Presbyterians in Transition

Hey, welcome back to the pastor talk podcast.
Thanks for being with us.
We appreciate you listening in on these conversations as we continue to discuss the theology and the history of the
Presbyterian Church today.
We kind of shift gears more of a consideration of where we are now with
a view toward our recent past.
Michael, I think this podcast will land for lots of people in the
realm of experiential.
We will be discussing things over the last several decades.
I think most of our listeners would have certainly been in churches during those periods.
Many of them may have even been Presbyterian.
I grew up Presbyterian and my lifespan overlaps with
some of the period that we’re talking about.
And I think in many ways I can see some of the marks
that we’ll try to identify in my own experience with the Presbyterian Church.
But what we want to do is just highlight kind of where we think we are now and maybe some sense of
how we’ve gotten there to highlight some of the struggles we’ve been having and are having as
not just a congregation but as a denomination.
And we hope that that sets the stage for a
we are not being critical today but we will be pointing out things that we think contribute to
the current state of struggle in the PCUSA.
But the hope is that in identifying those things
we’re ready to have a conversation about how they might change in the coming days.
Yeah, and I think that’s a helpful opening word is that there may be moments in this conversation,
especially if you’ve grown up Presbyterian,
that might sound like we are pushing pretty hard on a soft spot.
Unlike you, I didn’t grow up in the Presbyterian Church.
I’ve always kind of thought
that I’ve been adopted by the family.
And I think the thing that we both bring in our different
experiences is a shared love of this sometimes curmudgity fellowship.
But we have a deep and
abiding love for these people who call themselves Presbyterians.
So anything that sounds critical
needs to be couched in the relationship of people who have spent a lot of time and energy
investing in this community and being blessed by this community of Presbyterians,
not just in our present place, but in other churches and in other places around the country,
seminaries and places where we’ve got to serve and got to be members of.
And I think one thing that is
important to recognize as we’ve gone through this proverb study together is that one of the essential
determiners of whether you are able to grow in wisdom is your ability to receive correction.
And there are some things that we can look at in our history of Presbyterian,
Presbyterianism,
excuse me, in the United States,
especially where we have some things to learn.
So let’s just take
an honest look at that and try to not take things personally as we go.
Yeah.
And I hope it goes
without saying there are many,
many, many outstanding faithful Christians who are Presbyterian.
There are many outstanding churches.
There are lots of things that the Presbyterian church has
done and continues to do really well.
It’s just that those things will be the highlight in a future podcast.
And today we really turn our reflections on where are some of the places
that we are struggling a little bit.
Where have we been drifting?
And Michael, I think we have
to start by saying it’s been in some ways a downward slide that has been with us for a while.
You know, I think I ran the numbers one time and my mother who’s now 70 was a seventh or eighth
membership in that same timeline.
So if you want to talk the last 40 or 50 years,
we have lost hundreds of churches,
some transferring out, many closing.
We have lost thousands, even into the millions of members.
And it has been a difficult time.
There are fewer churches.
The churches we have tend to be smaller.
The budgets in those churches
also tend to be smaller.
When we look at the metrics of church that generally you use to evaluate health,
bodies,
budgets,
buildings,
those are not positive upward trends for the PCUSA, generally speaking.
Yeah.
You look especially at the generation immediately following World War II
and American Presbyterianism had an innate optimism.
There was this continued trend of
people coming and being faithful,
not only in attending and participating in worship services,
but very much in the surrounding fellowship ministries of the church.
Something like Presbyterian women was a particularly buoyant sort of fellowship in that time.
Just tons and tons
of work being done and not just social work,
though, that was also happening.
A lot of these
organizations surrounding our Presbyterian family were doing significant amount of investments in
mission and in education and in really sort of social help kinds of ministries.
It was a really
powerful time.
And as part of that,
there were entire industries that got built up around, not just Presbyterianism,
also mainline churches in general,
but there were entire companies and
industries that were built around the idea of building new churches,
architects, whose only job was to make the designs for a new building and companies who would come in to build those
buildings.
And there was this idea that you would make curriculum that would get distributed
throughout all of these churches.
And all of these things just seemed to be going up and up and up.
And then for what at that moment,
I don’t think felt like any significant change.
I don’t think there was ever a time in which it felt like someone flipped a light switch.
But statistically,
people look back and say there came a moment where suddenly that tide changed.
And instead of adding members,
the denomination slowly started losing them.
And the conversation at that moment was, well,
that that natural fluctuations happen.
The people are going now,
but they’ll come back.
And the expectation was that there would be hills and there’d be valleys and it would all work out.
But historically, Clint,
that’s not how it has played out.
Yeah. And I think, Michael, you bring up a good point.
When we talk about this general decline,
it’s not something that is just an experience of Presbyterians.
In other words,
it wasn’t simply
that we could have done things better and maybe had different results.
There may be some truth to
that.
And looking back, we try to unpack that.
But we’re really talking about a trend that hit the American church,
Methodists, Lutherans.
Catholics are insulated from the trends a little
bit because of the way that they do things and their family heritage in some instances.
But even Catholics saw the struggle.
Baptists saw the struggle.
Pretty much any denomination that had
done well and had what we might call in the church brand loyalty,
for want of a better word,
began to feel the effects of that and have also been to some extent,
especially mainline churches, what we would call Lutheran and Methodist Presbyterian,
have really been on the same trajectory of decline.
Now, lots of reasons for that and lots of attempts to try and unpack that.
The ’60s were hard on church because you went from an era in which there was kind of one opinion
to the idea that there were multiple opinions.
People began to have a less of a sense of trust of established institutions.
The church was certainly one of those.
The same thing has
happened to educational institutions.
But as we tried to navigate those shifts,
the result for Presbyterians was almost exclusively downhill.
We did not have a lot of success numerically
or financially in those windows.
And when I say financially,
I mean at the church budget level.
As a denomination, we’ve done well with money.
But at the local level where churches have to raise
money to meet their budgets,
they almost exclusively found themselves going in a time
when they had more people and more programs to having fewer people trying to maintain the same level.
And from a financial standpoint,
that’s always going to be very difficult.
And so we have
been in for 50 years now this general experience of losing things,
losing buildings, losing churches, losing people.
And it has been, I think,
difficult.
And it’s also been,
Michael, difficult for us.
You know, to some extent, I guess churches are optimistic.
To some extent, maybe we want
desperately to think that things will change for the better.
It’s been hard for us to acknowledge that it’s happened.
We had a very difficult time recognizing it or at least facing the facts of it
in the midst of it.
Very much.
And I think there’s a lot of pieces there,
Clint, that we could tease out.
But I go back to the three B’s that you named before bodies,
budgets, and buildings.
And I think the temptation of those joining our conversation might be to oversimplify what you mean in that.
When we say bodies,
we don’t just think of that as in the quantity of people in the sanctuary,
though that matters.
The number of people in worship,
the number of people participating
in education ministries, all of this does matter.
And of course,
it’s a proportional relationship
to budgets and buildings because all these things are connected.
But Clint,
what about the kinds of people that we have in our worship services?
Right? How young are they?
How old are they?
Our diversity of age has not increased over the years.
It’s not as if we’ve been able to sort
of hold the intergenerational line.
Most congregations have gotten older.
And with that,
programs and the reality of church life has often sort of gone in that direction.
One of the ways
that the mainline church struggles is to have active, consistent,
and effective, and I’ll explain why I mean by effective in a moment,
ministries to young people,
young adults,
sometimes even high school and children.
And that is a struggle.
When a family comes to a Presbyterian congregation,
they’re a small Presbyterian church,
and there’s no ministry to youth, that sometimes causes
difficulties for families,
especially a family that wants to have a formation element for their
child.
They want their child to know and grow up in the faith.
And so I think there have been
some of these really practical struggles as churches have gone on,
as we’ve struggled to
sort of face this reality of the fact that we are not seeing this sort of return of the young people
that we once hoped would happen.
That’s one example of how it’s not just the number of people in
worship, though many churches are seeing the lowest worship attendance they’ve ever seen.
That’s not some churches are also doing okay,
but it’s also who are those people who are in worship?
And are, is there a representation of this sort of larger world inside our churches?
And for many, many, many Presbyterian churches,
the population inside our sanctuaries does not reflect the
community that surrounds it.
Yeah, and I think it’s a very human tendency, Michael,
to
continue to do something that has worked in the hopes that it will work again.
And so those things
we did in the 40s and 50s that were effective,
those programmings, family-style programmings and
you know, staff-driven kind of ministries and very particular kind of mission cause things,
we did those things really well,
traditional education.
And when they began to be less effective,
I think very naturally we thought,
well, just keep plugging away.
And it took a long time
for us to realize that they were no longer working and not likely to start working again.
Now,
that’s not just the church,
that happened to corporations,
that happened to businesses.
The idea of a very heavy,
top-down, structured organization with intentional meetings and
long-range planning and kind of slow-moving response to culture,
that went away.
And the church, as many other institutions,
had a difficult time recognizing it as it happened and then
had to find themselves in some ways not simply repairing the ship but thinking, okay,
our old ship isn’t going to work and it’s not built for these waters.
We need lighter, we need faster, we need more responsive.
And as we’ve talked about before,
that’s not historically been the wheelhouse
of Presbyterians.
And so,
we find ourselves in an interesting moment as Presbyterian churches.
Most congregations, the vast majority of the Presbyterian congregations in the country,
have a fellowship in a facility that’s too large for their number as they try to keep up with the
repairs and the costs of their building.
Because we have been building people,
we have been fixture people.
It was that symbol of the brick church on the corner and the white cross and the
big doors and the organ inside.
And we went all in on those things and now churches are struggling,
as they’ve gotten smaller,
to keep their building,
to use their building well.
And some of the very things that we look to as our signs of success have now, in some ways,
become part of the struggles that we’re trying to manage.
Yeah. Going to Seminary, Clint, I knew of a Presbyterian nearby that had a historic, gorgeous sanctuary.
The congregation was not viable and so it closed.
And the Presbyterian then
owned this sanctuary that no longer had a congregation meeting in it.
And so, all of the tax laws that were favorable towards the congregation,
the lack of property tax,
a lot of these things that are set up to help churches in a community,
were no longer valid
because it was no longer a church.
And suddenly, this collection of Presbyterian churches
were paying taxes for a building that was once tax-free for a community that no longer met there.
And immediately,
that building went from being an asset to being a liability on multiple levels,
financial liability,
but also a larger communal liability.
Because now, here’s this building sitting there that’s no longer serving the community that it resides in.
And I think that
that’s a struggle for Presbyterians to get our minds around.
It’s so antithetical to what
assumptions we have made in the past.
Our assumption is when things are going well,
you build a building and then things will naturally,
you have to maintain it,
you have to weed the garden,
but things will naturally grow.
And our experience in the last,
certainly 20 years, if not more than that,
has been that things don’t naturally grow.
It takes intentional effort, adaptability, flexibility,
and quite frankly, holding the physical things
that we’ve relied on for so long lightly.
And I think that is at its substance, Clint.
You may disagree.
I think that’s one of the things that we see as an overarching sort of theme of the
last 50 or 60 years is that some of our motivations have been exposed in the process.
Building a new building can be the exact right thing to do if its motivation is to connect with
the community in a way that your previous building couldn’t.
But if building a new building meant
something about who you were as a church,
or it meant something about status,
or it meant something
about what you wanted to appear to be,
when that building starts to no longer help you,
it can sometimes be hard to change it in the way that it needs to.
And I think that’s just one
example, Clint, of how we found that some of the assumptions that we made,
some of the guiding
motivations that we had left unchallenged have now become readily evident in their consequence.
I read an article many years ago about infrastructure, specifically bridges,
and some of the magnificent bridges across the country that were built in a time of engineering,
and they were really marvels.
But now they are facing traffic loads and a traffic count that they
could have never dreamt of in the time they were built.
Now they’re looking at repairs that in some
case cost magnitudes of order more than the bridge itself costs.
And these things that were
done in an era of we can do this,
and let’s do it big,
are now in many ways a liability.
They were a tremendous asset at the time,
but they now have gotten to be so burdensome financially from other
perspectives that the total cost to do those repairs is astronomical.
And I think there’s a
sense, Michael, in which that speaks into our church situation.
We now find ourselves in a different
world, and some of the financial commitments and some of the systematic structural commitments we made,
we are struggling to unmake and to find new ways to move forward.
And in some ways those very
things that were for us progress now feel like anchors.
And I don’t want to paint too dark a
picture of that, but I think many churches find themselves in a place where they have less people
and expensive buildings and they could not have imagined 50 years ago that that’s where they’d be landing.
And that’s an unfortunately often repeated story in the Presbyterian Church.
So that’s a little bit of the background.
That’s kind of where we are in our modern state.
We occupy in the early part of the 21st century,
we occupy as Presbyterians a pattern of decline and a pattern
of struggle.
Now it’s not all bad news.
There’s some good in it.
But the reality is if you’re a Presbyterian,
you are part of an organization,
part of a denomination that is struggling to curb
a very steep downhill trend and to move other ways.
And as we have lived in that struggle,
it has done some things to us as a denomination, as a people.
It naturally, as we have struggles,
those are also opportunities,
but it creates for us some changes and some adaptations.
Some of them are positive.
Some of them we just have to do because that’s what it means not to have enough budget, etc.
So what are those things,
Michael?
How would we move forward?
Let’s talk for a moment
about those things we can identify that in our perspective at least have shifted within the bigger
framework of the PCUSA.
What has our situation done for us in terms of changes of how we behave?
Yeah, that’s an important sort of turn in the conversation.
And Clint, I don’t know if this is
maybe a helpful way into it,
but if you’ve been a lifelong Presbyterian,
those of you who are joining this conversation,
I imagine if you were asked to sort of survey the last 20 or 30 years in the Presbyterian Church,
you might have named some of these movements and trends,
but I suspect that
many might point to some of the social statements,
theological debates that have been happening in
the church.
Those have in many cases received a lot of the time and attention of the National
Presbyterian Fellowship.
Lots of disagreements,
lots of time have been spent at the highest levels
of the denomination really hashing out what the right stance on different issues have been,
and not just the most recent issues related to sexuality and gender,
but there have been many preceding that.
And I think, Clint, that what has happened in that time has been that we have been
so focused on stances and sort of theological responses to our current culture that for many
of us it has been the focus such that we’ve not seen the previous trends we were just talking
about.
The bodies, the budgets, and the buildings have been off the radar because we’ve been so
focused on a lot of the theological work that comes naturally to the Presbyterian Fellowship.
And what has happened in the midst of that has been divisions between congregations and the denomination.
And it would be naive to think that the last 10 or 15 years we haven’t seen a
significant number of churches who have left the Presbyterian Church USA,
they’ve gone to other
Presbyterian churches, or Presbyterian churches have closed.
And the net effect of that is
the Presbyterian Church, which has for years really had sort of a large tent,
lots of theological perspectives present,
both conservative and progressive.
Much of the conservative voice,
not all, but there has been a noticeable decrease in the conservative voice in the Presbyterian
Church as lots of these churches have either gone other places or done different things.
And the result of that,
Clint, is I think you start seeing,
especially at our General Assembly level,
a more consistent sort of leftward,
progressive kind of interest and focus within
the larger denominational whole.
And I suppose that the value of that might be in the eye of
the beholder, what you personally bring to that.
But there has been this sort of consistent
emphasis that we’ve seen,
I think, in greater measure in the last years on that sort of
progressive theological voice that’s always been present in our Presbyterian family,
but I think now is highlighted due to some of these congregational changes.
Yeah, I think it would be fair to say,
I can’t imagine that it would be difficult in my mind to
argue with the statement that the Presbyterian Church has probably experienced a leftward drift.
If you look at litmus test issues like same-sex marriage and ordination questions,
you would have to,
I think, say that the Presbyterian Church in its practice,
at least at the national level,
at the governing level,
is less conservative administratively
than it has been prior.
Now, for some, that’s good news.
In our part of the world,
that’s maybe met with a little bit of reluctance,
a little bit of unhappiness,
as it seems like so much of culture
going ways that many people in our neck of the woods maybe aren’t entirely comfortable with.
However, what hasn’t changed is the freedom within,
I would say that the boundaries have
not moved, Michael, in terms of there is within our family have always been room for right and left.
I think,
to your point,
a lot of the folks on the right have in recent years maybe said,
“You know what?
I’m going to go do something else,” and the result has been the balance,
the percentage of the average is probably,
that needle has probably been moving to the left more
so than it has the right, which is,
depending, again, on your perspective, a good thing or a bad thing,
but I do think it is a real thing,
and what that has done,
I would say 20 years ago,
what that did was create just an endless supply of arguments.
I would say in the last five to 10 years,
as some of those gates have been opened and some of those
decisions have been made,
we may or may not be happy with them,
but at least there is a sense
of stability now, and we’re spending less time arguing over whether we should have done those things or not,
which,
again, if you’re a person who feels like we made mistakes,
that’s going to be painful, but the upside is we now have some energy emotionally and theologically to try and
invest in these other questions of where are we going and how do we get turned around,
how do we function more effectively and healthy as a church, as a denomination,
as us congregations,
and I will say the reprieve of the big family squabbles has given us a chance to breathe and
undertake what I think are some really pressing questions that I don’t think we’re getting
the attention they needed.
Yeah, and I think that we have to move towards the present reality of
this sort of congregational emphasis of a local practice,
because it connects to this.
I think that if the leftward drift of the Presbyterian church was accompanied by a very dogmatic top-down
hierarchy and structure, if that was being emphasized,
I think we would be even in a
substantially different place than we are today,
because with this shift has been a simultaneous
emphasis upon congregational and local regional sort of authority.
And so just to look at one particular issue, Clint,
when the denomination opened the door to people of different sexual orientations being ordained,
they did not mandate to congregations who they could or couldn’t
bring into their congregation as a pastor.
In other words, they left that to sessions
to make that kind of discernment.
And that’s significant, because it means that while it
opened the doors for congregations that were seeking that door open,
it didn’t require of
congregations to do things that would be against their theological conscience.
And so in the midst of that particular issue,
you see a larger trend in lots of different issues.
While some of these doors have opened,
there’s also been this sort of across-the-board realization
that our house is not in order,
that these trends that have been happening for a long time
continue to happen.
And I think denominationally,
we see things like 1001 worshiping communities,
which is essentially just an effort to encourage new church plants across the nation.
There’s this burgeoning sort of awareness that we as a larger family need to be seeking ways.
I hate to use the word relevant,
but certainly we need to be mindful and connected to the
communities in which we live and serve.
And if we cannot find footholds and ways to do that,
I think we’re beginning to realize that there’s significant things at stake in it.
Yeah, I would agree.
I think congregations have experienced—and there’s an upside and
a downside to this—more autonomy,
more freedom, but also perhaps that comes with
less resource, less idea that if I have a question about why are people not coming to church,
that General Assembly is creating a program to address that.
So the good news for congregations
is they do have a lot more freedom to navigate their particular context.
And there is a lot of
ability to say, “Okay, I’m in this area,
so this will work,
but this won’t,” or “These are our
policies,” or even to the ordination questions,
“These are the people we feel are called to serve
this congregation in these moments.” On the other hand,
as we lose that kind of national voice and
that idea that we all function according to the same policies,
it creates a sense of disconnect.
And so it’s been a very much a struggle for Presbyterians to feel the things that bind us
together, the connections we have with one another in a time where it seems increasingly likely
that you may be doing things in a different way than your neighboring church or the neighboring presbytery.
And, you know, that’s a discomforting moment for Presbyterians because we’re used to
kind of being somewhat plug and play to be Presbyterian in one place.
It least meant,
not always theologically,
but practically,
and especially, I would say, governmentally,
meant that we understood systems,
and now we have this moment where there’s a lot of freedom to do
things in different ways.
Some of us are handling it well,
some of us are really struggling with it,
and it creates some tension.
The other thing I would say,
Michael,
just in terms of someone who’s
listening to this podcast and saying,
“Wait a minute, you’re saying the Presbyterian Church
is becoming more liberal,
and that’s not a thing that they would feel comfortable with or celebrate,”
I would just point out that I think the historic trunk of any organization,
typically, that’s the movement.
And this is true in our society,
this is true in business.
So,
in other words,
it has always been the pattern that people who disagree leave,
and that means that the historic group tends to be the one breaking new boundaries.
The historic group tends to be the one doing new things because when we do a new thing,
that’s when some of the
group says, “No, we’re not doing that.
We’re going to stick with the old thing,
and we’ll be over here
doing it if you need us.” And so,
while this may not be an easy transition,
it’s not an uncommon
one.
It’s built into the fabric of organizations, in my opinion.
Yeah, and I don’t want to over-focus here on this,
Clint, but for a moment,
I think it may be a helpful lens.
It has required significant changes in the conception of what a pastor is.
We’ve been talking about congregational changes,
but if you went to seminary 30 years ago,
you were likely trained in the ways to keep a church going,
how to keep a budget balanced,
how to sort of nudge
committees in the right direction,
and how to sort of help people in the midst of pastoral care
situations.
The idea of pastoral leadership had this emphasis 30,
40 years ago on the idea of
maintenance of the church,
maintenance of divine worship.
But the honest truth is,
there are many communities—we know this well in the Midwest—there are many small communities,
many of those listening to our conversation today may have grown up in the community,
that if you return there today,
the population itself in that community has been decreasing year over year.
Well, you can’t possibly expect that a church is going to somehow maintain its
membership in a time in which the community around it is experiencing significant and sustained
decreases of people that live in that community, right?
And that is one of the struggles of our
current breakdown towards the congregational model,
is that pastors are chiefly working on the issues
of their family of faith.
And as communities have started to struggle,
one might recognize the need
to start diversifying job descriptions and to start finding new efficient ways to experience
ministry across congregations.
But that’s not really the pastor’s training or goal,
is to be thinking outside the walls of a church.
And so that has been a weakness
that we have started to have to sort of become mindful of,
is that pastors need to go into a
context aware of the fact that we may need to start thinking outside our walls,
both in our community, but also in multiple communities.
Or that pastors might need to be aware that
maintaining isn’t enough.
We have to try to seek and lead congregations into new ways of growth and
new forms of welcome.
And so that should demand changes in our education,
the pastors that should
demand changes in the expectations of what it means to be a leader in the congregation.
But Clint, the reality is we’re a slow moving ship.
We aren’t quick to those turns and we’re
beginning to feel sort of the groaning weight of that as we are encountering turbulent seas.
Yeah. So imagine 10 years ago,
you were the most effective video rental store in the blockbuster chain.
It didn’t matter how well you were doing it.
You were doing a thing that no longer fit the
day and age in which you lived.
And I think as a person who went to seminary in that window,
you feel in many ways,
like your training was,
this is how you keep an old car running.
And then you come out and you find out,
well, you can’t get parts anymore.
You can’t.
Oh, wait, it doesn’t have a carburetor.
Whatever the analogy is,
things changed a great deal.
And we’ve been
scrambling to keep up with them.
And one of the ways we’ve been scrambling is to try and empower
congregations to make more and more of their decisions at the local level.
Now, that is in some ways a concession to the moment we’re in,
but it’s, I think, an important one because we’ve
realized that slow, methodical top down leadership is not well suited to our age.
The unfortunate reality is it’s what everybody knew.
And so as we try to learn to do something else,
it’s a slow transition.
And one of the places I think you can see it, Michael,
and this isn’t from a structural standpoint.
This is just kind of indicative of who we are as Presbyterians.
You and I have laughed about this.
We don’t want to offend anybody, but
in 17 years for me,
seven years for you as we’ve gone to presbytery meetings,
the number of times
we’ve gone to a meeting and the projector and the computer and the screen and what little technology, the microphones,
what little technology we use has worked flawlessly is I’m going to say less than
1%.
I’m not even going to venture again.
It’s not good.
Presbyterians,
again, we’re great with pencils and paper.
We’re great with old school accounting.
We’re great with writing.
We’re great with communication.
And then at some point,
so much of that changed.
And one of the benefits,
I think, to this COVID moment,
one of the opportunities in the church has been the
absolute way it has forced us into thinking some new thoughts,
Zoom calls and podcasts and recording
studios and digital online stuff and websites.
And I know this is in many ways your wheelhouse.
I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to bring that expertise and that passion
to a church that in many ways struggles to find a place for it.
You know, Clint, in the media space,
there’s this thing that people talk about called digital
natives and digital immigrants.
And the idea in that framework is that there are some people who
have grown up with the devices in their hands.
The smartphones is generally the thing that people
think of.
But largely, let’s say the internet and smart devices and computers with modern browsers,
all this kind of thing.
The idea is that if you grow up in this ecosystem,
you’re going to be more
natural in navigating it.
And there’s truth in that,
though it’s also deceptive and that we don’t
have time for that.
But that’s not,
I just want to say a caution,
that’s not always as true as you might think.
But then the converse is this idea of the digital immigrant,
one who’s experience in the working world was on a typewriter,
whose experience of getting things communicate up the
chain was always paper,
right?
And the idea is for those people coming into a very much digital
economy, this isn’t just church,
this is obviously business at its highest level.
The idea is that
for those people, it’s not going to be natural.
It’s not going to be like a well-fitting glove.
And so in that sort of more secular philosophical framework,
the conversation in the church has been,
well, we need to get the kids involved.
And I can’t tell you the number of congregations
where it’s been, well,
if you guys can’t do it,
just just go get the kids and throw them up in
the sound booth.
And Clint,
the honest truth is most kids don’t know how to run a sound board
either, right?
Just because you can run a smartphone doesn’t mean that you’re somehow
naturally gifted at being able to run a sound board.
Maybe it means that you’re a little bit
quicker to be interested in learning,
but those competencies aren’t the same.
I think what’s fascinating in our present moment,
the COVID moment specifically,
is lots of churches,
and I’ve been watching conversations across the PCUSA in different places,
people have been shocked,
Clint, at how much of the older demographic in the Presbyterian church has engaged in the online
format.
Now, it doesn’t mean that everybody is thrilled about it or that everybody wants it to
stay that way forever,
but there has been a wide sort of amazement at how much people have been
able to engage with at a level that people didn’t expect.
And so I think we’re beginning to discover
is that not only have we been slow to adapt to a technological world,
but that there is a great
number in our fellowship that was quick to adopt and found useful the tools that we could be using.
And that’s an open question for how Presbyterian churches are going to engage.
Yeah. And you just think about the reality of who we are as Presbyterians.
And, you know, it’s just it’s kind of fun to consider a few things.
We as a church,
nobody’s getting printed newsletters in their mailbox in this day and age, very few people,
I bet 75 to 90% of Presbyterian
churches are cranking out monthly printed newsletters and mailing them to people.
You know, think about the fact that when we come into the sanctuary,
not in COVID times,
but in normal times,
we’re getting a book and opening it up.
For some people, that’s the only book that are
opening all week.
There’s nowhere else where we’re doing those kinds of things.
We had a moment in this church where a person came in and made a confession to me.
They said, “Clint, I sit behind somebody and every week they get their phone out during the
sermon and they’re just on their phone.” Well,
they were confessing that after having watched that
a couple of weeks,
they realized that person was reading the scripture on their phone and then
taking notes on their phone instead of scratching it on our printed bulletin.
And those moments when immigrants and natives can talk to each other and learn from one another.
But it is, as you can imagine them,
a massive struggle in the church to think,
how do we speak effectively
to people who wish they didn’t have a computer and people who would give up everything they have before their phone?
And to try and do that well in this moment of transition is difficult.
And presented us the opportunity to do is just that, to say, “Okay,
we don’t have books.
We’re not mailing you paper.
Everybody go online.
Everybody get your stuff digitally.
We’ll do an app.
We’ll do a podcast.” And it kind of pushed us all into the same boat.
And as you say,
I think some of
the folks who maybe don’t come naturally to those things are finding out,
“Hey, there’s some good stuff here.” And interestingly enough, grandparents,
probably more so even than my bunch,
grandparents have gotten more comfortable than many might think with technology because of their
grandkids.
That’s how they’re doing FaceTime.
They’re doing those weekly checking calls.
They’re sending texts.
And that helps us.
But I think as a church,
we have a long way to go to integrate
and be able to do that stuff well,
because let’s be honest,
many Presbyterians don’t feel
like they need that.
It’s a nice thing to add,
but it’s not essential to them.
But if we are
going to effectively minister in the 21st century,
this, to me, seems like one of the giant challenges we will face.
How do we use technology well?
And I don’t want to be too critical on this,
Michael, but I’m not sure that it would be fair to say that we have a track record of doing that.
Yeah, Clint,
if someone’s joining this conversation,
they think that we’ve made a long detour down this
road about technology.
I think it’s worth making explicit that this is very much a parabolic
conversation.
What we’re saying about technology is in specific what we mean to talk about in much
broader, general terms.
Whether you want to talk about technology,
you want to talk about the ways
that we do Christian education,
doing it in an event sort of model during the day when lots of
younger people are at work,
when you want to think about how we do youth ministries on a Wednesday night.
And there are lots of things that we are going to,
as congregations in the Presbyterian
church, have to start sorting through if we haven’t already.
And I think technology is one example of it.
And I think,
Clint, one of the very strong struggles that we’ve had is not really
get more digital devices.
It’s not really change our church schedules.
It’s not really
nix paper bulletins.
Those things are sort of the concrete conversations that we have to have moving forward.
I think the struggle has been at its core,
at least in part,
flexibility.
Congregations have struggled with the idea of change,
with the idea that we must adapt,
that we must reflect the community that surrounds us.
And so our struggles in technology in
particular, I think, are a reflection of our inability to navigate the culture that surrounds us in general.
And I see in very much Jesus and the New Testament,
especially as you see Paul
going around and sort of the spreading of the gospel throughout the ancient world in the Book of Acts,
you see this sort of movement in concurrent ways,
that we must be translating
the gospel to the people around us,
that we should be proclaiming the good news,
baptizing the name of Jesus.
Well, you can’t do that if we’re always focused on the community inside the walls.
And so whether we’re utilizing technology or we’re utilizing other things,
our goal as a church
is going to have to be flexibility.
I do think that’s a nod that is certainly a note of gratitude
I’d like to offer for the congregation where we get to serve.
It’s not that everybody always loves change here,
but we have been offered a great amount of support and encouragement and generosity
and patience by a congregation who probably, if they’re honest,
don’t always love the changes that have been happening.
But Clint,
much gratitude to a congregation who recognizes that our mission
is beyond just continuing the things we’ve done well,
but to seek to find and do well in the
tears that lie ahead of us.
Yeah, Michael, I don’t know that I’ve ever conceived of it in
these terms before, but as I think back to our conversation on the history of the Presbyterian
church, and particularly that moment where we talked about some of the practices of the
Reformation and the Reformers,
if you’ve watched that,
you might remember there was a moment we
talked about our ancestors going in and cleaning sanctuaries,
stripping out the things that they
thought didn’t belong there,
icons,
relics,
in some cases, graven images or pictures of Jesus,
stained glass in some sense,
organs at times.
In other words, anything they felt
distracted people from worship.
And the context of that was,
and it’s interesting that our history,
early in our history,
we had this assumption that there are things that don’t belong
in the sanctuary.
And even in my own ministry path in the last 30 years,
I think of how many times a version of that conversation has come back around.
A drum set
doesn’t belong.
A screen doesn’t belong.
An earring,
shorts,
whatever it might be.
And
fascinating to think that in many ways we continue to try and reconcile
a well-intentioned practice of acknowledging that there are some things that don’t belong in worship
with the struggle to incorporate some of the culture around us in a way that makes it easy
for others to come in.
You know,
food,
but food doesn’t belong in the sanctuary.
That’s another one, as other churches have loud coffee and muffins and whatever.
And it’s an interesting,
I’ve never connected those two things in that way before,
but it’s an interesting idea
that one of the shifts we’re trying to make is perhaps to be less rigid with the barrier between church and world,
but in the way that allows the things of the culture to help the church,
and yet to maintain the separation from those things that don’t help the church.
And I think that will be a thing that we continue to struggle with.
I think we will,
especially as we consider
what it means to reach out to people who are on the younger end of the age scale,
because they by definition are the most connected often with the elements of technology or whatever it is in
their day, music, etc.
Music’s been another one.
No secular music in the church,
no this kind of
music, no that kind of music.
And I’m certainly not advocating that we should let anything in the
church, but it strikes me as odd that so many of our conversations have been about what fits and what doesn’t fit,
but those conversations have not always been theological.
Sometimes they’ve been emotional, and I think there’s a lot for us to sort out there.
Yeah, and that’s I think maybe
the point where we can put a bow on this conversation is we really spent this time with you today
talking a lot about the challenges that have been in our past and the way that that has set up what
we think, at least in our opinion,
many of the challenges that we are facing today.
And that is coming from two people who have lots of hope for the church.
The church capital see the larger
church, the Church of Jesus Christ,
but also I think in particular the Presbyterian Church, because we,
I don’t want to speak for you Clint,
but I think we’re both confident that in the
congregation that is seeking and striving by its membership to proclaim the good news in ways that
connects with its community that there is a future for Presbyterians in the world,
though we may not
see exactly the road that it will take to get there.
We see many good signs for that in what it
can look like.
So I think this conversation has very much presented the challenges we’ve had and
the challenges we now face.
I think our next conversation will allow us to talk a little bit
about those ways in which the denomination has been responding well,
and more specifically the
ways that congregations may be looking to respond in the future.
Yeah, I think if you wanted to summarize today’s conversation,
it would be how are,
where, what are the areas that we maybe are
not well suited to our times and how are we struggling to make that bridge from our past
to our present and future?
I think next week’s is far more optimistic.
What do we bring to that
that is helpful?
What do we bring to that challenge as Presbyterians that can help us
move forward?
What are the things we do well that we can continue to do well and be a strengthening
aspect and a blessing to the church?
And the good news is there are many of them,
and I think I’d
like to say many of you are experiencing them in this congregation or other congregations.
The seeds are planted,
and if we can care for them,
I think we are well suited in our day and age,
but we need to think through what it means because it will be different than what it has been in the past.
Well friends,
that is all for today.
We look forward to having you join us for the next
conversation next Wednesday, 9 o’clock Central Standard Time.
Until then, be blessed.
Thanks for listening.