|
|
|
|
Reverend Timothy B. Cargal, Ph.D. Faithfulness in a Faithless Age Ask people what they know to be true about the demographic trends of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in particular and so-called "Mainline Christianity" more generally, and you are likely to hear some fairly consistent responses. Our churches are aging—both in the sense that the median age of our members is rising and our buildings and facilities are showing signs of the wear and tear of use over the decades that have passed since they were constructed. Our numbers are dwindling as more and more people leave religious communities all together or flock to newer, more lively independent churches. We are so divided over internal battles between theological liberals and conservatives at the denominational level and between those who want change and those who want consistency at the local level that we have no energy left for reaching out to others. Denominational churches, as something of cultural dinosaurs, are headed for extinction. Such is the conventional wisdom about the Presbyterian Church. But there is an interesting thing about conventional wisdom: very often even its truths can harbor some serious misconceptions. I am reminded of the quip by Yogi Berra about a restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded." Sometimes even the truths of conventional wisdom need to be confronted with some facts. Thankfully, when it comes to the widely held perceptions about the church in America, we now have some facts and not just anecdotes. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has recently published the findings of a survey of the "U.S. Religious Landscape." The study was conducted over several months last summer and included responses from more than 36,000 participants—a sampling pool that would make any of the current presidential contenders green with envy. The survey was designed to study not just "Mainline Christianity" but the broad sweep of American religious attitudes, from atheism to Zen Buddhism as it were. The facts it brought to light seem to confirm many of the perceptions of the current conventional wisdom. The Pew Forum reports1 "more than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised." What is perhaps even more concerning for Presbyterians and other mainline Christian denominations is that if you include those who simply moved from one Protestant church to another the overall figure jumps to 44% who have changed their religious affiliation as adults. Among the reasons for why the median age in all religious communities is rising is that "people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children." And among young adults, aged 18-29, "one in four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion." As a consequence, whereas "six-in-ten Americans age 70 or older (62%) are Protestant ... that ... number is only about four-in-ten (43%) among Americans ages 18-29." The statistics, then, support some aspects of the conventional wisdom. We are indeed living in a period when Americans are both less faithful to the religious traditions in which they were raised and somewhat less faithful in terms of a religious commitments generally. But there are other findings of the report that suggest that the Presbyterian Church and its mainline siblings are not doomed to extinction. Take a closer look at those 16% of adults who are unaffiliated with any particular faith. Only are quarter of them (and so roughly 4% of the total population) considered themselves atheists (1.6%) or agnostics (2.4%). Fully three-quarters of those who don’t affiliate with a religious tradition (12% of the overall adult population) "simply describe their religion as ‘nothing in particular’ ... fairly evenly divided between the ‘secular unaffiliated’ [who say "religion is not important in their lives"] ... and the ‘religious unaffiliated’" [who still say religion is "somewhat" or even "very important in their lives"]. Americans may, then, be less faithful in their commitment to the religious traditions of their past, but despite the best efforts of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others, they are hardly turning their backs on belief in God or religious values in droves. People are, however, feeling less need to affiliate themselves with others in terms of their religious self-identifications. The study finds "people [who are] moving into the unaffiliated category out number those moving out of the unaffiliated group by more than a three-to-one margin." But roughly 4% of all adults are moving in the opposite direction. As the report states, "This means that more than half of people who were unaffiliated with any particular religion as a child now say that they are associated with a religious group." Thus, "the unaffiliated population has ... one of the lowest retention rates of all ‘religious’ groups." That statistic—which I promise is the last I will include in this sermon—underscores that all groups have massive revolving doors. There is no religious group or non-religious group that is not simultaneously both losing and gaining adherents. Presbyterians are, to be sure, declining in numbers because we are losing folks faster than we are attracting them. But the statistics show that such decline isn’t a set destiny. There is so much flux in American religious affiliation that we can still hope to reverse that trend. As our scripture lessons remind us, that hope does not lie simply in the statistics. Indeed, our hope for restoring growth to both our denomination and our congregation ultimately lies with God. As 1 Peter reminds us, for all of us in the church our faith is a result of what Christ is has done for us through his life, ministry and resurrection, and done within us by the Holy Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead. We may feel as though we are a living as cultural exiles—and the statistics show that feeling is warranted to at least a degree—but our faith and the ongoing life of the church were never about our individual or even collective abilities to ride out either adverse or even favorable cultural trends. The church has always been nothing more, and nothing less, than the gathered community of those whom God has redeemed. Moreover, as we have been reminded by Peter’s sermon in Acts 2, God’s promise of redemption has always been "for you, for your children, and for all those who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls." So long as God continues to call people to redemption, so long as those people gather together in community, there will be a church—even if individuals may pass in, out, and back in again as if through revolving doors. But just because the growth of this and every congregation is ultimately God’s doing, that does not absolve us of any and all responsibility for the future of our church and our denomination. There must be attention given to the building of community among those "whom the Lord our God calls." Acts describes how that those who responded to Peter’s sermon "devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers." To put that into more modern parlance, we as a church have a responsibility to study both scripture and our theological tradition together so as to understand what it means to live our lives as God’s children. We have a responsibility to share in fellowship that encourages us to live out our faith when times are good and to comfort and support one another when times are bad. We must share in the sacraments of the Lord’s Table and baptism to instill in us that we are both physical and spiritual beings. We must bear one another’s burdens and rejoice together at God’s blessings as we together join in prayer and worship of the God who has called and redeemed us. Yes, ours may be an increasingly faithless age, but our future is in the hands of a faithful God. Copyright © 2008 by Timothy B. Cargal. All rights reserved. 1 All statistics are cited from the "Summary of Key Findings" at http://religions.pewforum.org/reports. The full report is also available there.
|
|
Send mail to
webmaster@northwoodchurch.com with
questions or comments about this web site.
|