The bad news is that church doesn’t seem to be a transformative experience for many.  46% of church-going respondents said their life has not been changed by church.  61% couldn’t remember an insight from the last church service they’d gone to.  That’s not to say that these people aren’t getting anything from church – remember, two thirds of people are connecting with God and others – but it does mean that their faith life may not be growing and developing in their faith through participation in church.  The Barna study appears to be asking about church worship experiences, and worship certainly can’t address all aspects of Christians’ faith lives, but the findings should give us pause.

I found out about this study through two blog posts written by Taylor Burton-Edwards.  In his first post on this topic, The Differences Congregational Worship Makes . . . And Doesn’t, Burton-Edwards reflects on what this means for worship.  In particular, he picks up on the lower numbers reported by young adults regarding what they’ve received from attending church, rightly raising concerns about these results.  He also notes the poorer scores from people who attend middle-sized churches and ventures an interesting explanation based on Dunbar’s number for social group cohesion.

Burton Edwards’ second post, Differences Congregations Don’t Make . . . And What to Do about It, is more pessimistic, concluding, “Congregations make little or no difference in the lives of most people who attend them.”  Burton-Edwards then reasons that we shouldn’t expect congregations to make a difference in people’s lives and instead this task should be left to groups similar to the early Methodist societies.  Burton-Edwards cites the examples of campus ministry groups, Walk to Emmaus Fourth Day groups, and unspecified UMC groups in Zimbabwe.

Although I appreciated Burton-Edwards’ first post, I have to take issue with his second post.  First, I think it’s an extremely negative reading of the Barna Group’s report to conclude that congregations make no difference in people’s lives.  Burton-Edwards takes “somewhat influential” to mean that churches only “marginally affect” people’s lives.  While I agree that this report points out that churches have a problem in terms of fostering discipleship, Burton-Edwards’ overstates that problem.

But more importantly, no matter the size of the problem, there is no way we can excuse congregations from the responsibility to make a difference in people’s lives, as Burton-Edwards suggests we do.  This is especially true as United Methodists, with our mission “to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world”.  The Book of Discipline affirms that congregations are the primary sites at which the UMC carries out its mission.  We need to expect congregations to be just that.

I really believe in the importance and effectiveness of small group ministries such as those Burton-Edwards cites, but if our congregations are not making a difference in people’s lives, if they are not helping them become better disciples of Jesus Christ, then we as the United Methodist Church are not carrying out our mission.  If we truly believe in our mission and truly believe that our local congregations have a role to play in that mission, then we should continue to expect that they carry out the work of making disciples, including teaching them and transforming their lives.  It’s not easy work, and it’s not something that’s going to happen every day, but to be United Methodists, we cannot give up on it.

Having the attitude that “the world is our parish” denotes a certain understanding of the church and its relationship to the world that I think is characteristic of Methodism (and many other denominations as well).  It denotes an understanding that the purpose of the church is not just to care for its own members but also to reach out beyond itself to engage with the world, to minister to the world, to be in mission to the world.

Currently in American Christendom, there are two understandings of how the church reaches out to be in mission to the world.  One is a conversionary understanding in which the church’s job is to try to convert individuals out of the world and into the church.  The other is a social justice understanding in which the church’s job is to try to combat the unjust structures of the world.  All too often, there is a bifurcation of the two, and they are seen as mutually exclusive and competing understandings of how to minister to the world.  Such a view is often present within United Methodism itself and reflects yet another dimension of the conflict between conservative and religious voices in the denomination.

Yet such a breach between these two forms of ministry to the world has not always existed.  Indeed, it’s really only a product of the last 100-125 years.  Before that, Methodism had a long history of trying to reform both individuals and society.  John Wesley was certainly no slouch in preaching individual conversion, but also tackled systematic injustices like poverty and the slave trade.  He wasn’t Marx in his analysis, but he did have an awareness of and concern for systemic problems with human society.  Such a combination of a drive for individual and societal reform continued through Methodist history until the fundamentalist/modernist debates of the turn of the 20^th century began to drive these two options apart.

Nevertheless, I think it is possible to reclaim such a unity in the concept of ministry to the world which is our parish, and thus to reclaim some unity in our denomination.  To do so, however, depends upon a robust understanding of the holism of the church’s mission.  What is holism?  It’s thinking about think as wholes, not as a collection of divisible parts.  An emphasis on holism is also part of the what-comes-next era, so the intellectual and cultural resources are out there to support such an emphasis.

If we seek to undertake holistic ministry to the world our parish, we will seek to present a whole gospel to whole people in the whole creation.  This means that seeking religious and moral transformation is important.  To say it’s not and that economic and political injustice is all that matters is to practice a materialist reduction that goes against the spirit of religion, which emphasizes that matters of the spirit matter.  Yet we can’t stop at seeking individual religious and moral transformation, for that would also ignore the wholeness of people, who are also economic, political, sexual, and physical beings with associated needs and concerns in these areas.  Our ministry to the world must therefore address these areas as well.  Furthermore, because whole people are part of a whole world, our efforts in these areas must not be solely individual but also systemic in nature.  Finally, because the whole world is not just human, but natural as well, our ministry to the world must also include ministry to the created, natural world, the essential context of all human life.

My guess is that right now there are a lot of people doing street evangelism who wouldn’t want to see their work as flowing from the same impetus as people protesting the School of Americas, and vice versa.  Yet in order to stay together as a denomination, we must find ways in which we can think of these two aspects of the church’s mission in the world as part of the same understanding that the world is our parish.  Since mission in and to the world is one of central reasons for the church’s existence, we need something to unite the denomination in its mission, just as singing can unite us in our worship.  I hope that agreeing that the world is our parish can be an important part of that uniting bond.

On a first glance, polity is certainly part of what constitutes the unity of The United Methodist Church.  Historian Richard Heitzenrater (and others) argues that what it truly meant to be Methodist in the early days was to be in connection (or connexion, as the British would spell it) with John Wesley.  Similarly, to be United Methodist nowadays means to be a member, minister, or ministry of The United Methodist Church, a formal organization with its own set of laws and regulations governing how the church functions.  People can play with the boundaries of those laws or disobey those laws at times, but one isn’t United Methodist unless one buys into the organization to a certain extent.  If a church completely disregards the Book of Discipline, never sends delegates to an Annual Conference, doesn’t pay apportionments, and is in no way linked to the church hierarchy, it’s not United Methodist; it’s an independent, non-denominational church.

So polity is definitely part of what unites United Methodists.  In fact, polity is such an important uniting force that it also highlights the forces for disunity.  Methodists can argue with Presbyterians and feel that, as fellow Christians or even fellow Protestants, they have a stake in keeping those arguments going and not just walking out.  But, at the end of the day, there’s always the option that, if the argument gets too much to deal with, Methodists (or Presbyterians) can take their ball (or, rather, their pension fund) and go home.  Yes, that might be a defeat of Christian unity, but it’s not going to cause massive administrative problems in local churches.

United Methodists cannot, however, when arguing with each other, just take their pension fund and go home because it’s the same pension fund!  Because polity governs things like money and power but is also something that unites denominations in a fairly robust way, disagreements over other issues quickly get translated into disagreements over polity, and these disagreements matter because they affect things like who gets to be a minister, which ministries get money, and who can become a member of a church.  It affects the day-to-day operations of churches in real, tangible ways.  Sometimes polity is strong enough to survive these types of conflicts, and churches work through their differences; sometimes it’s not, and churches split.

This tendency for conflicts from other areas of the church to become conflicts about polity means, however, that polity cannot be the sole source of denominational unity.  If all we have in common is common pools of money and common structures of power, then all we will do is fight about money and power.  There’s already a good deal of that going on in the church (see the comment from a couple of posts ago about people fighting like weasels at General Conference), and we don’t need more of it.  Fighting about things like money and power means that the church is focused internally on itself and not focused externally and is focused on earthly things and not heavenly things.

When the church is not focused externally, then it can’t be in mission and ministry to the world, which is a good portion of the church’s reason for existence.  When the church is stuck thinking solely about earthly and not heavenly things, then it can’t be an effective worshiping community, which is most of the rest of the church’s reason for existence.  And if the church isn’t in mission and isn’t a worshiping community, then it has effectively stopped to be the church, no matter what the name on the incorporation papers say.

Therefore, to do ministry together and to worship communally, which are the reasons for the church’s existence, there must be something more holding the church together than just polity.  In the next two weeks, I’ll look at some ideas as to what else might provide that basis of unity.

For anyone living in the United States who is a United Methodist (or any other form of mainline Protestant for that matter), the idea that we have a numbers problem is not a new one.  The United Methodist Church in the US has not just been lagging in growth behind other denominations – we’ve been steadily declining in numbers for decades now.  Dr. Robert’s and my article goes beyond this observation in suggesting that The UMC has problems elsewhere, too, but it certainly does tie in to the narrative of United Methodist decline in the US.

There is, in my mind (and I’m speaking only for myself here and not trying to put words in Dr. Robert’s mouth) a right and a wrong way to respond to the realization of numerical problems with the denomination.  I think the wrong way to respond is to say, “We’ve got a problem with numbers.  Therefore, we need to find a way to improve our numbers so that we can continue what we’ve got.”  The right way to respond, in my mind, is to say, “We’ve got a problem with numbers.  Therefore, we need to think deeply about what God’s mission for us is and make sure we’re pursuing that mission as passionately and as whole-heartedly as we can.”  I think it is fair to say that both Dr. Robert and I were hoping our article would be a stimulus to get people in The UMC to think more deeply about mission, which I see as central to this second option.

The reason I think the first response is wrong is because it is ultimately focused on us, not God and not others.  At its worst, this type of reasoning says, “We’ve got institutions to preserve (whether those be particular ministries, General Boards, clergy guaranteed appointments and pensions, cultural clout, theological positions, places of privilege, or something else), and we can only preserve those institutions if we have enough people in the pews to support them.  Therefore, we need to get people in the pews so that they can support us and our institutions.”  In this way of thinking, people are invited in not for their sake or the gospel’s sake or Jesus’ sake, but for our sake.  Ultimately, this approach will not be successful.  People don’t want to be used, and it’s hard to sell people on a defensive attitude centered on preserving institutions of which they haven’t previously been a part.  If that’s how we respond to our falling or lagging numbers, our numbers will continue to fall and lag.

I have concern for The UMC because I do see this sort of response popping up to various degrees.  I’ve seen it in both the Call to Action and in some of the clergy response to the Call to Action.  While I think there are a number of positive things in the Call to Action, at times I detect an underlying assumption that what The UMC needs most is a way to start growing again.  Yes, I think The UMC should be growing, but what I think we need most is to be participating in God’s mission to the world in the ways God wants us to, whatever those ways may be.  At the same time, a lot of the clergy responses I’ve seen, while rightly holding up the importance of various ministries that can’t be best judged by numerical growth, also has an undercurrent to it, one which wants to make sure the clergy’s current financial and vocational turf is protected before they’re willing to talk about new ministry initiatives.  The Call to Action is more radical in suggesting changes, but I worry that both some of its supporters and detractors are motivated more by protecting the current life of the church than they are by the gospel, however defined.

In contrast, in what I think is the right response to recognizing our numbers problem, we would use the gut-check moment that comes along with that recognition to hold ourselves accountable to God and God’s will for us, even if that means losing some of what we’ve currently got.  One of the questions Dr. Robert and I ask in our article is, “[I]s it the case that holistic ministry (including numerical growth) gushes from a deep well of confident faith that United Methodists lack, relative to the stronger theological or liturgical identities of sister denominations?”  I think a proper response to the problem of numbers involves (re-)articulating for ourselves that deep well of confident faith.  I’m not here saying that The UMC has lost the faith we once had (as conservatives might) or that we need to completely adjust our faith to fit with our contemporary situation (as liberals might).  I am saying that we need to know what our faith is, both in its traditional and contemporary elements.  We need to know the gospel, and recognizing problems with numbers can be an occasion for us to make sure we know the gospel so that we can put that gospel into action for the sake of the world.

In this approach, then, the focus is not on us and defending what is ours, but on God and pursing what God has in store for us and the world – following a sense of mission.  It’s about putting God’s call on us ahead of our attachment to our communal life as we now know it.  There are costs involved in such an approach.  Deciding we care more about the gospel than our institutions will mean that some of those institutions, even some of those institutions which are in many ways good, will fall by the wayside.  It means some who had been part of our communal life before will leave, and it may even threaten schism among those who can’t agree on what the gospel is.  We’ll lose some of our life together.  And I can’t promise that such an approach will lead immediately to dramatic increases in numbers, though I think it is our best long-term hope.  Yet if we pursue this path, no matter what happens with numbers, we will have the joy of participating in God’s mission to the world, and we’ll be less worried about what happens to us because we won’t be focused on ourselves; we’ll be focused on God and on others.

Ultimately, I think this is the right way because it is the Biblical way.  In Mark 8:35, Jesus says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” (NRSV)  If we only care about saving the current form of our common life as United Methodists, we will lose that life.  If, however, we are willing to lose the current dimensions of our common life together for the sake of Jesus and the sake of the gospel, then we will find new life – new life in Christ, new life in the gospel, new life in mission together, new life overflowing with joy.  May it be so.  Amen and amen.