December 2010 Newsletter Article

As I write this I remember back to 20 years ago today. After years of working in sales, corrections, construction and teen centers, after four years of seminary, I had received a call to Christ Our Savior Lutheran to be their pastor and was ordained amid much pomp and ceremony. When my son Erik saw my son Jesse (a handsome 10 year old with teeth and a mullet) leading the procession carrying the cross with a couple dozen pastors following behind he remarked with some concern, “O No, Now they’ve gone and made Jesse a pastor too!!!” My daughter Rhea with her hair poofed high read the lesson from Corinthians. My first official act was to baptize my youngest daughter Liz. My second major task, one not taught in seminary, came the next week when I worked on the furnace to get it running on a cold Sunday morning before worship.

Over the years, styles of ministry, understandings in theology, and the needs of the community, like our hair and clothes styles, have changed. When I started here in ministry communion was served only to those ten and up who had received instruction and “understood” the meaning of communion as if any of us could grasp the full meaning of communion were we to study it our whole life long, communion being one of those things being better understood through experience than knowledge. At my ordination I introduced the song “Borning Cry” to the congregation which was still coming to grips with the “Green Book,” and over the years our music has morphed into a wide variety of hymnody that is still not quite up to the modernity of style listened to on the car radios traveling to and from worship. When I started I had an Apple IIC with 128K and dual disk drives at home, the church had a Wang that took up the better part of a desk and used 8 inch floppies, it sat in the back room largely unused. We currently send our newsletter out on the internet, have a web radio station and are on facebook and twitter and are near the top of the list on appropriate google searches. My cell phone is 100xs the computer my Apple IIC ever was. We were on the cutting edge of ecumenism back in those days by sharing our worship space with Christ Church Episcopal, since then they have moved on, Turning Point has moved in and we are the only church in Alaska that is signed onto the interfaith Charter for Compassion. We have tweeked our worship service, our musical style, our organization, how we get the chores done, our technology and many parts of the building but we are rapidly coming to a place where something more drastic is needed.

After years of tweaking enough to get by, the burner in the furnace has been replaced, and now after years of tweaking enough to get by, the very essence of how we identify, and how we do “church” is changing, and may even have to be replaced, and it appears that we can either get on board or be left out in the cold.

Worship attendance in the US peaked two Sundays after 9-11. Since that time attendance across the nation decreased significantly up to 2007. From 2007 to today churches in general have seen a similar decrease in attendance. During that time there was some continued growth in the “Mega-churches” in the country, but they too are now facing a similar pattern and as their numbers decline below a critical mass and they too will soon feel the pinch. When I graduated from Seminary it was understood that about half the kids left the church after confirmation, but they came back after their first child was born, now less than half the kids even go through confirmation and of those the percent that stays or returns to active participation in worship is about 10% and declining. It is estimated that by 2020 less than one in ten 20 year olds will have ever set foot inside a church for any reason. I assume that does not include non-gathering events like voting, but it does include such things as funerals, weddings and other rites of passage along with worship. My library is full of books with titles like, “Kicking Habits,” “The second coming of the church,” Why Christianity must change or die,” and “We are here now” and though helpful no one has a magic pill. Leonard Sweet describes it as a tsunami of change coming and we can either surf it or go under. Not very encouraging I grant you and not the kind of message I want to bring to you on my 20th anniversary. But still, we are the children of God and we are not without hope. In Isaiah 11 we hear of another time when a far greater calamity than this was on the horizon, the words of hope that a new shoot will come up from the stump that seemed all but dead and gone can give us new hope today also. New life and new hope is the hallmark of our God and that is the good news. The bad news is that this new life seldom looks like the old life. So the question we will be dealing with in the next few years is this; what needs to die, what do we need to let go of, in order to allow this new life in Christ to grow?

A hint comes when we discuss the issues regarding human sexuality and the church. We as Lutherans can often feel confident in our enlightened sensitivities, that is until we turn the discussion to most of the 20 year olds out there who look at us like we are dinosaurs for even considering something they settled in their minds years ago as even being remotely interesting or controversial. When we bring up continuing conversations with Baptists, Methodists and Catholics on theological issues they wonder why we aren’t marching arm in arm with Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and Hindu’s to confront the injustice in the world and our propensity toward war as even a viable solution.

I do not know if we will survive the tsunami that lies ahead but I can tell you that without a willingness to accept change, and most likely drastic change, we surely will not. This is not something I can do; this is not something any pastor can do. There will be many steps in the journey ahead but in addition to walking through the process of deciding what needs to die before we can move on, we must each discover within ourselves what is so important about our relationship with Jesus Christ that we can no longer hold it in, but we must share it with others. There is a part of me that is looking forward to the journey ahead, if nothing else we might find, if we can let go of our dear old friend “used to be” that we actually like surfing.