irregular. Often we get the same over-all numbers as in past years, but most people’s church-going patterns have become more sporadic. People that used to come every week now might come twice a month. People that used to come twice a month, now come just once, etc. I don’t think our worship services are less exciting or compelling or beautiful, quite the contrary. When I run into people that I haven’t seen in church for a while, the answer is always the same: “O we’ve just been so busy. We just haven’t gotten a moment to spare.” And then comes the list of activities or events or whatever that seems dauntingly long indeed.
I worry because I can sense a slow erosion in the life of our church community. We have plenty of people involved in the church, but the level of involvement, the level of commitment has changed. Across our denomination and our region, I hear the same story: People’s lives have become so busy and hectic. Children’s lives are over programmed and increasingly frantic. Families feel stretched too far and don’t have enough time together. Church is less and less of a priority in people’s lives which are already too full.
I have no doubt that these things are true. The culture around us is changing. Some young parents have talked to me about the lives of their kids being so different now than they were just five years ago. “Screen time” has become so important, social media has mushroomed into such a dominant thing, and sports, sports, sports, sports.
There is another element that is especially true of our particular part of the Christian culture. We are a progressive church and part of a progressive denomination. I believe that our understanding of Christian faith is the real hope for the future of the church and that our area is filled with people who would be comfortable here and would agree with most of our interpretation of the Christian message. And yet, those very people are less interested in going to church or supporting the church. Members of more conservative or evangelical churches feel the need to band together to sustain a system of belief that is at odds with an increasingly secular culture. Our natural constituency is more at peace with the secular ethos. They are increasingly secular people looking for a spiritual dimension in their lives, but not looking for some radical alternative. While our faith is well anchored, our beliefs are more open, more accepting, more provisional. Hence we don’t have the passion and commitment of a narrower mind or a more judgmental kind of belief. The ideas that make us more open and accepting, ironically make us less zealous. Our members don’t all feel as much “need” for church quite as often as some others.
All this speaks well of our church community, but makes it harder to sustain our life together. Now, I’m not writing this as a form of public hand-wringing. I don’t want to scold you all into being more committed. I want, instead, to provoke us all into some fresh thinking about who we are and what our future might look like. We need to be creative in figuring out how to adapt to these times and how to meet the needs of our people. Maybe we need to do Sunday school completely differently or even at a different time of the day or week. Maybe we need to be more creative in linking our church community together using social media. Maybe our structure needs to be even more “ad hoc” and “organic.” Maybe we need to find other ways to touch the lives of our community outside of Sunday morning. I don’t yet know the answers, but we need to think it through more intentionally and more boldly.
At the request of the Board of Deacons, this winter we will be engaging in an envisioning process. We don’t yet know what form it will take, but we are bringing in an outside facilitator to help us to design the process and lead us through it. You’ll be hearing a lot more about it over the next couple of months. We will attempt to articulate more clearly, who we are and what makes our church community unique and compelling. We will try to diagnose our problems and challenges more clearly. We will try to get to the very heart of how we see our mission and purpose in people’s lives. And then we will bring our creativity to bear on re-envisioning how we go about the work, worship, and fun of being the church.
I hope that we can together become a church for the next generation and revitalize our sense of who we are and why what we do is important. In the meantime, give all this some thought. Talk about it to others. Let your imagination loose. Let’s begin to get excited about a new chapter in this communities life. We are still a very vibrant and healthy church. Our message is more important that ever and our outreach more crucial than ever. Lets turn our future into a time of engaging challenges to be embraced and well met. If we can do this together, we can all stop worrying each fall. And, by the way, if we haven’t yet seen you in church this fall, come and make everybody feel better.
