Church Growth

I have had the privilege of speaking with several pastors recently about church growth or the lack of growth which many churches are experiencing across the country.  Some pastors are looking for gimmicks or programs to attract those who left and also looking for ways to welcome those who have never been.  Others are accepting of their size and diminishing membership and are desirous to settle for being in the service of those who remain.

A predominant reason people say they don't go to church is that they consider themselves spiritual and not religious and that the church is filled with hypocrites.  It is very easy to perceive the church as being filled with people who are "holier than thou."  It is also  very easy for the church to attract or foster people who "protest too much" in an effort to hide their own sinful nature.  It is easy for good people to be judgmental especially if they secretly recognize sinful desire in their own hearts.  On top of that, when some crime occurs in a church, we might discover that the perp was a pillar of the community, a lector, secretary, youth group leader, pastor or Eucharistic minister. 

It is not that the church attracts bad people.  The truth is everyone has the capacity to be a "bad" person.  There was a study by Wallerstein and Wylie where they asked 3,000 NY citizens who have never been arrested about all the things they had done in their lives.  100% of them have committed misdemeanors and were never caught and 97% had committed felonies but have never been caught.  So if you've never been caught, you must be a good person despite the bad things you've gotten away with.

About fifteen years ago I vacationed in Canada with a friend who illegally brought back Cuban cigars and prescription drugs which you couldn't buy in the US but they were available in Canada.  I thought it was very funny that I got flagged for a search and he, a Roman Catholic priest, waltzed right through. 

Today, churches often run background checks on its members in an effort to weed out the sinners.  It is good that they want to make safe sanctuaries but they need to keep in mind that most saints such as St. Paul and even Jesus, a convicted felon himself, would not be welcome in our churches for none of them would pass their background checks.  Part of the problem with organized religion is that it represents only a tiny part of the story and one that is often dangerously dysfunctional at that.

People of adversity find strength within themselves and they think that that has to do with finding meaning.  Instead of finding meaning we should call it forge for meaning for finding and searching are two different things.  Endurance is the entry way to forging meaning and, being accepted into a community is the only place that that can happen.  When we forge meaning we can incorporate that meaning into a new identity and that is what the church needs.  We need to take our faults and traumas and make them part of who we've come to be and we need to fold the worst events of our lives into a narrative of triumph as a response of things that hurt.  Instead the church tries hard to deny this.

I once encouraged a church to start a prison ministry and the response was that they didn't want to attract or associate with those kind of people.  What they failed to realize was that those people were already in the parish as convicted arsonists, drug users, DWI perps, a sex offender and burglar.  A few years later one of their 20 year old boys was arrested for dealing drugs and it still didn't dawn on them that they had the capacity to heal and the healing needed to happen in their own back yard.

When it was found out that I answered a suicide hotline, a woman grabbed me after a church service, broke down in tears and told me that her brother was arrested for committing a sex crime with a teenager, then completed suicide while in jail.  We spoke for quite some time and afterward I told the pastor what had happened so that he could be aware of the situation.  Instead of being compassionate, he became angry that the woman would confide in me and not him.  Of course, this was in a parish who abandoned a former pastor who was arrested on a DWI charge. She never trusted anyone in the parish with her pain and she carried it silently for many years. 

A woman who was raped as a teenager seemingly had her life destroyed.  She dropped out of school, gave birth to the child of the rapist and never went to college or forged a career of her own.  At the age of fifty she was asked if she ever thought of the rapist and she said she did and she felt sorry for him because, he has a beautiful daughter and two beautiful grandchildren and he doesn't know that and she does.  As it turns out, she considers herself the lucky one.  She credits the support and love of her community for the blessings in her life. 

Some things we are born to; our race, a disability, our sexuality, our gender and some are things that happen to us; being a rape victim, a prisoner, a Katrina survivor, a 9/11 survivor.  Religious identity means being able to enter into a church community to draw strength from that community and to give strength there too.  A church community is not for someone to enter in and say "I am here and I hurt," but rather "I hurt and I am here."  But we are ashamed, judgmental and can't tell our stories to the "good people" but our stories are the foundation of identity.

Just as the stories we tell come from our life experiences, our lives can grow from the stories that we tell.  The bible is filled with such stories of healing, joy, forgiveness and com-passion (suffering with one another).  That is the key; one another and, you won't find that on a Facebook page.  Instead, the church looks for ways to attract the wrong people because the church is interested in numbers and money.  If the church's goal is to promote healing and acceptance through pain and struggle, numbers and money will be the symptom thereof.  Currently, that calling is being lived out through social services and other organizations and they are doing a better job than the church is.   So, who needs the church . . .

It isn't solely about changing ourselves but about changing the world.  It doesn't make what is wrong right but makes what is wrong precious and you won't learn that from social services.  The road less traveled is what makes all the difference and the church is abandoning that road.  We can not be ourselves without the misfortune that drives our search for meaning.  "I take pleasure in infirmities," St. Paul wrote, "for when I am weak, then I am strong."  The church is trying to be strong while denying its weakness and driving out people it thinks will make them weak.

Oppression breeds the power to oppose it and that is the cornerstone of identity.  However, you can't change the church if you don't belong to it.  If a church is full of hypocrites, leaving it doesn't change that.  I know a church whose organist was arrested and half the church supported him and half wanted to abandon him.  The church chose to abandon him and eventually all the supporters left and the haters won.  That church's attendance dropped and is currently in danger of closing because - hate begets hate.  If the church chose love and forgiviness, who knows where it would be today. 

Today's church does not know what oppression is because they are doing the oppressing.  If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes and we've always been attracted to the heroes in our society.  Satan doesn't have to fight the church because he has joined it.  When we shelter our children from adversity, we've failed as parents for it is adversity which trains and teaches children how to prepare and cope for what the real world may throw at them.  Someone once asked gay activist Harvey Milk what they could do to help the cause and Harvey told him to go out and tell someone.  There is always someone who wants to confiscate humanity and there are always stories to restore it but we need people to tell the story.  By banishing sinners the church is denying and forgetting its story and its calling.   Certainly every church will proclaim that it welcomes sinners but watch what happens if a registered sex offender or former murderer would like to join.  Ask Squeaky Fromme what church she is welcome in.

If the church lives out loud, we can trounce hatred and restore everyone's lives.  Then we can truly celebrate who we are and truly see ourselves in a healthy, life-giving, complimentary relationship with creation around us. Forge meaning and build identity then, invite the world to share your discovery and joy.  As the Hollywood axiom goes, "If you build it they will come."  Those who hear may even enter in for, they too have a story they'd like to share if they are brave enough and welcome to do it and then in the process, heal others too afraid to speak up.  The big question is though, does the church want to listen?

Homosexuality in the Roman Catholic Church

It's all over the news today; The Vatican recently released a draft of their new document, RELATIO POST DISCEPTATIONEM and it has stirred up quite a firestorm among those on the conservative side of the church and, I think it is rather amusing.

One paragraph within the document states that homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community. Are we capable of welcoming these people, guaranteeing to them a fraternal space in our communities? Often they wish to encounter a church that offers them a welcoming home. Are our communities capable of providing that, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?

What is amusing about the backlash against that statement is that homosexuals have been at the forefront of the church since its beginning.  Many of our great artists, painters, composers, musicians, architects, sculptors, writers and clergy were - and even today - are gay.  Start by taking a look at Leonardo da Vinci and his legacy to the Roman Catholic Church.  The church has had no problem accepting and embracing the work of gay people for centuries, including today's current crop of gay liturgical participants, as long as they deny their identity and don't come out.  

There is a national music group of over 10,000 members whose past president is gay, everyone knew, nobody cared.  However, when he married his lover of over thirty years, her was terminated from his position. 

The church teaches that everyone deserves respect, dignity and love and that is not inherent upon anything.  Not on their occupation, race, sexuality, economic situation, looks, education or past.  Everyone is a child of God and made in God's image.  Every sinner has a future and every saint has a past.   However, the church still has a difficult time being forgiving and accepting while protesting too much.

The church is quick to state that homosexuality is not a sin, homosexual acts are, and I'd like to point out that heterosexuality is not a sin, although heterosexual acts outside a marriage are.  Most heterosexual people have committed the same sin as homosexuals.  While both acts may be wrong in the eyes of the church institution, we should always love and respect the person and treat the person with dignity.  Gay or straight.  Sinner or saint.

What is surprising is that most churches have no problem with the homosexuals within their worshiping community and are already welcoming to them.  The people simply don't care or are accepting.  Among the silent majority, they are more surprised by the hateful vocal minority than the fact that homosexuals have been the driving force behind the church for centuries.

This document is calling the church to be more dynamic, merciful and welcoming but, the church already is and has been for the past two thousand years.  The haters are constantly telling God's people what is wrong instead of affirming everything genuine, beautiful and good in God's human project.

Clergy, organists, choir directors, choirs, soloists, liturgists, painters, sculptors, architects, composers, theologians, writers, poets and the people in the pews; gay people are already out there where the church is a magnet for those who wish to express their faith through their art, skill and passion.  For the haters who wish to eradicate the homosexual from the church, they would deny the church the source of its most richest heritage and treasure.  The church, its music, its art, its architecture, its teachings and the beautiful tapestry it is today is because of the many people in the past who self identified publicly or privately as homosexual. 

The church needs to remember why it hates homosexuality.  Fear, rabid foaming at the mouth and hysteria about homosexuality started in the days when people died at the old age of thirty or forty.  In order to build the population for protection, to ensure a work force to feed and shelter its population, and to promote the lineage, girls got married at the age of 13 or so.  Men who engaged in masturbation (the sin of Onan) or homosexual tendencies did not produce offspring so the church declared that those activities which spilled the seed was a sin.  I beleive that the Church Of Latter Day Saints promote families of at least seven children to this day for the same reason - to build a population.  And of course, this was also the foundation for the practice of bigamy.   More wives meant more children and a larger denomination.

When there was a war between Christians and Muslims (the Crusades - which we still feel the aftershocks today), in order to beat the Muslims, Christians needed to outnumber them so the more Christians there were, the bigger army they could build.  More Christians meant bigger armies, bigger churches, more workers and the need for larger territories which meant that in order to seize more territory - war.   Over the centuries we forgot why we hated the idea of not producing children and out of ignorance, the hatred for homosexuality still exists today.  

Looking back, we can see how arrogant, wrong and misguided our hate used to be for groups such as blacks, women, Asians, Irish, Jews and for many Christians, the gays.  While looking back, one has to wonder what was wrong with us.  I suspect in a hundred years or so, people will look back on this issue and wonder the same.  The Roman Catholic church should pay heed lest people look back and wonder, "Catholicism, what was wrong with us?"

I know a lot of people who don't go to church.  Not because they don't beleive in God, but because they don't beleive in the church.  Many of those same people won't shop at Walmart because of its human rights violations.  Those same people won't go to church because of its human rights violations.  You have to wonder which is the more enlightened sect.

“I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever."
- Daniel J. Boorstin .