The Office Curmudgeon

I recently read a few chapters out of Barna’s new book, Revolution. My initial reaction to reading that most individuals will just leave the church was, “Eh, I’m not so sure I see it that way.” Since then, I’ve learned much more about myself and my church and I’ve moved more too, “Dude, Barna may be all over this.”

I didn’t really agree that Revolutionaries would find spiritual fulfillment outside the church institution. While my wife and I left our church, we didn’t find any suitable replacement and we stopped going for a short while. We felt something missing, and we went back, so worshiping in a church is important to us right?

My wife, which I’ve mentioned I consider a poster-child for the post-modern view, gave a response to my question, “Can you be spiritually fulfilled outside the church?” “Um, yeah!,” in a tone such as, “Well Yeah, duh!” As though that was a stupid question, and why didn’t I realize that? She is not required be in a sanctuary to worship the Lord, or even step inside a church building to feel spiritually fulfilled. Well, Barna 1, Slezak 0. Hmm.

Next I began relating Barna’s statements with my recent struggle with being a part of our church. Unfortunately, I found my view of our church was shared by many other young adults. Most of the young adults of our church have left to find other places to worship. I haven’t talked to any of those that have left, but I wonder where they’re going, or if they’re going at all.

As for me, I feel like I’ve come full circle. The more I give it thought and prayer, the closer I come to giving up on our church and finding a church that reaches those in their early 40s and younger. The average mainline church is too inflexible, too set in its way to go through the trouble of trying to reach us. We have a couple of churches with emergent or ancient / future services which I would like to try out, but we don’t have a good selection in this area of the Midwest I’m in. If I can’t find one, Barna 2 Slezak 0?

Now I think Barna’s got it right. The postmodern world view, along with the current state of the church is a great formula for my age of people leaving the church completely. The church is not fulfilling our needs, and in a world of rapid change and numerous choices, we’ll keep looking until we find it. And if we find that outside the church, why do we need church?

One of my new goals is to keep up a trend of posting here on the end of the week. Last Friday I really wanted to write, but couldn’t pull it off. Last time I said I’d talk about Revolution, Barna’s recent book, but instead I’m going to stick with writing about my trials in church life.

After my Church is Failing, Part II post, Clif read it, and was quickly compelled to strike up the conversation with me. (We talk of philosophical subjects and church life a lot.) The short version was he felt a significant portion of my perspective was due to stage in life and generation gap. I’m sure those things are a factor, how can they not be, but I was not willing to give up as much as he was driving at. This writing itself could be dismissed as such, as that’s the age old cycle of growth – but doing so is a cop-out, and here is why.

I will not dismiss this as life stage so easily because I’ve heard that excuse used for the past fifteen years, and I’m sure I’ll hear it for the next fifteen. If everything is attributed to just being a stage in my life that I need to somehow grow past and get over, I can be getting away with a lot more than I have been thus far. I believe this more to be a difference between post-modern and modern world views. Here’s is a quick example of the difficulty between post-modern to modern communication:

What a post-modern says: “I like this church. The people here are nice, and I like coming here. I don’t feel very connected with God when I worship here though. When I feel filled with worship, it is through high energy music that I connect with.”

What a modern seems to hear: “I like this church. The people here are nice, and I like coming here. You don’t do a good job reaching me during worship. You really need to change the service to have music that I like.”

This seems to me an intrinsic communication gap. So do you read the above and dismiss it as differences between how generations worship, or do you read it and see an opportunity to reach those with a post-modern world view? Dismissing it as generation gap is a cop-out because that answer is essentially, “This is the way we do church, or you could go somewhere else.” That’s … not the church I’ve read about. What young people from the post-modern world view are saying is “What you do works for you, but it just doesn’t work for me.” All the while most churches are struggling to reach post-modern people.

So my question still waits for an answer. Your worship doesn’t work for me, should I just go find someplace that does? In many places in life it’s easy to dismiss differences of opinion citing generation gap, but I do not feel you can do that in the church. One of the things the church should be is a place where people can go to have a closer relationship with God and worship Him. Many would agree that the church should be that place for young and old. Very few would agree to change the church to be able to do just that.

So how do you include both the young and the old and not change the church? What if we didn’t want to change the way your church is done, we just wanted church to include our needs too? How would you do that?

In my previous post I expressed the concern of my wife and I about the worship service we attend. A service that has seen little growth over a year and is not nearly it’s former self. Most of the younger crowd is missing. I’d say we met with just about everyone we should meet with, and expressed our concern for not being fulfilled in the worship service we attend. We’ve talked with the praise band director, the senior pastor, and the director of Foundational Ministries.

Our conclusion is that the church is not changing at the pace it needs to. Each individual we talked to has a different story. I’m not about to point fingers, and there are plenty of other circumstances you could attribute it to, but the cold hard fact is that change was needed more than a year ago – and here we are in the same situation today. It’s no secret that the process of change has a greater lifespan within a church than outside of it, even in churches that are nimble. Our pastor, still newly appointed here nearly a year ago, has been extra careful with change. I understand not wanting to come off as dividing rather than a uniting – then again, how long do we continue to fail in face of not rocking the boat? In the life of a church, that can prove to be a while.

The questions that remain: Will as many people who needed the change still be around by the time change occurs? Will we still be there?

In talking with our pastor, he stated that he has implemented change in other churches quite successfully. He reminded us that change takes time. Sure, no problem. In fact, some of those changes took eight years to achieve. …. !?!?
[Insert another record scratch here]

Wow. In an age when technology allows information to flow at light speed and change to follow quickly behind, me thinks that churches need to learn how to change a bit quicker than that. I’m dumbfounded. I’m not suggesting that a change in worship style will take eight years to implement, but I’m not waiting around another one, all the time being unfulfilled in worshiping the Lord!

I will admit this is a localized problem. They’re only losing the younger folks; attendance is strong among people in their 40s and higher. So even if a church like ours actually understands what is needed to survive into the future – can they do it fast enough? I’m not filled with hope at this point, and reading Barna’s Revolution didn’t help either. I’ll talk about that next.

Brian Slezak