BLOG 6/6/17. STATIC CHURCHES IN A NOMADIC CULTURE?
The ‘village church’ sounds so quaint. It harks back to the time when the church house was a community gathering place, and buzzed with activity on Sundays, and was considered by many to be the house of God. That all began to change a long time ago. Think, for-instance, of poet Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village lament over that period in British history when the industrial revolution moved the textile industry from cottage industries in small villages to the large impersonal industries in large cities. He grieved over that past when the pastor was a gentle figure giving some caring presence to the villagers, and the quaint church-house was the center of the village—now standing empty, as does most of the village.
It has been difficult for our present remaining devotees of neighborhood church institutions to accept that the cultural shift of our present is as dramatic with us. That first generation after World War II had a field-day planting their denominational church franchises in the new neighborhoods and on the growing edge of cities. Architects had a field day. Handsome church sanctuaries rose everywhere, and church institutions flourished for a period.
Ah! but hardly a week goes by now without the report in the local newspaper of another old cherished church house being closed and sold because the congregation has aged, or moved away. It has been difficult for many to accept the fact that we live in a nomad culture in which the populace is constantly on the move. People move frequently, and even in pleasant subdivisions one hardly knows one’s neighbors, nor often do not even want to know them. They are ‘cocooners’ who go to work, come home, pull down the garage door and hide.
Where is one’s neighborhood? Where does one have any kind of significant contact with others? The popular TV comedy Cheers of yesterday located the neighborhood in the local pub where the viewers began to know the foibles and idiosyncrasies of all of the actors, and yet the same viewers are often at a loss to have significant contact with others, except perhaps at work, or in a running or biking club. It’s a different world. People change jobs frequently, and accept employment half-way across the country. And, … the church is less and less a factor.
So, neighborhood church houses become something of an expensive anachronism. Those who are followers of Christ often meet over coffee, BEER, or over meals, and there share their pilgrim journies, but not in church institutions or church houses. They realize that a church building is one thing, … but that the church is a community of mutual discipleship, love, encouragement, out-of-hiding honesty with each other, and that requires significant time spent together wherever.
That also means that the church is compelled to accept its Biblical definition as a community of pilgrims and strangers. It must ever be versatile, flexible, mobile, and vulnerable. The building must never define the church. Think of those tragic scenes in the middle east where historic old church buildings are destroyed by ISIS. Does that mean that the church there no longer exists? Not at all. Or the church in China during the ‘cultural revolution’ where the Communist government expropriated all church property. Did the church cease to exist? No, it went ‘underground’ and grew exponentially, even when being discovered to be a Christian was a crime, and communities of faith grew up in concentration camps.
What to do with empty church buildings in this present post-Christian culture is a real ‘head-scratcher’. Pews, pipe organs, stained glass windows, and classic church architecture are not in high demand on the market. But the spiritual hunger of a culture that is the product of a sort of self-satisfied humanism lurks out there. And the followers of Christ are called to be children of light in that darkness, and they need each other in their incarnation as God’s people. What is remarkable are all the creative ways and places they have found to find each other. Stay tuned.
