The Church of the Future

The Church in Time, Three Sermons on the Church:
Past, Present and Future

The Church of the Future

My mother, when I was a boy, had in her possession several crystal balls. But though she was a prescient woman, she never managed to use them for delving into the future. Nor could I – though I’ll guarantee that I tried – unsuccessfully. Which means that when I come to deal with the church of the future, I have no special knowledge beyond that which any one of you may have. I can forecast, but with far less certainty than that possessed by a television weatherman of forty years ago. Yet there is a sense to our talking about the future of this institution we hold so dear as we aspire to its continued value for ourselves, our children, and their children, too. If, as I have already said, the church is the home of the faithful, we have good reason for wanting it to be around in times to come.

But without a crystal ball, what can be said of this future? We have talked of the church of the past and the church of the present. Both near us and far away, we have around us examples of the church in all its diverse forms. And we have our own example, too. What can we say from this perspective? What possibilities for the future can we justifiably forecast?

Good and bad possibilities abound. We see congregations going to the dust – vanishing forever – while we see others rising anew. We see the churches of ancient Christendom – those of Europe and the Orthodox near east – barely able to attract five percent of the population about them, while in Africa and Asia we see vibrant, young movements, throwing off their missionary pasts and addressing their progenitors as if they – these young churches – were the teachers and the churches from which they sprang were the students. Closer to hand, we see major changes in church hierarchy, arguments about feminism, about choice with regard to birth and with regard to the elderly and infirm, about revelation, about how to relate to reinvigorated Islam as well as the faiths of the far east, and about whether the needs of the needy are social, political or religious.

And all of these arguments and events point toward the future as justification for our considering – and making ultimate decisions – with regard to what is happening now.

Good and bad possibilities for the church of the future abound, and both possibilities should be considered while remembering our definition of the church as the home of the faithful.

First let us consider the bad possibilities. And here I would talk of self- centered churches and dissipated churches.

Self-centered churches are navel-gazers, concerned only with who they are and what they have to say to and about themselves. They are the good-time churches, the ego churches and the mega churches. "Look at how happy we are," they say. "Look at how important we are." "Look at how big we are." They organize themselves to spread their joy, to enhance their importance or to increase their growth as justification for their existence. But woe be to them if their formula fails.

We had a Unitarian Universalist startup church in our own area that proclaimed itself as a mega church before signing up its first member. It failed…

I think its mistake was in proclaiming itself as being both large and Unitarian Universalist. If it had just said it was going to be large, it might have worked, at least for a while. Then it could have evolved as long as it centered itself on its size. We like big things, after all. As a society we are focused on big things. . . big buildings. . . big business. . . big government. . . big health. And why not big churches, too?

We’re focused on happiness, too, as Lumpy Branum already pointed out back in the late forties. You may not remember Lumpy Branum, or even his character, Uncle Lumpy on the old Fred Waring Show, but perhaps if I told you that he later became Mr. Greenjeans on Captain Kangaroo, a bell would ring. But as Uncle Lumpy, Mr. Branum would tell the children of the late 40’s the stories of Little Orley. One of these musical tales was of "Little Orley and the Happy Bird." Orley was upset because of a run of bad luck, but the happy bird said he should just sing a happy little song regardless. Then the bird got so flustered he tripped over his own feet, fell from the branch, landed in the mud and was fit to be tied. "Aren’t you going to sing your happy little song?" Orley asked. And the bird tried, but then he closed with "Aw, go home and leave me alone." The idea of happiness only goes so far. We need other feelings and other relationships to deal with the other events that happen in our lives.

And God knows, we’re focused on our own importance. There is some value to talking about how great we are. But that too has a problem because occasionally – just occasionally – there are other people and other issues that are more important that ourselves. There are places we need to look that are more vital than the places where we find ourselves.

Dissipated churches focus on issues of real importance but these issues are timely rather than being timeless.

These are the laser churches that are for this and against that, which is valuable, as long as "this" and "that" remain important. They focus in sharply on an issue of the moment. But when that issue ceases to be all important to society, such churches lose their center. Then they better find something else to focus on in a hurry if they hope to survive. For with the dissipation of the significance of that which they stood for or stood against, they can dissipate, too.

The peace churches of the Viet Nam war are an example of this. You may remember those churches that rallied around the issue of peace as if it were the only gospel. Then the war finally ended and those churches lost their center and started loosing members. They had to find something else fast in order to survive, which many of them failed to do.

I consider the present day fundamentalist supporters of the "old time religion" to be a part of this possibility of dissipation. They may be riding the high tide of too much public opinion right now, but they are in danger of being left high and dry if we move away from the fanaticism for the simplicities of the past that seems to be a part of the present. If our culture turns from this attitude as it surely will at some point, and if they can’t, the churches of the old time religion will be left high and dry.

There’s an old story that applies, about the forts along the divide between the United States and Canada. We often forget that our shared border was once armed with state of the art weaponry – with forts and canons and muskets and such. But a shift took place and the need for those forts and weapons faded into oblivion and the forts and weapons rusted and collapsed.

The need for churches that focus on one issue, that propound one gospel as if it were the full gospel, that maintain one theology based on the past is bound to dissipate, will eventually vanish and these churches will vanish with the need they made so intimately their own.

Enough of the negative, however. Now let me say a few things about the good possibilities for the future of the church. For I believe that such possibilities do exist where there are open communities, where the spirit is the center of the congregation, and where people unite in an honest search for truth.

Open communities don’t limit the backgrounds or the aspirations of their members. They honor and encourage the diversity that is there. They may chide occasionally but this is done from the perspective of the chidee rather than the chider. That is to say, we may chide you for some thought or action you hold, but we do so from the perspective of who you are and what you can be rather than doing so to make you like us. As communities, such churches are there to comfort and nurture in times of adversity as well as to challenge when complacency becomes too easy and to exult when joy prevails. They are there for all seasons. Spirit centered communities recognize the value of serendipity, for the spirit is always available, if we will look. They are not limited in faith traditions. They manifest themselves through individuals and through groups, through diverse cultures and religions. They are centered in the good, but good is so uncertain that honest people can find it on both sides of an issue. That makes the spirit centered communities communities in turmoil – but in healthy turmoil as long as they continue to honor and seek the spirit. A community of truth-seekers are equally in turmoil, for the most profound truths are always uncertain. Most of the Greeks in antiquity thought that an unrestrained search for truth was dangerous, as many people do today. That’s what the Oedipus story is about who killed his father and married his mother without knowing what he had done. That, however, wasn’t the worst thing that happened, for he then made a radical search for the truth of what happened and discovered what he had done. Truth, unrestrained is a danger, the ancient Greek would say. But Socrates died for the truth. His jailers hoped that he would simply walk out of his unlocked prison cell, forget the truth and leave Athens alone. To do so would be to deny everything his philosophical perspective stood for, however. So Socrates stayed and died. Ferdinand Christian Bauer was, for me, the greatest New Testament scholar of the last century, because he honored an unrestrained search for truth. A relatively conservative man, he felt that any question he could ask of scripture and its origin was acceptable as long as he did so in pursuit of truth. The answers he found shook the basis of belief in the early part of the his century – but not his because the truth was the center of his faith. Let me go one step further and say that those who seek the truth in revelation are really seekers after lies. For revelation is the antithesis of truth. When you can say that ultimate truth is revealed and therefore is true even when it flies in the face of science, you have destroyed the very foundations on which truth is based. Galileo was told that the earth had to be the center of the universe because it was revealed of God to be the truth.

Truth seekers, while willing to acknowledge the certainty of temporal truth, recognize that the greater truths – of worth, of life, of love, of sacrifice, of transcendence – are always uncertain, appearing and appealing to different people in different societies and different times in different and sometimes antithetical ways.

There are good and bad possibilities for the church of the future, then. And I suspect that no one of the possibilities I have portrayed will triumph over the others. Indeed, some of the bad will look mighty good to many, and will flourish at least for a while. But the faithful will always need a home, and somehow, I think they will always find it. They will find it in that place
    where, as I have previously said, they can meet with trusted elders;
    where they can talk with like minded friends, as different as their individual understandings may be;
    where they can find a protected place to watch the children grow;
    where they can stand with the dying and comfort those left behind to grieve;
    where they can hear words of challenge and compassion, of prophecy and hope;
    where they can feel safe in experiencing the deepest longings of the human soul and where they can feel the support of others to make these longings a tangible part of life – as great or small as that life may be in the greater scheme of things.

There is a future for the church. May these be pointers along the way toward the brighter day we all would have for us and all.