WHAT DO WE DO WHEN WE GATHER?

What do we do when we gather?    Dr. Roger Ray

This lecture will be delivered in various locations in England during the first two weeks of May.

One of my earliest memories is of sitting on the basement floor of my early childhood home and watching my mother run the wash through the hand cranked wringer on the top of the washing machine. Such a machine would have seemed primitive to anyone living just ten years later but in the mid-1950’s it was a step up from a scrub board and a wash bucket. 

 

My parents did their homework by the light of oil lanterns, 

they commuted to school either on foot or on horseback, 

their homes were heated with wood, 

and a good deal of farm life still involved milking cows by hand and harnessing a mule to plow. 

And when they took their four children to church, they took us to a big old church that vibrated with the loud music of a pipe organ. Diffused light filled the space through solipsistic scenes depicted in stained glass.

And we sang hymns from the revival period of American history as people of faith struggled to recover from the ravages of an economic depression and a world war.

Cars, electric lights, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, air conditioning, radio, television, and telephones, were all unpredictable innovations in my parent’s lives. My generation embraced the wonders of space exploration, the invention of computers, cell phones, the internet, and we have enjoyed the explosion of global trade that has made both food and clothing much more affordable. The latter may be more subtle to you but it is huge. My parents grew up in a house that didn’t have closets because they didn’t have that much stuff.

The home I grew up in had fairly small closets because most of us had three pairs of shoes, a suit, a pair of jeans and three or four shirts. Now, most of us in the Midwest have walk in closets bigger than most London flats and even men have more shoes than Imelda Marcos. We don’t have universal health care, and fewer and fewer people have access to higher education but we have fast food restaurants on every corner and almost everything we wear and own is disposable, thanks to slave labor in the developing world. 

What I am saying is that the world has changed dramatically, not over centuries but with every passing decade. Cell phones went from being a novelty to a necessity in a decade, just as horses and cars had to share our city streets for a fairly brief period of time. Cars were a novelty, and in a few years, horses were the novelty. 

What does this mean for communities of faith? For Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus? One of America’s true prophets, the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once opined that the church is most often the tail lights when the world needs for us to be the headlights. Churches are addicted to nostalgia. Sure, we call “tradition” or “orthodoxy” and our intentions are usually quite noble . . . we remember when churches were relevant, they shaped the world, they trained coming generations in values, character, even patriotism. And we want that back. 

We know that we are losing more than members and attendance. We know that it isn’t just loss of donations. We are losing our reason to exist. Let me give you an illustration:

In 1991 I moved to serve a large denominational church in Springfield, Missouri. 

A few miles to our south was the fastest grown entertainment center in America, perhaps you have heard of Branson, Missouri? For several years it was difficult to hire a carpenter, electrician, or plumber in Springfield because any able bodied person with construction skills for miles around was working in Branson building theaters for the musical stars who had been very popular in America during the 1960’s.  

By the mid-1990’s there were more theater seats in Branson than there were in New York, but I always marveled at this phenomenon that was, for me, certain to fail. Some of my best friends went from being multi-millionaires into bankruptcy because they believed that Branson’s success was bound to continue to grow but what they didn’t seem to realize is that the product Branson was selling was nostalgia. They brought Andy Williams, stars from the Lawrence Welk show, and Tony Orlando, and the Osmonds. 

They were selling memories to a newly retired World War II generation that had money and leisure time but what they didn’t have was very many years left in them to drive cross country to relive their youth. Branson never developed a marketing scheme for the next generation . . . possibly because most of our stars had wrecked themselves with drugs and alcohol, but Crosby, Stills, and Nash nor remnants of the Beatles were never in danger of building a Branson theater. 

In a fitting symbol of economic divine judgement, a powerful tornado came right down the middle of the Branson strip in 2009 and most of the theaters that were destroyed were never rebuilt. This, I believe, is a fast track view of what has happened and is happening to the churches of the 21^stcentury. We have been gradually dying off for sixty years, what we have been has little or nothing to offer to the coming generation, and, my friends, the tornado is coming. 

Now folks, I don’t want to set fire to our past. I am personally a product of the traditional church. My mother was our church’s secretary. I entered the ministry when I was 22 years old. I have literally, physically been in the church six or seven days a week since I was 5 years old. What is more, I not only went to seminary, but I did my doctoral research in monastic spirituality. 

I not only love the classical music of the church, but I am probably the only person in the room who drives down the road listening to recordings of Gregorian chant recorded in monasteries. But let me ask you, when you drive down the road, what music do you listen to? When you pay to go to a concert, what kind of music is it? What speaks to you, what is meaningful to you, what is important to you?

And what’s more, every church I know of is populated with aging parishioners who keep saying, “We have to get young people to come to church,” but those people want it to happen as if they could turn the hands of time back to 1959 and get young people to want to find a theology that is the equivalent of oil lamps, coal stoves and hand milking cows to be attractive to them.

We have witnessed, over the past four decades, a revival of Islamic fundamentalism. We know that has not been good for the world or for Islam. Islam will either modernize or it will pass away. Similarly, we have seen a rise in Christian evangelical and fundamentalist religion, most notable in the mega churches of Africa, the Americas, and some here in the UK and Europe. It doesn’t have as many bombs or guns as what the media tells us is associated with Islamic fundamentalism, and they don’t have as many beheadings as we know still happens in Saudi Arabia, but there sure is a lot of assassination of intellect.

The mega church movement in America is a product of the dread of loss of white privilege, as self-congratulatory groups of people insist on a homophobic, misogynistic, and militaristic religion that still blames the poor for being poor while promising them a home in heaven if they will refrain from stealing the bread they need to survive.

If this seems harsh, well, you can be consoled by the fact that there will be nothing left of me here by May 15^thbut a trail of condensation behind a Delta jet. But, as I sometimes like to remind my listeners, these are just my opinions, it just so happens that I am right. 

Churches have seen this threat of extinction coming down the track for years and they have tried to respond by offering more contemporary religious music, most of which is theologically wretched and musically even more tragic. They have tried to switch from theologically heavy sermons to more pastoral concerns, talking about how to deal with divorce, death, depression, and loneliness. And that’s not all bad. But is there another way other than, as we say, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic or trying to turn church into a self-help support group?

If we think that the church has something of value to offer over the next twenty, fifty, or a hundred years, how do we restructure ourselves to respond to that need? And I hope that you caught from my opening, all of the changes that my parents saw in how they lived, and all of the changes that I have experienced in my own life, were largely unpredicted innovations. 

I believe that I will live to see the death of gas powered cars; I believe that we will all see the advent of self-driving cars. I believe that most of what we get now from our smart phones will be in our glasses in the next generation, but I am not at all sure that there will be many bricks and mortar churches still in operation as churches. 

There is a chapter in my book, Progressive Faith and Practice, titled “What do we do when we gather as a community?” In that chapter, I acknowledge that progressive church services are in evolution. 

The very first service held in my church that was formed in the summer of 2008, looked a whole lot like the last service I conducted in my former denominational church in the summer of 2007. We knew more about the theology that we wanted to embrace than we knew about how to embody that theology in our liturgy. 

Slowly we began to weed out traditional hymns, we moved away from lectionary based services, and we ceased to offer up prayers of intercession to a supernatural theistic God. We became less Christian and more inter-faith. We changed from weekly scripture readings to wisdom lessons, often drawn from modern philosophy, science, politics, or poetry. In our first five years, all 52 Sundays per year involved a scripture reading, these past few years, that probably happens four or five times a year. That path offers both freedom and danger… the dangers of narcissism and tribalism should never be easily dismissed. 

For centuries, a shared Bible, lectionary, and body of music made it possible for every conservatives and liberals to have a common language in which to speak to one another. Giving that up is not to be done lightly. And yet, I am a Biblical scholar and I could speak for the rest of the day without notes about the evolution of the New Testament cannon and its influences from early Gnostic movements, the Marcionite church, and Greek mystery religions but there is not a sole in this room that wouldn’t rather have a pizza and a beer. 

Progressives are all over the board about how our evolution should progress. My good friend, Bishop John Shelby Spong, still attends Episcopal worship and recites the creeds, even though he does not believe a line of it literally and he is quite iconoclastic in how he talks about the liturgies that beg, “Lord have Mercy” and the baptismal renunciations of the wiles of Satan.

John Churcher and I are probably theologically about like to railroad rails running side by side for miles, but John still insists on talking about Jesus a whole lot more than I do. We end up at the same place in most cases, but he still wants to start in a space that I associate with pipe organs and stained glass. That’s not a criticism of either Spong or Churcher, it is just an example of how we are evolving differently.

In my book, I list about a hundred examples of songs we use from the secular world. That list was compiled in 2013 so if you will send me an email, I will send you an updated list. Every church and every denomination has different rules about how far you can stray from your book of order. What we have found is that existing books of liturgy have almost nothing we can use. 

This has forced me to write our own prayer of confession every week and my music staff and I often have to rewrite the lyrics to either hymns or popular songs. Again, this is not just time consuming and difficult to do well but it is also another way of unmooring your congregation from the larger body of the faithful and that must be done mindfully and with more humility than I can usually muster. 

As I have been at pains to explain, most major changes in culture and in church culture cannot be predicted more than a few years in advance. We had no idea how computers and the internet would change our lives until it had happened. 

I suspect that most of what will be transformative to us over the next decade is not something we have even heard of yet. Just as Face Book and e-mail has largely taken the place of traditional post office traffic, and Amazon.com is putting retail stores out of business, the internet is also claiming lots of territory once owned by the church.

On Sunday mornings in Springfield, I have about 50 people sitting in front of me. But via the camera in the back of the room, another thousand will have listened to my sermon within a day. Because these podcasts and videos remain available indefinitely, more than 15,000 sermons are downloaded from our little church every month…. That we know of…. Many are reposted on radio stations and translated into Spanish and reposted in Central and South America. 

We didn’t see that coming. It just happened.  We are the only progressive church for 200 miles from Springfield, so we started posting sermons on line as a service to our members who didn’t make the long drive into Springfield every week and we quickly discovered that there was a global appetite for what we were offering. 

So, are we a little church in rural Missouri or are we a mega church with campuses all over the world? The truth is that we are both and there would be no international church were it not for the small seated church in Missouri and there would be no small seated church in Missouri without the support of our global members. Our existence is economically dependent on the marriage of the two. 

So, again, we ask, what do we do when we gather? Well, we are offering two very different experiences. Our online folks get sermon content only. They don’t receive communion, they don’t shake hands during the passing of the peace. They don’t enjoy a cup of coffee sitting around a conference room table during book discussions and John Church and Mo Wills can tell you that they are missing out on some of the most amazing music enjoyed by any church anywhere, but there are a lot of them. 

But in our bricks and mortar church experiences, I have these suggestions:

1)  Churches do not change quickly or easily but I urge you to try to marry your liturgy to your theology. We have spent a hundred years educating pastors to be academically more informed theologians, but we still sing hymns to a divine Santa Claus in the clouds who has a wickedly punitive side, and recite creeds that hardly made sense in the 4^thcentury universe in which they were written. Everyone is going to go about this differently but there comes a point where you are not just dishing out enough nostalgia to make it feel like church and you cross the crucial Rubicon into simply being dishonest. Our liturgy, our hymns, should both reflect and teach our theology so that we are not asking our members to be rational, critical thinking adults most of the time and magical thinking people who unreflectively engage in superstition when they come to church. 

2)  A certain amount of tradition and nostalgia can both tether us to our past and help us to existentially accept the evolution of the church, but I emphatically urge you to avoid turning your sermons into history lessons. Way too much of what passes as being “Biblical preaching” is an invitation to escape the world where we live and to enter an ancient and largely imagined world full of miracles, apostles, and sandal wearing early Christians. 

Even 40 years ago, when I was in seminary, my homiletics professor taught us to open our sermons with a current events illustration and to close with one like it. That is a helpful rule and, frankly, the more current the better. My own preaching can now be described as an ethical and spiritual commentary on current events. I recently heard a lecture delivered by a professor in South Carolina in which she was asked what she considered to be her most reliable news sources. She replied: National Public Radio, Democracy Now, and Roger Ray. I don’t know her, and I didn’t try to contact her, but I do not consider myself to be a news source. I am a pastor.

I try to be a prophetic preacher. I spend several hours every week immersed in alternative news sources so, I understand that many people will hear about news stories from me that they will never hear on commercial TV or in print media, but I am a professional religious and I am trying to do the same thing that Jeremiah did 2500 years ago, I am trying to speak truth to power from an ethical and spiritual perspective. 

There are tens of thousands of churches that put their sermons on line in one form or another. I don’t know of any that have our numbers. I doubt that there are any progressive churches that have even 10% of our numbers. And folks, look at me, I am an aging corpulent cleric. I don’t have the booming persuasive voice of a John Churcher or the book sales of a Bishop Spong. 

There ought to be younger and smarter pastors who should be pulling way out ahead of me, and honestly, I am going to be glad to be replaced. But I am not going to retire until someone, and hopefully several someones, are filling this lane on the web. There is nothing unique or even unusual about me but I believe that those who should have eclipsed me already are holding back, trying not to get fired, trying to remain popular with their peers and their parish . . . as if Jesus was crucified for being a moderate. For young pastors, let me just say this, there are few things more liberating than being fired. We have a saying in the American south, only dead fish always move with the current. If you are not swimming against the current in our day then you have left the ministry and now you are just a beauty contestant. There is a global audience waiting for every church. All you have to do is offer content that is worth listening to.

3)  Let me move on to say something about your music. I know lots of churches that are trying to imitate the music in the mega churches that they are afraid are draining away their future members. That is a contest that you can’t win and shouldn’t win. We spend about $20,000 a year on our music program and our area mega churches spend over a half a million. I don’t want to do what they do but even if I did, I couldn’t touch their budget.

What we do is offer excellent content that we can pull off with two, or three, or four musicians at a time. Whatever you do, you should go for the best possible quality. Everyone in our world now has access to excellent music performances of all genres everywhere we go. We have a lower tolerance for mediocre music now than ever before. Live music can have the upper hand over recorded music and congregational singing can have a community building dimension that cannot be replaced with listening to recordings. 

In a world marred by mediocrity, anything that is truly beautiful, poetic, artistic, or profound becomes a healing refuge for us. Don’t try to do what you cannot do well. Try to network with local professional musicians who will bring their talent to you for an hour at a time for an honorarium you can afford. 

I happen to have world class musicians who work for us, but we regularly pull in guest musicians for diversity. We have a pretty good preacher, but they still send me on the road regularly to give their ears a break and to get to hear some other people. 

4)  Finally, I encourage you to think beyond your own preferences. The majority of people in your area do not go to any church and that is not because they all are ideologically opposed to going to church, they just don’t believe that there is a church that is worth going to. What content would it take to change their minds? What would be interesting enough, helpful enough, inspiring and challenging enough to persuade them to want to come? It isn’t easy to figure out, but our survival depends on us getting it right. 

And remember, if you get it right for 2018, accept that 2019 might need to be significantly different. In a world of rapid transformation, we need to be in the midst of it, serving as headlights and not tail lights.