Outgrowing Church, Second Edition: If the Law Led Us to Christ, to What Is Christ Leading Us?

By John Killinger

Why are so many people drifting away from today's churches? John Killinger suggests that part of the problem is that they have personally outpaced the thinking and understanding of the church so that they no longer find it adequate as a social structure for the celebration of their faith. In their attempts to find Jesus and his teachings relevant within the new culture, they strike out on their own or adhere to para-Christian organizations that retain an allegiance to Jesus without the baggage of the traditional institution. Killinger, a former big-steeple minister and theologian, describes how he himself has been forced essentially to abandon the church in order to remain faithful to the beliefs and ideals that first drew him into it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Oct 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532692796

John Killinger

John Killinger has been senior minister of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, distinguished professor of religion and culture at Samford University in Birmingham, and executive minister and theologian at Marble Collegiate Church in New York City. He is the author of more than sixty books, one of which, The Changing Shape of Our Salvation, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He lives with his wife in Virginia.

Book preview

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Outgrowing Church

If the Law Led Us to Christ,to What Is Christ Leading Us?

Second Edition

John Killinger

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This book

is affectionately dedicated

to all the new, next, progressive, emergent

Christians trying to find their way

in a cultural world

where the old church,

the one with which most of us grew up,

simply isn’t up to the job

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter 1: Outgrowing a Particular Church

Chapter 2: Outgrowing a Denomination

Chapter 3: Outgrowing Church, Period

Chapter 4: The Disconnect between Jesus and the Church

Chapter 5: The Absence of Spirituality in the Church

Chapter 6: Mr. Darwin Isn’t the Enemy

Chapter 7: The Church’s Lack of Imagination—or Spirit!

Chapter 9: A Belated Afterthought

Bibliography

Introduction

In one sense, we never outgrow church. It is too big, too impacted with meanings both ancient and modern, too rich in its heritage of art, literature, and philosophy, for anybody to outgrow it. It would be silly to speak of outgrowing it if we meant that we could outgrow these things in any serious way.

But we do outgrow our own sense of church, or the sense of church to which we made a commitment of sorts at some specific earlier points in our journeys, and we do outgrow certain manifestations of it that haven’t kept pace with our own developing quest for holiness and adventure. Surely any persons who are more mature and knowledgeable today than they were yesterday have outgrown the church in which they grew up, especially if that church only barely met their needs at earlier stages of development.

And, when this happens, it is incumbent on the serious pilgrim to move on, to experiment, to discover some new and different experience of church, if possible, that will satisfy his or her needs at the next stage of existence, and thus justify having begun with church at all.

My own life has been inextricably involved with the church.

I became a professing Christian when I was eleven and felt a call to the ministry when I was sixteen. I attended a Christian university, and, after earning a PhD in literature at a secular graduate school (I was pastoring a church at the time), went to Harvard Divinity School for a master’s degree and then to Princeton Theological Seminary for a second doctorate.

In all, I have pastored eight churches, two of which were rural charges and another two of which were in the major metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and New York. I have also taught in four major American theological seminaries—Vanderbilt, Princeton, Chicago, and Claremont—as well as in three Christian colleges or universities.

I have actively belonged to four of the major Protestant denominations—Southern Baptist, Presbyterian (USA), Disciples of Christ, and the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches—and my final stint as a minister was in the Reformed Church of America, as Executive Minister and Theologian at the famed Marble Collegiate Church in New York City.

I also spent a year as Theologian-in-Residence at the American Church in Paris, France, an ecumenical church related to the Office of Overseas Churches of the National Council of Churches in the United States.

So the reader can appreciate that I am steeped in church and everything it implies. From the age of eleven, I have never known anything else. My entire life has been lived on the altar of Christian service. When I married, it was to a young woman who was active in the church as an organist and pianist, and we were in church together for more than half a century. Almost all of our friendships were in church. When we reminisced, it was usually about church. But before my wife died in 2014, we felt that we had pretty much outgrown the church—or at least the church as it existed in most places in America. We grieved for it, and circled it still like animals circling a spot where their forebears lived and perished. But we could not resurrect it, or even its ghost, in palpable terms that satisfied our hearts.

Too much was missing!

My first thought about writing this book arose from the haunting title of Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church. Taylor, an Episcopalian, finally got a little pastorate of her own, in the hill country of North Georgia. Apparently it was a blissful experience that ran aground when she began to tire of the minister’s all-consuming schedule. So she left, but with no ill thoughts about the little congregation she had pastored. Her situation, in fact, sounded idyllic.

But I read her book at a time when I was between churches and beginning to wonder if I could stomach another. I had had some idyllic experiences too, especially in the first small churches I pastored. Comprised mostly of farmers, small business folks, and a few teachers, those churches were warm, friendly, and cozy. But I had also pastored a number of larger churches where things weren’t always so happy. For one thing, they usually had traditions that were onerous and punishing, especially for ministers who found them sub-Christian or at odds with humanitarian instincts. And, for another, they always contained some members who were direct descendants of Genghis Khan, Rudolf Eichmann, and Lizzie Borden.

It is an odd fact, borne out in the lives of many retired ministers I know, that most pastors can hack the tough duty at these sub-Christian churches a lot better when they’re in there fighting against the lack of Christian faith and love than they can later when they have to find a place to worship where they are no longer the leaders. That’s when it hits the fan for most of us and we balk at even attending church, much less belonging to it.

I have a dear friend who recently retired from the United Methodist ministry in a Southern state. He couldn’t wait to hang up his spurs and become an ordinary church member without portfolio—until it happened. Then he began the arduous job of finding a church where he could feel comfortable in worship on Sunday. It wasn’t long before he was in despair.

I can’t stand it, he wrote in one e-mail. The music is lousy, the minister’s sermon is worse, and there doesn’t seem to be an ounce of Christian love in the whole congregation!

A few weeks into his retirement, he took a two-day-a-week job at a pizza restaurant, preparing salads and delivering pizzas to the oven. Within a short time, he had become the de facto chaplain of that restaurant. People were coming to him for counseling, they had stopped cursing so much in his presence, and he was happier than I had ever known him to be in the pastorate.

In my own disenchanted time since leaving the ministry, I began thinking that Taylor didn’t go far enough with her book. Somebody, I thought, needed to write about outgrowing church, not just leaving it. That was my problem, I realized. I hadn’t just left church, I had actually outgrown it.

I didn’t know this until I quit beating my head against the wall, trying to turn churches that were basically secular social clubs into real, matter-of-fact churches where a godly spirit prevailed and people dealt with one another in love and compassion instead of envy and rancor. But it was true. Suddenly I realized it was time for me to actually walk on from the church as an organization and stop hovering around it hoping to find something that would rekindle my excitement from the old days.

And then I realized why a lot of people haven’t been going to church. Not just people who once belonged, but people who never went at all. They have outgrown it. The times we live in, the education we get from the media, our electronic connectedness, the sense of being world citizens and caring about the earth and its diverse inhabitants, all conspire to put some people out in front of the church, which can be reactionary, narcissistic, and generally unloving and unreceptive to people who aren’t like the ones that belong to it.

Books on Church Leaving

What surprised me, as I began thinking this way, was that there were already some books appearing whose message was similar to the one blinking in my brain. They weren’t all from authors with the same background I had, as a pastor and theologian, but they were saying essentially what I was thinking, that sometimes the only thing you can do on your spiritual pilgrimage is to leave the organizational entity that gave you your start in the first place.

As long ago as 1993, William D. Hendricks published Exit Interviews: Revealing Stories of Why People Are Leaving the Church. Even then, claimed Hendricks, an average of 53,000 people a week were leaving the church, most of them complaining about its lack of real spirituality. Some were going to other religions such as Buddhism and Islam and a few were joining parachurch spirituality groups, but most were simply evaporating from the rolls, concluding that churches would never measure up to their own professed standards.

In 2002, New Zealander Alan Jamieson published A Churchless Faith: Faith Journeys Beyond the Churches, examining the same phenomenon of countless Christians vanishing out of the official churches in order to become servants of God in other places.

Researcher George Barna’s Revolution studied the data on church-leaving for approximately twenty years and concluded that roughly one-quarter to one-third of all Christians in the United States are now allied not with a local church but with some parachurch organization such as a house church, a prayer group, a witness band, or a social services organization. They had grown tired of talking about church, he said, and wanted instead to be the church. Barna predicts that by the year 2025 U.S. churches will have on their rolls only about half the Christian population of America, and the other half will be actively involved in groups and activities not officially sponsored by churches.

Brian Sanders’s Life After Church: God’s Call to Disillusioned Christians describes the church as a failed experiment. People who have fallen in love with God, he says, aren’t happy with what they’re getting in their local churches, so they often feel the call of the Spirit to seek other places of worship and service. His own final Sunday in church, he says, was the one when he sat in the pew bored by a pastor talking about how the church’s bathrooms needed to be redecorated. I knew at that moment that would be my last Sunday.¹

A lot of people continue to go to church long after they’ve found out how boring it is. But Sanders didn’t want to be one of them, shopping around and consuming churches the way Americans consume everything else. He left church the way a lot of people do these days, in order to follow God in a commitment most church members only talk about.

Sanders understands the predicament we are in when we are finally ready to leave the church. On one hand, we cannot have church alone; there isn’t any such thing as the church of one, there is only the church in community, the church as the body of Christ. But, on the other hand, if the church isn’t fulfilling its mission as a radiant fellowship in love with both God and the world, it cannot satisfy the needs of the person who really wants such a church. So what can an honest seeker do except leave?

Julia Duin’s book Quitting Church: Why the Faithful Are Fleeing and What to Do About It echoes many of the things these other authors had already said. As religion editor for The Washington Times, she has been in a good position to observe church joiners and leavers during the last decade. What she sees is a lot of people who are finally admitting the banality of the local church and who have given up on it despite the fact that they continue to read the Bible, pray, and lead devoted Christian lives. Young people especially, she says, aren’t willing to stay with an organization that is just reinventing the wheel and not doing anything to change society. They have left the little church on the corner for the First Church of Starbucks.

Duin believes the sexuality issue is responsible for many people’s unhappiness with church these days. Because of evangelicalism’s negative attitude toward gays and lesbians, many younger members in its churches feel caught in a hypocritical situation; they have gay and lesbian friends at work and in their social life but are compelled to remain silent on the matter in church.

The same is true, says Duin, about most conservative churches’ views on women. If women can be CEOs of major corporations, why can’t they pastor churches? She cites a 2006 issue of Christianity Today that ran a cover story on how Reformed theology is sweeping conservative churches. In an accompanying photograph, all the pastors were men. Nor did a sidebar listing all the leaders of the Reformed movement contain any women’s names. How many female authors, asked Duin, "have appeared on the cover of Christianity Today?"²

The Emergent Church

In addition to these books, there has been a spate of activity from authors either involved in or impressed by the so-called emerging church phenomenon: Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian and A New Kind of Christianity, Robin Meyers’s Saving Jesus from the Church, Diana Butler Bass’s Christianity for the Rest of Us and A People’s History of Christianity, Michael Spencer’s Mere Churchianity, and Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence ranking among the best of them. Tickle’s book deepens and dignifies the movement by locating it in one of the great epochal transition eras for the church, thus identifying it with the century following the fall of the Roman Empire, the century at the beginning of the high Middle Ages, and the century of the Reformation, during each of which the church in general underwent enormous changes as it adapted to new cultural factors.

The common theme running through these extremely well-written and interesting books is the need for the church today to be flexible in the face of enormous socio-cultural shifts, so that it doesn’t choke inside its own moral and theological carapace while there are exciting new worlds to be approached with the gospel of the kingdom of God. They represent the need for Christians in this vibrant era to travel lightly, taking only what they absolutely need from the wreckage of the past and being willing to follow the Spirit into new places and alliances.

There is as yet no available information on how many people have actually left the church because of its moribund institutionalism and unwillingness to adapt to the times, but as a percentage of those still clinging to the wreckage of the mainline churches it is probably very small. I live only a few miles outside Washington, DC, and travel extensively in the U.S. and abroad, and, aside from a few more liberal and essentially small congregations that do not express any highly visible rejection of big-steeple religion, I have not encountered a single church where there is any real discussion of emergence or progressivism as a primary intention of the community.

When I discovered how much had already been written about the exodus from the churches, though, I confess I wondered if I should even attempt to write a book called Outgrowing Church. Obviously a lot of people have already had the same idea. And the emerging-church authors have cogently and articulately covered most of the reasons for being critical of the church as it has been and seeking another, more creative way for Christianity in the future.

Room for One More?

Still, I am prompted to write my own story and express my own dissatisfaction with the church I have known, for several reasons.

First, I am probably the oldest writer among those I have mentioned, and have seen and experienced more varieties of Christianity than they. Ordained to the ministry at the age of eighteen, I have pastored in my lifetime eight churches, from small, rural congregations in the hills of Kentucky to sophisticated big-name, conspicuous-wealth, and old-power churches in Los Angeles and New York. Three of the eight churches were

Reviews for Outgrowing Church, Second Edition

[Christine Smith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have outgrown the Christian Church in almost all denominations. I am now seeking to define my spirituality. This book was very helpful. It is good to know that others have walked this path before me.
Christine