Every now and then, one of my churchgoing friends shares an article on Facebook that claims to explain why people aren’t going to church. Sometimes it’s about millennials, sometimes it’s about singles, etc. For some reason these articles never fail to exasperate me.
I just read one article that claims the reason kids leave church when they grow up is – get this – we put them in children’s activities instead of forcing them to sit through “big church” (my term). These kids grew up but felt that traditional worship was alien to their tastes and sensitivities, so when they were old enough, they ran out the door in terror.
Pish tosh. The reason people leave the church has very little to do with what music we choose, whether we have a praise band, or even children’s church.
Full disclosure: I led children’s church for five years when my kids were small. The reason was that my oldest son sat in worship with me starting in his first-grade year and was bored out of his ever-lovin’ mind. He hated, hated, hated it, almost to the point of tears. He tried; he really did, for three years. But he couldn’t stand it. And he wasn’t alone. By the time our second son got to first grade, the ranks of kids squirming in the balcony had hit a demographic high.
There was nothing wrong with the music – it was world class. The preaching was excellent. But none of it spoke to my sons, not in the first grade or the fourth grade. A friend whose kids were the same age as ours was having the same problem, so we volunteered to begin a children’s church. We met with some resistance from the ‘establishment,’ but we weren’t asking their permission.
The issue was this: our faith was important to us, and we wanted to do everything we could to pass on an opportunity for our children to share that faith. Traditional worship wasn’t working, for whatever reason. So we tried a different format.
My friend was a gifted music teacher, so he began the children’s worship time with a hymn or two. He used the time as a teaching opportunity, and the kids responded. Yes, it was a bit more informal, but we met in the chapel with pews just like the ones in big church. We had a couple of adults at all times to settle kids down if necessary, but that wasn’t very often. We prayed, and we invited the kids to pray.
After music time, I told a Bible story. I embellished a bit here and there, and I added a few sound effects, but it worked. We discussed the meaning of the stories with the kids, and we asked them what they thought. The kids paid attention and learned the stories. They told the stories eagerly to their parents on the way home. They brought friends. The “kids” are in their thirties now, and one I hadn’t seen for years volunteered with no prompting that the Nebuchadnezzar story was his favorite.
The kids were completely turned off in adult worship. They were energized and engaged in children’s church. Some of them today go to church, and others don’t. We moved away and lost track, so I don’t know percentages. One of my two sons found a great church where he and his family are quite active. The other has been content not to look all that hard. Of the other kids I’ve been able to keep up with, some go to church, some don’t.
I am firmly convinced that the reason the Church didn’t retain all of these kids has nothing to do with worship formats. If you’ll pardon the cliché, that argument is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The reason goes much deeper than that, and it actually got a lot more attention in the 1960s than it seems to get today.
The reason people don’t go to church is that they can’t for the life of them figure out why they should. They don’t see the point.
As Pierre Berton wrote in The Comfortable Pew in 1965, “The church to its opponents has become as a straw man, hardly worth a bullet.” If you haven’t read Berton’s book, find a copy and read it. Berton was a respected Canadian journalist whom the Anglican Church of Canada invited to write its 1965 Lenten periodical. Though he had quit going to church himself, Berton allowed himself to be persuaded to write the thing, and it immediately outsold every other book published in Canada up to that point. I think we can safely say that no other Lenten periodical has come close.
Berton laid it on the line as no one else had done to that point. The Church in Canada and elsewhere had become an agent of the social status quo. It had virtually no prophetic voice, though the gospel clearly demands otherwise. Ten years earlier, church attendance in the United States had peaked at almost 50% every week. Church leaders were confident and ecstatic. By 1965, however, church leaders were worrying about the “Crisis” of the church. That’s a remarkably short turnaround.
I can’t summarize Berton’s book here. Suffice it to say that my two sons had plenty of moral and prophetic energy in elementary school. They were serious about conservation and justice; they just couldn’t see that the church cared about either of those things, what they had learned about Isaiah notwithstanding. Churches are almost always concerned first and foremost with their own survival and repairing the buildings they inherited from the fifties. Frankly, it’s easier just to let them die.
Diana Butler Bass documented an enormous shift in her 2009 book, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. Within a ten-year period, “religious” went from a positive association in the minds of most Americans to a negative association. It has to do with institutions, organization, and dogma. On the other hand, the word “spiritual” now has a mostly positive connotation after many decades as a negative word (it once connoted a lack of accountability). The word “spiritual” is about experience, explained one man. “Religious” is about infrastructure, more or less, and nobody gets excited about infrastructure.
In essence, the North American church has talked far more about theological opinions than about the experience of God. Those groups such as the Pentecostals were exceptions, but they often took anti-science positions, so mainline churches felt a need to put distance between themselves and spiritual experience. Their memberships have plummeted; vast numbers of congregations have closed, while others are too small to support a trained pastor.
The most vital religious movement I see today is contemplative. Resurrected from Catholic monasticism through Thomas Merton and others, contemplation and meditation are drawing larger numbers of people who are disaffected with their churches, Protestant and Catholic alike.
While some will be predictably threatened by this movement, I see it as the hope of the church in the future. It feels like authentic faith because it is felt and practiced. It’s not about dogma or doctrine that evolved out of some national cultural conflict centuries ago. Opinions are pretty much irrelevant. It’s simply about opening oneself to God’s presence in the present moment, and trusting that God’s presence will lead you right. It’s not about orthodoxy; it’s about faith.
I can tell you that the church of my childhood never mentioned any such thing. I got a taste of it in seminary when one of my professors introduced me to Thomas Merton’s books, but even then it didn’t sink in very far. It took a Catholic friend who gave me Richard Rohr’s little classic, Everything Belongs. That book literally changed my life and my faith. It led me to others such as Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy Longing, Douglas Steere’s books from a Quaker background, and to classics of Christian devotion from centuries ago.
More than that, my journey led me to an active prayer life. It’s mostly silent prayer, listening for God rather than instructing him on what needed to be done that day. Some people call it “centering prayer,” while others call it meditation. Whatever.
The point is this: prayer matters to me now. Doctrine, i.e. theological opinions, matter far, far less, though they can still make for interesting bull sessions with the right people. Contemplative spirituality is the real business of the church; of this I’m utterly convinced. It should have been our business all along, but we were too busy sanctifying success and securing a place for the institution to muck about with humble and honest spirituality. Churches still distrust prophets until the rest of society has decided to honor them; at that point the church may (or may not) follow along. That’s not a very inspiring performance.
So forgive me if I don’t see your point when you tell me that people don’t go to church now because we worshiped the wrong way when they were kids. The problem was, we weren’t really worshiping at all.
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