We Missed It

We Missed It

I was in the midst of my favorite presentation on certain realities of congregational life, “The Life Cycle of a Congregation.” My point was that the further down the descending side of the bell curve a congregation has slid, past the plateau, the more drastic must be the change it undertakes to swing it around to positive development again. A fellow interrupted to object to any notion of change, particularly drastic change.

“We’ve been through drastic change already in our church, over the past thirty years, with ordaining women and revising our prayer book. It hasn’t worked! We’ve continued to lose members, not gain!” His tone was forceful, even angry. People around him nodded grimly.

I had been talking about congregations, not national churches. However, a little bell dinged clearly in the back of my mind. My antagonist was perfectly correct, of course, in what he said, and so was the theory I was presenting. The principle of Life Cycle applies to larger as well as smaller entities. It suddenly dawned on me what this means for the church.

Yes, we did, in the seventies and extending into the eighties, undertake to wrench ourselves, belatedly, into the twentieth century. “Cultural relevance” was our hue and cry. We met enormous, almost crippling resistance, and we lost members from both ends of the ecclesiological spectrum. We gained many, too, but the net result was loss, as experienced by all of the Main Line.

That loss may have had little to do with our extended internal crisis. The Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and others lost even more, and the Catholics would have if not for Hispanic immigration. I happen to think that, had we not taken the steps to modernize we did, our collapse would have been much greater, perhaps disastrous.

But the lesson of the Life Cycle is clear: though we agonized and/or crowed as if we had made a huge, courageous turn, in fact we did too little, too late. Ordaining women was not a startling innovation to many people: all of main-stream Protestantism had done it already, years earlier. Revising the Book of Common Prayer impressed only us, as everyone else had departed from the Cranmerian cadences of the BCP centuries before us. Even the Catholics had abandoned Latin for contemporary English prior to 1979. Our great moment of courage, as it seemed to us at the time, was in fact a failure of nerve. We needed something much more dramatic and more like a reinvention of ourselves to flip us out of institutional decline.

The other insight of the Bell Curve has to do with where we must have been on it. Had we been just at the down-turn from the plateau, where I believe the great majority of Episcopalians attuned to that sort of thing believed we were, our tactic would have worked. Those two unsettling changes we made would have been sufficient. But they weren’t.

That means we were much further down into factionalism, parties in conflict, anger, and polarization than we thought. From thirty years out, it seems pretty obvious. We had been High Church and Low Church, Catholics and Evangelicals, Liberals and Traditionalists, for decades, held together (tenuously) only by that very BCP we then revised. We lacked any theological consistency, yet we denied and avoided dealing with the significance of that reality. We never examined the theological underpinnings of the changes we were making. We finished our prayer book revision just before inclusive language became a major issue, and so we failed to deal with it. We included women among the ordained, but wimped out on dealing with gays and lesbians. We accepted divorce and remarriage without doing the theological work we needed to do on marriage, and we stopped short of examining the concept of same-sex unions, leaving that for later. We didn’t even broach the forbidden subject of episcopacy and hierarchical authority. And so, we bombed. We crashed without making the swing around to rebuilding again.

Incidentally, the Catholics have done the same thing, which explains their continuing malaise. Vatican II, which compared to their history, seemed like such a major shift in direction, was really chump change compared to the wholesale revisions the century called for. The Mass is in the vernacular, and the few remaining nuns are out of habits, but the clergy remain (officially) celibate and male, and the authority of a feudal papacy remains intact. Additionally, the clergy sexual abuse scandal has seeped through the rug despite all efforts to hide it, rather than deal with it. The time called for unprecedented courage, and appeared at the time to get it, but in fact the response was far from sufficient.

We see the consequences in our own communion, which continues its slide toward death. Our polarities harden, our animosities deepen, the chasm that separates us deepens and widens. Frankly, our hope now, in my opinion, lies in as dignified a passing as we can manage (which will be not very), followed by a new birth. While we lie in the tomb, one hopes we will grow some guts.

It has become commonplace for sages of the moment, such as Tickle, to forecast a coming new Reformation, a cinque-centennial new awakening akin to the Conciliar Age, the separation of East and West, and the rise of Protestantism. This recent revelation makes me think that, in fact, it was the twentieth century, not the twenty-first, that marks the division of the ages. The new age of the Christian Church has already happened. And we missed it.