A member of our congregation recently, with great sincerity but clearly troubled, asked me this question: "Conrad, are you suggesting that we shut down our congregation?" The answer for me is clearly "No." As I write day after day, I think often of our grandson Ezra, and how much I want for him to grow up in a community of faithful followers of Jesus and how thankful I am that his parents have chosen to be part of such a community.

My calling, as I sense it, is more descriptive of what is occurring in the church than prescriptive of what should be for any particular church. I trust the providence of the Almighty to bring to pass in his time the eschatological future that has already been prescribed in heaven. 

What is so clear to me is that the church in the West/North is doing a pretty good job of shutting down itself--if one doesn't believe that, then one's eyes have to be closed. The Gallup recently reported that only 47 percent of Americans now belong to a church, mosque, or synagogue--down from 70 percent in just 1999. This figure had remained at about 70 percent for the preceding six decades. 

So something is happening to the church in America. Despite twenty years of emphasis on missional church, despite forty years of Evangelical efforts to find an ally in the political right, despite being the nation with more Christian radio stations, television channels, and a host of other resources, Gallup also reports that thousands of congregations are closing yearly.

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 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

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When I first left the ministry at Elizabethtown Mennonite Church in 2005, I said that what I needed was a theology of mission. And so I latched onto missional theology and the missional church movement and with Heidi came back to ministry in the same congregation in 2011. But what I have seen of the missional church movement over the past 20 years is what we in the American church are so good at doing--commodifying the Spirit's work, packaging it in fancy labels, making bold but false promises, offering expensive programs that offer celebrity speakers who are no longer engaged in mission themselves but talk a good game. 

But as a recent Gallup survey has shown, across those same two decades the percentage of those who do not identify with religion has dramatically increased and now fewer than one-half of Americans are church members. And of course, this number is higher the more recent the generation. I hear from one church member and leader after another--my kids have dropped out of church. Folks, commodifying the mission of God has not brought our children home, nor our neighbors, nor our extended family members. 

So it is no longer a theology of mission I am after, but a theology of dismantling--and I recently found it in a document written by Dutch Mennonite leader Henk Stenvers which he generously sent to me and gave permission to use as I wished. And so over the course of this week or so I will be drawing upon Henk's work, because after 35 years of research in American religion and 20 years of ministry and church consulting--Henk's is the best description and piece of work I have read that presents both an accurate sociological perspective of what is happening to the church in the West but also the most Biblical theological perspective that I have yet to read about how we are to respond to the Spirit's dismantling of the church in the West. 

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 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

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Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

No, whether the church survives in the world, regardless of its theology and practice and beliefs otherwise, depends completely on which Jesus it takes with it into the world.  And whether our children remain faithful depends on the same choice that we make. But as Dutch leader Henk Stenvers reminded us this week, there will always be a people of God regardless of whether one or another denomination survives the current storm, or whether your congregation or mine does so as well.

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 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

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Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

But we can't engage in the dismantling work of Isaiah 40 until we've been dismantled ourselves, until we've been stripped of any sense that we are the lucky ones, until we understand just how broken and crooked we are ourselves, until our hearts break for the brokenness in the world as if we were crying in pain for our own brokenness.

A listener asked me this week if I was suggesting that they shut the doors of their church and just give up--was that what I was saying? I replied that every fellowship of Jesus' followers must discern for themselves what the Spirit is saying. But I'm not sure how much of the decision  is even in our hands, for the Spirit seems to be hard at work closing quite a few churches that have become narrow roads of the lucky ones rather than saints who in their love for a world that God so loved are hard at work on that multi-lane freeway that runs  right into the heart of God!

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

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Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

Folks, I have a hunch that the Holy Spirit wants us to learn from the dismantled church in Europe, and as Henk said, to let go of the fear of disappearing. This was certainly the message of the Old Testament prophets who prophesized the devastation of God's people for reasons that now account for the church's devastation. For, said Isaiah, though only a stump remains, from that stump will grow a new shoot.

The problem for the American church that is an enterprise with Christian colleges, Christian publishers, Christian schools, Christian non-profits selling all kinds of products including Christian mission experiences, concerts, and church multiplication, Christian mission agencies, Christian television, and on and on, is that we have made our faith big business. We have commodified Jesus. We have as Halverson prophesied, made the thing an enterprise. And like so many enterprises, the thing we are selling becomes so much less important than the fact that at the end of the day we see a bottom line that is black rather than red. And surely we assume, health and wealth are evidences of God's blessing on our efforts. I'm not at all so sure these days that this is true.

Just maybe we are gaining the world and losing our souls.

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What’s so interesting in this story in John 9 is the only person where their eyes open the entire time was the man who had been blind and whose social relationships and identity were being shredded and dismantled the longer the story goes. And yet, as these relationships and identity are being shredded and dismantled, a new identity is being formed in him and the only relationship that really matters anyway will also become a reality. The implications it seems to me are the same for we as individuals and for the church—despite rejection by those in the middle, the centers of influence and status and power, and though our former relationships and identity is shredded and stripped, we must keep our eyes open to the new realities that Jesus will create and build up within us, a reformed and transformed identity that he will give to us, and most of all the comfort of his own presence at just the time the bigwigs threw us out on our ear. 

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It is easy for we who are in the church to ignore those leaving the church in droves these days, and to point to their failures to assimilate to the church culture, their differences of agreement with our theology and practice, their pain and woundedness that kept them from forgiving and on and on. The problem is, that these are exactly the people that drew themselves to Jesus and to whom Jesus was drawn. There was a reason that wounded women so loved this man and that he loved them.  While sociologists call such folks religious "nones" these days, I think of them as the diaspora whom Jesus is searching for, the sheep who he said are not yet in his fold, the children of God with his imprint upon them even if they don't know it. 

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

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Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

I appreciate that while the friend who sent me the note above, though he was initially concerned, pushed through to hear what I had to say. For its not that I've discovered unorthodoxy regarding God's love, but rather that I've finally experienced what none other than that which the most beloved disciple described in his first epistle: "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." 

Or in Kanagy's paraphrase, "fear has to do with walking that fine line between obedience and grace, somehow thinking we can do so on our own." But the love that St. John describes, is that of the one who has fallen whole hog off the balance beam and is wallowing joyfully in a grace and a "love that will not let me go."
 

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

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Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

Which brings me to Henri Nouwen's thesis of the "wounded healer," and my long struggle with what I understood Nouwen to be saying--that as a leader it is important to reveal our weakness as sort of object lessons for others whom we are leading--but not completely let slip what a mess we truly are lest they sense the need to care for us and we become dependent on them for support. Which is all well and good if one can conceal one's brokenness and if one can keep the lid on the Spirit's dynamite. But what happens when the Spirit takes over? And what happens when one's weaknesses can't be covered over or concealed? What happens when in dismantling the church, the Spirit must begin by dismantling its leaders? 

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Support the show

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!