Metamorphosis: Preaching after Christendom

By Sarah Travis

Post-Christendom, Christian leaders and preachers in North America struggle to respond to anxiety and despair about the future of the church. Declining participation, fewer resources, decreased influence, and confusion about pastoral and ecclesial identity lead to fear for the survival of the institutional church. Preaching must speak to the despair and confusion faced by congregations today, as well as cast a hopeful vision for an uncertain future. This book argues that preachers can change the narrative of the church post-Christendom, by urging an exit from Christendom ecclesiology and promoting the construction of an identity that embraces vulnerability and incarnation instead of power and permanence. Counterintuitively, failure, decrease, and marginalization constitute good news for the church. Through wide-ranging conversation partners including postcolonial theory and theology, social science, systematic theology, and homiletic literature, this book engages preachers and scholars who seek to reimagine both gospel and ecclesial identity in order to bring new life to communities in despair. Preachers participate in a process of metamorphosis, in which the church's self-understanding is transformed into a vulnerable, incarnate community that leaves behind the character of Christendom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jul 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532650659

Sarah Travis

Sarah Travis is an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. She teaches worship and preaching at Knox College, University of Toronto.

Book preview

Introduction

In the Graveyard

We preach in the midst of death. It is an occupational hazard for preachers to find themselves in close proximity to death. We tend to the dying with all the gentle care we can muster. We preside at funerals and memorial services, accompanying those who struggle in the desert wasteland of grief. We hold the hands of women and men experiencing a multitude of little deaths—divorce, job loss, miscarriage, empty nests, and endings of all kinds. There are plenty of pastoral care books that teach us how to be present and coherent in the face of trauma, death, and despair.

There is another kind of death looming on the horizon, one we talk about at coffee gatherings and cocktail parties, ecclesial conferences and theological colleges. Together with colleagues and parishioners, we take the pulse of the institutional church in North America and we discover that it is not steady, it is not robust. Faced with this uncertainty, those of us whose very lives depend on the vibrancy of the church feel our pulses quicken and our adrenaline spike. We urgently discuss solutions that will prevent the death of the church as we know it. As the Western church reflects on its own disestablishment and struggle, we wonder how our churches and denominations will survive. Can we turn things around? What do we need to do differently to become a thriving institution again? How can we succeed, increase, and regain the power, control, and influence that have slipped from our collective grasp? We as leaders, alongside our congregations and institutions, are haunted by these questions, and we experience tremendous fear, anxiety, and grief as we recognize the seemingly inevitable signs of decline.

Pastors and theologians strive to name signs of life in the midst of death. In preaching, we remember and proclaim the promise of new life in Jesus Christ. This is the promise that sustains us at the bedsides and gravesides of those we love most. In the storms of life, we lean all our weight against this promise. We wait for resurrection. We monitor the patterns of creation for evidence that life begins again, that there is a flower in the bulb. We search for proof that God will keep God’s promises. When the survival of the church seems less certain, we hope and pray that God’s promises will save the church from threat and turmoil. With increasing desperation, we seek God’s help to repair and gird up the congregations we love so much. We pounce on any indication that there is still breath and life here.

At this moment, the news does not appear to be good. The structures of Christendom are tumbling all around us; the church as we have known it is already some degree of dead.¹ We wait to rediscover abundant life. We wait for resurrection, and yet we know intuitively and theologically that resurrection has a prerequisite. In the counterintuitive accounting of grace, death precedes life. In baptism, we die before we rise up in Christ, putting to death all that has become tired and stale among us. As people of faith, our eyes are drawn to the pattern of existence that brings life and death into partnership, so even as death is imminent a new creation looms. Through resurrection, God reclaims creation (including the church) from the powers of death. New Testament scholar Brian Blount reminds us that there is more beyond Golgotha: Even though Jesus’ apparent march to the cross and his devastating death on the cross occupy almost all the energy and space of the gospel story . . . there was an apocalyptic moment whose revelatory power and promise trumped even that spectacular death . . . Resurrection.²

The graveyard is the place to be. In the graveyard, life emerges where life is not supposed to be. Life springs up, surprising us and reminding us that everything we thought we knew about demise and decay and finitude is not necessarily so. In today’s church, there is life. There is profound, transformative movement of the Holy Spirit. There is life even beyond what we have imagined, beyond even that which has been already experienced in centuries of the faithful gathering of servants of Jesus Christ. There is life, but it might not be immediately recognizable.

Decline and Despair

At a recent gathering of the Academy of Homiletics, I was cognizant of a sense of lament regarding the contemporary state of the institutional church. Those experienced homileticians expressed despair about the future of academic programs as declining financial resources create challenges for the maintenance of human resources within educational institutions. As we participated in a broad conversation about the future of homiletics as an academic discipline, we were acutely aware that theological education itself is changing drastically and rapidly. As I listened to the discussion, I wondered how preachers and teachers of preaching might find the words to comfort and challenge the church when preachers and teachers are also afraid. Decline is not limited to the theological academy, but is also found in the parent churches of seminaries and theological colleges. Anecdotally, pastors perceive a rising level of panic about what seems to be a rapidly accelerating decline in many pockets of the Western church. A colleague who is an experienced pastoral minister and active in the wider church recently commented, We are failing to take in the high level of anxiety in the church. We don’t give that enough space in the church. Everywhere you go, there is anxiety.

This anxiety relates to the rapid change experienced by today’s church. Phyllis Tickle harkens back to the great Reformation to describe the massive upheavals that are occurring today, writing about the process of wrenching, deconstructing, liberating, anxiety-producing world-rending change as it works its way, straight as the proverbial arrow, from one regimen for ordering life to a new and unprecedented one.³ The world-rending change that we are experiencing in the early twenty-first century is not confined to the church. The church is situated in a much broader tide of social change. Just as the Reformation was about a whole shopping list of things, there are many factors involved and many names used to describe whatever is happening to the world today, hundreds of years after the Enlightenment.⁴ This shift is not sudden. It has been happening for decades, although it has not previously been perceived so acutely or with such seriousness. Some leaders discern that the rate of cultural change is accelerating, and one could argue that this is particularly evident in the church. Longtime members of churches remember a time when things were different. They are wondering why the pews are half empty, wondering why their children and grandchildren are not connecting to the church in meaningful ways, wondering why the voice of the church does not seem to matter within the culture at large. Congregational leaders know that something must change in response to stagnation and decline, but they do not know where to begin or which prescription or model to follow. Leaders hope and pray that new life will walk through the sanctuary doors, but hope is often outweighed by despair. In a statement that might send many faithful Christians running for cover, Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall writes, It is entirely possible (and thinking Christians can no longer avoid this conclusion) that most of the once powerful ecclesiastical institutions of North America will disappear entirely within the near future.⁵ This decline and resulting despair is largely a consequence of the end of Christendom. Craig Carter defines Christendom as follows:

The concept of Western civilization as having a religious arm (the church) and a secular arm (civil government), both of which are united in their adherence to Christian faith, which is seen as the so-called soul of Europe or the West. The essence of the idea is the assertion that Western civilization is Christian. Within this Christian civilization, the state and the church have different roles to play, but, since membership in both is coterminous, both can be seen as aspects of one unified reality—Christendom.⁶

Since the fourth century, Christianity has functioned as the normative religion in the West and has enjoyed enormous power and influence. At some point in the recent past, its power and influence began to wane. Alan Roxburgh names the challenge this creates for Christians today.

The fourth and twentieth centuries form bookends marking transition points in the history of the church. Just as the fourth century adoption of Christianity by Constantine forced the church to struggle with its self-understanding as the new center of the culture, twentieth century Christians must now struggle to understand the meaning of their social location in a decentered world.⁷

This period in which the church is experiencing a change in position from the center to the margins can be called post-Christendom. Stuart Murray offers a working definition that is helpful here: Post-Christendom is the culture that emerges as the Christian faith loses coherence within a society that has been definitively shaped by the Christian story and as the institutions that have been developed to express Christian convictions decline in influence.⁸ Western society has developed within the context of a Christian narrative, and yet that foundational narrative no longer makes sense. The Christian worldview that has undergirded the development of both material and intangible institutions no longer has primacy. The church that has been at the center of Western culture more and more finds itself located in the margins of twenty-first century life in North America. With the end of Christendom comes a time of crisis for the institutional church—specifically, I refer to the historically mainline church in North America. Our practices, policies, programs, structures, and, perhaps most importantly, our self-understanding, are in transition.

Even as I write about our church, I recognize that the church in North America is multidimensional and diverse. Primarily, I am referring to the institutional church as it is organized into recognizable denominations with unique governance structures and liturgical practices. Different denominations will feel the effects of the end of Christendom differently, although most traditionally mainline denominations that have formed part of the cultural establishment will share a common experience of disestablishment. Ecclesial decline is not experienced universally within North America, nor is it a global reality. I hesitate to define church too narrowly, in order to leave room for the various ways that followers of Christ gather for worship and service. This book is most relevant for those North American churches and denominations that articulate a sense of decline and disestablishment.

The Sky is Falling and Other Responses

The vulnerability and instability of the institutional church result in a lot of hand-wringing. Western church leaders respond to deep anxiety and despair in a variety of ways. Some responses are constructive and encounter varying degrees of success; others are simply exacerbating the problem. Douglas John Hall draws on two familiar images to describe the reactions of North American Christians to the decline of the established church.⁹ Like Chicken Little, some church leaders loudly announce that the sky is falling and urge something be done to stop it. These leaders employ every available resource to gird up the institution. The level of commitment and hope of these leaders is often admirable and reveals great courage. Other leaders, like the proverbial ostrich, prefer to keep their heads stuck well in the sand, ignoring the trouble. These birds will gasp in shock at the possibility that the institution is on life support.

Chicken Little and the ostrich are apt images to describe two main categories of response, but in reality the church’s response is more nuanced. Despair and fear for survival produce a plethora of responses, most of which are only temporarily adaptive, and some of which are destructive both to the church and to those we serve. Edward Farley summarizes the responses of the church to the decline and disestablishment of Protestant denominations and the subsequent experience of being on the fringe, claiming we have instigated a number of important statistical, historical, and sociological studies with more to come. We have thought up various programs with catchy titles that sound like ad agency commercials . . . And we have become self-preoccupied.¹⁰ Farley goes on to admit that we really don’t know what to do—there is no way to reverse the clock, no magic wand to wave. Disturbingly, Farley reminds us that times of peril and insecurity are times of idolatries and absolutisms . . . after the earthquake, we begin to envy religious movements that glitter power and slick success and wonder whether to imitate them.¹¹ Peril and insecurity cause some to look toward discourses of power that have served us well in the past, when the church wielded firm control over people and social structures. Some are tempted to build figurative walls to protect the church from the world, creating strict definitions about who is in and who is out, sometimes using moral frameworks to protect the organization. Some enforce aggressive faith assertions that alienate those who have other perspectives.¹² We put enormous financial and human resources into the fight to survive, sometimes by maintaining expensive, aging church buildings that suit neither worshipers nor the surrounding neighborhood.

Some churches intentionally accommodate to culture, relying on the trends that drive marketing success or strong business models. In our desire to lure consumers, we might be tempted to preach a tame gospel that will not offend, challenge, or chase away those who are seeking a deity that will provide comfort without demanding much at all. This tendency is summed up in the term Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, which sociologist Christian Smith identifies as a belief that

God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem. Good people go to heaven when they die.¹³

Princeton professor Kenda Creasy Dean argues that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism has little to do with God or a sense of divine mission in the world. It offers comfort, bolsters self-esteem, helps solve problems, and lubricates interpersonal relationships by encouraging people to do good, feel good, and keep God at arm’s length.¹⁴ This perspective is primarily about feeling good—something a church in danger might wish to emphasize in order to maintain or increase the numbers of people attending worship and participating in church activities. This feel-good tame gospel rarely effects transformation or enacts justice.

A fear for the church’s survival might result in a tendency to look continually inward, to abandon missional theologies in favor of self-protection. Homiletician David Lose expresses concern that this tendency to become self-absorbed out of a concern for survival is as natural as it is destructive.¹⁵ Many ministries have located themselves in a more missional stream, which finds reaching out to be a more adequate expression of Jesus’ call. However, these missional strategies may still rely on a strong central congregation or institution that is equipped to reach out beyond its own boundaries. Whether we are reaching out or gazing inward, the strategies we are using to save ourselves aren’t working and do not always result in a credible expression of gospel.

Whether we are stoic in the midst of decline, refusing to let go without a fight, or expending every bit of our energy to love the church back into being, the decline continues in many expressions of the church in North America.

Preaching Gospel in the midst of Fear

Preachers find words to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ from week to week to the people that constitute the Body of Christ. If we are to proclaim a transformative gospel, we have little choice but to take a bold and honest look at