Last week I wrote about the first challenge to the church in America: Technology. This week we are looking 2 more challenges. Challenge #2 is that America is increasing becoming “post-church.” Notice I didn’t write “post-Christian” and this is a distinction with a difference. Randy remarked that Christianity still has a profound influence in American life. The problem we face is not hostility, but indifference. Public assemblies of the church are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the average American’s daily walk. While there are some growing churches in metro areas, growth is coming at the expense of smaller congregations. That is certainly true here in East Tennessee. Church attendance as a percentage of the population continues to shrink and is projected to be 11% by 2050.
Challenge #3 is a pronounced age/social/gender gap. Randy made the observation that churches of Christ tend to be older, more women attendees with less men, and very Southern, white, upper middle class. Randy made 2 observations about this problem. First, churches can overcome this gap by being committed to mentoring the next generation behind it. Not with mentoring as another program, but mentoring as part of the churches way of doing their work. Second, if churches are becoming more and more female in attendance, then we all need to think hard about how we raise young men.
These are very vexing problems because they are linked to what is going on in the society at large. It is easy to wring our hands and long for yesterday. It is past time that the church stop and take a hard look at how we are living in a world that is far different than it was 30 years ago and make a difference for Jesus today.
I know this is usually teen space, but I had the privilege to attend Elderlink in Atlanta at the end of March. This was the best Elderlink I have attended so far. Randy Harris kicked off the conference on Friday night with 5 challenges to the future of the Church in America. I will spend the next several weeks discussing them here in Neil’s Notes. The first challenge was Technology. Technology enables us to have an incredible amount of information (even biblical) at our finger-tips; even my Bible is my Blackberry. However, technology also provides an unprecedented amount of distraction to our lives. Randy made the point that where there is no quiet, no prayer, there is no growth for us spiritually. He has a point; a virtual world only goes so far. Only when the church can be together is when it can experience the fellowship described in Acts 2: 42-47. What say you?
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