Last week, the Pew Research Center reported that between 2007 and 2014, “the Christian share of the population (in the U.S.) fell from 78.4 percent to 70.6 percent, driven mainly by declines among mainline Protestants and Catholics.” Evangelicals are in decline too, just at a slower pace. All the while, the religiously unaffiliated grew from 16.1 percent to an impressive 22.8 percent.
On Pentecost, we celebrate the first century birth of a chaotic Christian movement, sitting in our 21st-century churches that are in a statistical spiral of decline. Couldn’t Pew have waited a few weeks to release their dismal findings? You know — just let us throw our birthday party before we have to plan our funeral.
Nevertheless, this Sunday we’ll turn to the pages of Acts to read the origin story again. Historians can tell us a lot about the earliest days of the Christian movement: the social conditions, the early church gatherings, the rituals. But folks had to tell stories to convey how it felt to be there. Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the account goes like this:
When the Feast of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Without warning there was a sound like a strong wind, gale force — no one could tell where it came from. It filled the whole building. Then, like a wildfire, the Holy Spirit spread through their ranks, and they started speaking in a number of different languages as the Spirit prompted them ….
Their heads were spinning; they couldn’t make head or tail of any of it. They talked back and forth, confused: “What’s going on here?” Others joked, “They’re drunk on cheap wine” (Acts 2:1-4; 12-13, The Message).
Statistics like those in the Pew study have a lot to say about the social trends of church attendance these days. But it’s hard for statistics to convey what it’s like to get caught up in the movement of a congregation’s life — even in a precarious era like ours. We need to tell stories in order to convey that sense. Here are a few I know:
• White congregations that resisted “white flight” and resolved to stay within the city they call home to serve those in their community. They shrink to a dismally small number of congregants, wondering if they will survive another year. Many years later, they are thriving churches with a penchant for the work of racial justice deeply embedded within their congregational narratives.
• Congregations that resolutely decided that the only way to love their LGBTQ neighbors was to become fully welcoming and affirming of LGBTQ people in decades like the ’50s when McCarthyism targeted gays and lesbians as “sex perverts,” or the ’80s when the prevailing public image of queer folk was gay men dying of a mysterious, incurable disease. (An aside: A lot of churches and denominations are catching up these days, when the prevailing cultural image of queer folks is shifting toward the affluent white gay couple with adopted children (think Mitch and Cam of Modern Family), but we’ve still got a lot to learn from the narratives of churches that were far, far ahead of the wider culture in their embrace of LGBTQ people.)
• Churches that open the doors of their historic buildings for creative partnerships with nonprofits and community groups that are desperate for affordable space in which to conduct their good work, refusing to allow the brick and mortar and stone they own to become protected shrines to their past.
• Congregations that stand up to their denomination’s bullying in order to support the equity of women in the church or inclusivity for LGBTQ people or to take a defiant stand on an array of other concerns of justice, refusing to uphold an oppressive ecclesial status quo.
• Churches that pass the offering plate an extra time to collect bail money for arrested activists on the front lines of racial justice demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo.
• Congregations that allow their own needs for capital improvements or sound systems or musical instruments to be put on hold — perhaps indefinitely — because their community is in desperate need of a group home for adults with developmental disabilities or an addiction recovery facility, realizing that if they don’t build it, no one will.
These are all churches I know. I bet your church has stories like this, too. They may be buried deep in your institutional memory, but they’re worth digging up and sharing at this Sunday’s birthday bash. Embedded in these narratives is a lingering sense of our own congregational call that can get lost in our anxiety over the stats.
What I’m learning from the convergence of Pentecost and the Pew study is this: We really aren’t guaranteed a future. Every now and then, we need to put the security of our institutional life on the line for something we really believe in. At least once every decade or so, churches need to do something so audacious and risky that it can still be said, “Folks in the community talked back and forth about that church, confused, saying, ‘What’s going on here?’ And others joked, ‘They must be drunk.”’
Photo credit: Pentecost frontal at Wells Cathedral