Decline and fall

The science of numbers in the Church of England always makes for sobering, if depressing reading. I'm not sure I can take much more of it. 

Linda Woodhead, writing in the Church Times this week, termed the decline in numbers of Ministers 'not enough boots on the ground', saying that 'there are no longer enough troopers to keep the show on the road, and the show will have to change.'

http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2014/7-february/features/features/not-enough-boots-on-the-ground

As well as not enough Ministers, there are of course, fewer and fewer people attending Sunday worship. An influential American writer on spirituality said recently he didn't really connect with God through 'going to church', to which 'Christianity Today' responded with, of course, an article saying why going to church still made sense. They'd have to, wouldn't they, because deep down, we're all thinking what will happen if, say in 30 years time, no one in the UK really is going to church (or to an Anglican church anyway...)
http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2014/february/should-i-stay-or-should-i-go-why-i-could-stay-home-but-choo.html?paging=off

Of the people who do attend on Sundays, the graphs show ageing congregations, (in the C of E, the average age stands at 62) with few coming up from younger generations to take on all the jobs the older ones have done. A piece in Church Times suggests that the army of ladies born in the 1930s and 1940s are the real troopers - when they pass on, who on earth will keep all this stuff going?http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2014/7-february/features/features/generation-a-%E2%80%94-the-dwindling-force

Of course the church, in some form, goes on all through the week, with numerous volunteer run events up and down the UK - mums and toddler groups, lunches for the elderly, drop in centres, debt centres, etc. etc. All this is the church in action. But we still have the issue of Sunday worship. If congregations slowly dwindle to nothing, what will we do with all those buildings, for a start?

And so the question 'why go to church?' haunts believers, Ministers in particular. We're the ones who are supposed to be 'keeping the show on the road', who worry about the show grinding to a halt when all the people have gone. The likelihood of turning those graphs around till attendance is rising and average age falling to something more representative, seems small.

If people come to faith later in life, with ready made families and lifestyles, creating a culture of church going can be extremely difficult. It has to be fitted in to an already crowded life, and sometimes it seems it just cannot be. Cue Fresh Expressions of church - mid-week, Saturday mornings cafe-style, Messy church, etc. But people are still busy, busy, busy. Are we too busy to gather?

When you grow up from childhood with a rhythm of gathering, churchgoing, it's simply what you do on Sundays, just as going to school or work is what you do the rest of the week. As one writer put it, there's a noticeable difference between going if nothing else comes up, and going unless something else comes up.

Is there a way to lighten the dismal tale of ecclesiastical decline and fall? What do Ministers do about the significant number out there who believe stuff without 'going to church?' What even is 'church'? 

Linguistically the word ecclesia began in civic life - the 'ekklesia' was a gathering, pure and simple. That's what church is - it's us gathering. What we do when we gather flows from there. 

At first we gathered in homes - presumably gatherings got too big - after persecution and missionary scattering across the globe, people started putting up special buildings for gathering, some of them very large, some smaller, in every locality in the UK eventually, and organising themselves into manageable groups (with some acrimonious splitting along the way, as is only human) - and here we are today.

Church growth (decline) graphs are ultimately depressing, but they should tell us one thing - we must attend to what the point of our gathering is. When we know that, and know the relationship between gathering and being sent out again for a purpose, we will be on the right road. If we forget, we can say goodbye to the show, and the road, completely.

Number crunching the kingdom

Being a church leader can seriously mess with your numerical ability. For example, I used to think 30 (in church) was small. Now I would be delighted to preach to such an enormous number. Or 10 can be 'higher' than 20: I used to think a church of 20 adults must be in decline, until I read Fresh Expressions literature, where 10 adults who were formerly nothing to do with church, now gathering in a coffee bar to explore faith together, is perceived as a definite 'gain' on the 20 who've been weekly Sunday attenders for donkeys years yet have seen no one under the age of 50 join them for a decade. It all depends on the context.

There's safety in numbers. And anxiety in their absence. It's hard with a designated building (called 'church') to get away from the fact that it should be full of people. But it's context again. If I wander into the church midweek and discover one person praying there, I am delighted.

But one person at the main Sunday service and I would be mortified. Ten people at a midweek meeting might represent a third of the congregation of a small church, but a large church of 300 would consider 10 mid weekers a failure. 

And it doesn't help that well meaning (sometimes senior) people often give the impression that your job is to keep everything going as before, asking every time they see you 'How are numbers?' I am so tempted next time to respond 'oh, half the church have left since I came but the 12 remaining are really on fire for the Lord' (which is basically what happened when Jesus started talking about being the bread of life in John 6:66).

We live with the spectre of cutbacks and rural church closure. I have heard church closure lamented as the definitive end of Christian witness in an area. And I'm sure it is a crisis. But a crisis is not an ending. It might be the beginning of something else.

A peculiar form of mental maths goes on at the beginning of Sunday worship: which priest hasn't done some astonishing numeric leaps as they look out upon a church of largely empty pews, and calculate what a large number of people there would be if everyone who has come, ever, was actually there right now? And on being asked later 'how many did you have?' begins the answer 'well, if so-and-so, so-and-so and so-and so hadn't been on holiday/busy at work/having a lie in/recovering from the night before/preparing a meal for 27 cousins, there would have been......'

It's like that childhood game you played when you couldn't finish your plateful of food, only in reverse. Instead of pushing all the food up one end of the plate to make it look nearly empty, we spread out along the pews to make it look full. I think we need to have picnics instead - 20 people in a 'clump' on the grass, singing and praying will always be 'bigger' than 20 sitting in straight lines in a large building.

A quick trawl on biblical 'counting': David being reprimanded for taking a census of his fighting men to see how many he had (I especially think of this when asked to do my 'Mission Return'); Gideon who was told to slim back his men and keep only the keen ones and Jesus, who told of the shepherd with no numerical sense whatever abandoning the 99 sheep to search for the one. Perhaps the only evidence that more=good is the exhortation to pray for more labourers for the harvest.

Being about more than numbers, 'church growth' is hard to chart. Think of those anxious breast feeding mums whose babies don't put on steady weight along the percentile devised to measure bottle fed babies. Sometimes you appear to be doing all the right things (you 'cultivate an environment that releases the missional imagination of the people of God')* but still it's one step forward, two steps back. Because it's about people, their growth and their sanctification. Shared life, accountability, honesty about problems, holism and taking the long view.

I am trying to get out of the numbers mindset. I'm trying to resist the pressure to go for an indiscriminate 'more'. I pray for encouraging signs. Next time someone asks if the church is growing, I'll say we're working on the soil and leaving growth to the Holy Spirit.

*The Missional Leader, Romanuk and Roxburgh, p. 21