The Christian Century's cover story from last month, by Amy Frykholm, discussed the younger generation's tendency to form loose connections, which has implications for the traditional church membership model. Frykholm calls this phenomenon "new modes of affiliation." As a result, churches have to start rethinking the way they do things. While the article dealt with younger people's unwillingness to commit to a church, I was fascinated by a church in Washington State that seems to do things differently.
Instead of using the traditional approach of church membership, which was developed in the 1960's, a small Episcopal church has found a creative way to form community. Bishop Greg Rickel said,
What denominational metrics people are asking—how many people are in church on Sunday, for example—may not be the right measure for today. The measures that contemporary churches need may be more intuitive and more spiritual in nature.
Instead of focusing on numbers and membership growth, this Washington congregation is an important component of the local community. Rickel compared his church to a "base camp," a center "where people stop to receive nourishment, training, basic supplies and encouragement," who then go out to serve others.
Commenting on the standard model, Rickel says, "We've only been paying attention to the people who stay. But maybe that's not the purpose [of the base camp]. Maybe we've been treating base camps as permanent residences."
The idea of a base camp reconfigures church as an outward-focused, building-less group of people who do more than simply meet for a couple of hours on Sunday mornings. While Rickel notes that a base camp doesn't mean that congregations lose their distinctive identity and challenging ethic, but too often we have seen that increasing the membership rolls fails to translate into truly changed lives.
A sociologist, Wade Clark Roof, who was cited in the article, points out:
Institutions want to count people. They want to report growth. But they may not be able to do that in the way they once did. Their assessment of vitality will have to take a different form. The forms are going to be more fluid, but this simply means that people will have to think seriously about what is worth preserving and why. That is not a bad question for religious institutions to ask. Lived traditions are always adapting to new circumstances. (emphasis added)
I loved this. I suppose I'm part of the younger generation mentioned in Frykholm's article, so the idea of extending church beyond the 1960's institutional models appeals to me. The pastor at the church I've recently started attending mentioned that he wants to see members "get in and get out" on Sunday mornings, so that we can be involved in the community the rest of the week. I didn't quite know what to think of this at first, but now I see a similarity with Rickel's base camp idea.
Although the gathering of believers does serve an important purpose, deliberately pushing those boundaries of "what is church" beyond one morning a week or a physical building is intriguing. Individually, Christians consider themselves Christians every day of the week, and seek to follow Christ all the time. But institutionally, churches have been more rigid and resistant to change, so they turn into, as Rickel called them, "permanent residences."
What is an institution's purpose during the week? An occasional phone call to the church office to see if a struggling family's electric bill can be paid? I'm definitely not saying that the church staff are sitting there twiddling their thumbs all day - I'm wondering what's the relationship between those formally tied to the institution by virtue of their membership and the institution itself?
Unfortunately, it often looks like churches simply become repositories for more and more wealth and aspire for bigger and better buildings, and sometimes the "worship services" can resemble navel-gazing. When we compartmentalize what it means to do church, paying someone's electric bill is just what you "do" as a Christian - it doesn't mean you call up the "church office." Your participation in what is supposed to be a transformative community is not simply limited to a service on Sunday morning.
But on a broader level, beyond actions like paying individuals' bills every so often, I wonder: How many communities could be practically transformed if such wealthy, inward-looking institutions moved away from just tallying their attendance and membership statistics, to instead counting how many mouths the church community fed throughout the week?
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