Is the Church in a Wilderness?
Look around. Don't miss the signs.
The Church goes through a reformation about every 500 years or so. This is a statement I heard from a lay church-historian on the Liturgist podcast around 2020. Currently, the church is sitting right outside that 500 year mark with the last major reformation being the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. Most reformations represent a crisis point. It is a place of decision, a turning point. Ryan Burge has mapped the ebb and flow of the American Religious landscape and contributed to the book, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take To Bring Them Back,” where Burge observes that “We are currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in US history.” Religious switching and altogether drop-outs have been occurring at break-neck speed. There is nothing in the church’s rear-view mirror that addresses or speaks into the church’s current religious landscape. We are in an unknown land. Untraversed territory. A crisis and the wilderness almost always follows crisis.
The Power of the Wilderness.
The Atlantic published an article a year ago, July 2023, written by Russell Moore entitled, The American Evangelical Church is in Crisis: There’s Only One Way Out. This article was written with evangelical protestantism in mind and many denominations fall outside of this domain. However, if you read my first post, I referenced the work of Burge there as well and his prediction of “wholesale denominational closure over the next 20 to 30 years.” Based on this, it is evident that the church’s current crisis stretches across denominations. The impulse here is to think that any given congregation has 20 to 30 years to seriously engage this crisis situation but Burge’s prediction is for broad-scale denominational collapse, of which the causal agents are playing themselves out in the present.
The American Evangelical Church is in Crisis. There’s Only One Way Out.
In the article from the Atlantic, Moore remarks that, “Those who wish to hold on to the Old Time Religion must realize that God is doing something new. The old alliances and coalitions are shaking apart. And the sense of disorientation, disillusionment, and political and religious “homelessness” that many Christians feel is not a problem to be overcome but a key part of the process.” The fracturing happening within denominations are really indicative of the breaking down of the “Old Time Religion” and the breaking in of the new. Moore goes on to say that he is “hard-pressed to think of one congregation that is not divided—or in an adrenal stance of tension about the imminence of division—over the turmoil of the political moment.” I would add that even those congregations that feel as though they were shielded from or somehow miraculously dodged any major congregational fallout (whether over politics, economics or theological tension), over the last few years are even more vulnerable.
Jean Gebser, a Swiss philosopher, linguist and poet, wrote in depth on the subject of human consciousness. Gebser defined 5 distinct “structures” of human consciousness and observed that humanity has been existing within the 4th structure known as the “mental-rational.” The mental-rational, also known as the “perspectival,” reveals itself as the capacity for the human to perceive of the world through a single point. Each structure that Gebser identifies also has a corresponding “deficiency stage.” This stage happens at the point of “mutation” when one structure moves into the background making room for the next. I was introduced to Gebser mere months ago and am still stumbling my way through the complexities of his insights, so for now I will lean on someone much more familiar with Gebser’s work. Cynthia Bourgeault is an Episcopal Priest, best selling author, internationally renowned spiritual retreat leader and has written on Gebser’s work. In the deficiency stage, what is unattainable through the mental-rational or perspectival begins to bare weight on our world-views, and perspectives, and our identity begins to feel threatened. When that happens, the person or person(s), states Bourgeault, reaches a
“…temperature of moralism and judgmentalism,” which “rises steadily as the embattled mental structure collapses toward a "universal intolerance" (as Gebser bluntly names it.)”
Sound familiar? This is most overt in the unwillingness for individuals to concede that our own perspective(s) and view(s) are one in an array. It is this “universal intolerance” that is motivating the fragmentation of the Christian religion (especially in regards to LGBTQ+, women in ministry, and concepts of inclusivity), but it is also indication that the new era is here. The “integral” or the freedom from a single perspective, is emerging and intensifying.
I bring up Gebser’s work to make the point that we see the turning of these tides in every sector. This is not just a Church-wide phenomena. This is a human phenomena. Religion is only part of even bigger societal shifts including the political and economic. The fragmentation of the christian religion is the means by which the “integral” is birthed. The church is shifting from a “perspectival,” “mental-rational,” state of human consciousness, to the “integral,” where the church becomes capable of not just holding, but feeling various views and perspectives without the perceived loss of our identity. Know this though, being a part of a community with various, differing theological perspectives does not indicate the integral. It is only integral when the congregants and members feel the freedom and safety to be seen without fear of being ostracized and without the desire to force others to conform to their perspective. Cynthia Bourgeault says it this way:
“For now, the most important thing to keep in mind is that in the Gebserian system perspective is not simply a point of view; it is a completely different world of seeing, unfolding according to its own protocols: its own core values and ways of making connections. To truly take in another’s perspective is not simply to take in another’s “position” and arrange the pieces dialectically on a mental chessboard. Rather, it is profoundly to take in another world and allow that world to touch our hearts and wash over us deeply until it, too, becomes our own. It is to listen in a whole new dimension.”
It is this new structure that will be tasked with helping Christianity retrieve the seed and essence of what Christianity truly is in the coming years. It will look drastically different. From congregational religious expressions, to the nuts and bolts of rituals, weekly calendars, and the internal processes of organizational life. Two prominent characteristics latent within this new era, and essential characteristics that the church can begin working with now are transparency and freedom. More on this in a later post.
Where my work picks up and where Moore left his readers is with a man, “Abram of Ur, who heard a promise and trekked our into the desert, not knowing where he was going.” This narrative is representative of where the Church is now. The reaction that many have had is similar to that of the Israelites during the Exodus from Egypt, “I just want to go back.” To quote Moore, “Many mainstream evangelicals assumed that we were all just waiting out a moment of disorder: If we can just get through the 2016 presidential election, the pandemic, the racial-reckoning protests and backlashes, the 2020 presidential election, and the seemingly constant evangelical-leadership sex-and-abuse scandals, we’ll end up safely back in 2015.” However, “the answer was not to reassemble the old architectural plans and start again.” Although this has been the impulse for many congregations. The old mechanisms and methods for confronting a declining, or restlesss congregation will yield almost no gains in this new era. The only solution is, like Abram, to take that first step into the wilderness. It is the willingness to leave things behind and create room for new fields of divine possibility. Try to resurrect those ecclesial components that have fallen away, and you will be met with frustration.
The Hebrew word for wilderness is midbar and it is associated with terms like “speak,” “word,” and “reveal.” The wilderness was the place where the Hebrews believed that God revealed Gods self. The literal Greek translation for “crisis” is birthing stool. Crisis is the birthplace to the wilderness journey where our identities and purpose are brought forth. Crisis is the seat of new birth, new beginnings, new life, which are directly associated with the wilderness pilgrimage. There are no cutting corners here. The way in and through the wilderness is not with the right pastor, or worship service, or youth minister, or any other minister, myself included. The way forward, as it has been revealed to me and many others, is latent within a tradition nestled within the Christian religion that has long flown under the radar and is now re-emerging, center stage. This tradition is what my next post will be about. Below is a quote by an expert who I won’t reveal just yet because it would give it away but this is what she has to say about this tradition…
“It (the unnamed tradition) never fully disappears and it always emerges exactly when we need it conformed to fit the conditions of the world.”
Going forward, this is what you can expect. Lot’s of typos and grammatical errors! I don't want to put pressure on myself to post every week. If the post requires more research it will take longer. I really want to get the content out in a way that is easily accessible, digestible and most importantly in a way that contributes!
Lastly, I’ll say this. I was having lunch with a friend a few months ago. We’ve been close for almost 20 years. She knows me better than most. I shared with her some of my predictions, and of course at the end of my speculations I remarked, “ I could be wrong though.” To which my friend replied, “yes, you could be wrong, but you usually aren’t.” There are a million things I am not good at and I hope that I will never be tasked with doing in the church. There are a couple things that I can do well. I have been able to look at organizations and institutions and perceive pretty clearly (and quickly) how the next years and even decades will unfold. I believe in grace. I do. I also believe that God created a world not of spectators or apathetic beneficiaries of the divine life, but as full participants.
I am looking forward to getting into this tradition!