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Written by Tom Ehrich
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Sunday, 10 January 2010 16:26 |
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Like many church leaders, I have been grappling with the steady decline of mainline Protestant churches over the past 45 years and trying to determine what we can do about it.
It dawned on me that the problem isn’t what we do on Sunday. It’s how that one day claims our best energies and resources.
The clue for me was listening to church leaders blame the recession for their recent woes. But our woes didn’t start with the latest recession. Attendance has been declining since 1964, when Baby Boomers began graduating from high school.
Many have drifted away from church. Most have not drifted away from God and faith. Studies suggest religious yearning is as strong as ever.
For many families and young adults, Sunday is their one day to get a slow start. Plus, a audience-style worship-learning is too passive for a transactional Web 2.0 world.
Even though modernized, the language of Sunday worship seems formulaic, and anachronistic. Decades of bickering over sexuality, gender, and doctrine have made some people wary of denominational argument.
Taken together, the various no’s to Sunday church add up to empty pews on Sunday morning and empty coffers.
These changing attitudes toward Sunday church confound an enterprise that, from the beginning, has seen Sabbath worship as its paradigm. Staff persons devote the majority of their workweeks to preparing for Sunday. Many smaller congregations do all of their work on Sunday, from fellowship to business meetings.
However, some congregations have seen the paradigm shifting. They have expanded their weekday, off-site and on-line ministries. They’ve found exciting new ways to reach people.
How can mainline Protestant congregations turn around 45 years of steady decline? I think we should embrace a concept that I call “Multichannel Church.” It’s based on a fundamental known as “multichannel marketing,” using multiple ways to reach customers.
The Multichannel Church starts by affirming what it already knows how to do: provide Sunday ministries at a single site. Then the Multichannel Church adds more avenues of ministry, in an effort to reach more people, including the majority who have been saying no to Sunday church.
The Multichannel Church, while taking diverse forms, will incorporate some or all of these avenues:
»SUNDAY ON-SITE: worship, education, fellowship
»WEEKDAY ON-SITE: suppers, education programs, mission work
»REGIONAL GATHERINGS: neighborhood assemblies, workplace, targeted interest groups, held close to where people live or work.
»HOME GATHERINGS: prayer and study groups, informal devotionals
»PERSONAL SPIRITUALITY: self-determining, using classic devotional tools, Web-delivered content, and personal ingenuity.
»SPECIAL COMMUNITY EVENTS: one-off events that facilitate mass participation by the entire congregation, with focus on forming identity
»PUBLISHED WORD: magazine, self-published books, shared journals, home-grown devotionals
»SOCIAL NETWORKING: Facebook, Twitter, et al.
This new way won’t be expensive. It will require a yearning to serve, willingness to change, and courage to explore.
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Let's finally admit that there is no "magic bullet" or off-the-shelf program that will fix us. The god of functional rationalism will not save us! Rather than focusing on the "round'em up" model of bringing folks into a church building through a new marketing program, it's time we followed the Spirit of God out into our neighborhoods and communities and open our imaginations to what is going on around us. Instead of counting heads at worship and programmed events, the church and its leaders should be focusing on being open to the work of God's Spirit in our local context.
We need to be re-formed and trans-formed as God's people in our 21st-Century North American context, not re-marketed.