Creating Culture

I grew up (literally) in a mid-sized Methodist (later United Methodist) Church in Boise, Idaho. My parents started attending this church in 1958. We attended Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, Jr. High MYF (Methodist Youth Fellowship) and Sr. High MYF (which in 1968 became UMYF, and then just UMY (I'll let you guess the acronym). I was UMY President at one point, attended church camps, and even served on our Conference Senior Youth Ministries Council (SYMCO). We attended worship every Sunday, unless deathly ill. 

That was the era in which people walked out to a street corner, proclaimed, "I'm starting a church on this corner," and the next Sunday fifty people would show up to help it happen. Somewhere around the later years of high school, I began to wrestle with the idea of going into ministry. This wrestling continued through college, and finally after graduating from Willamette University, I went off to seminary to pursue ministry training.

By the time I started serving churches under appointment in 1986, the statistical decline of national church attendance had already begun. Every single church I have served - every single church - was about half the size they used to be. Every single church remembers the glory days when nurseries were full, the youth groups went on mission trips and had touring choirs, when they had to have at least two services every Sunday, when Christmas and Easter services had standing-room only. I remembered those sorts of days from my own childhood. However, I have never experienced those glories once in my own pastoral ministry (except at the funerals of significant community members). The shifts in church demographics are so personal I can taste them. And my teeth are still on edge. 

Our Situation 

All around us, society is changing. Attendance patterns in churches are changing. Article after article attempts to parse various generational behaviors regarding faith expression and group involvement. Core-level values and foundational worldviews are shifting, with new values threatening older values, resulting in a fractured and conflicted culture. Religion has come to be viewed not as a unifying factor, but as a divisive factor. In very many ways, the usefulness and significance of religion (defined broadly) is being questioned and challenged. This is a time in which the collective soul of humankind and the church is being tried and tested. How will we respond in ways that are not reactive and reactionary, but are culturally creative and will contribute to the well-being of all humankind and the earth itself?

This is a time of tremendous challenge for religious communities and practitioners, and this struggle is being played out in our churches, temples, synagogues, mosques and society.  One question facing society is “What sort of world are our religious imaginations creating?”  As disparities between rich and poor increase, what sort of just and equitable culture will we bring into being?  As global climate changes, as hundreds of species become extinct each year, as the genetic codes of organisms from bacteria to corn to human beings is altered and patented and owned by mega-corporations, as fragile habitats and ecosystems are subjected to commercial exploitation and extraction, what sort of sustainable and ecologically aware culture will we midwife into life?  As multinational corporations seize the reigns of power and control worldwide, what vital villages will we build in order to raise our children?  What world (or worlds) will our religious imaginations birth into being?  

Investigating a Twenty First-Century Response

As denominational bodies and individual church congregations struggle to address and cope with the many and varying shifts in society and what some people refer to as cultural tsunamis, far too often the mode of thinking relies on institutional preservation. This mode of thinking, developed and perfected in the twentieth century, functioned well for rebuilding societies that had been devastated by two world wars. The model adopted was essentially derived from corporate business models of leadership and corporate growth, which were an integral part of the rebuilding of society in the mid-twentieth century. 

However, the post-modern critique of institutions and their embedded self-interests as well as the rise of the anti-institutional expressions of post-Christianity, post-denominationalism, and the Spiritual-but-not-Religiously identified population render the institutional models of the twentieth century ineffective, outdated, and inadequate to the task of carrying forward the core essence of the Christian faith into the twenty-first century and beyond. In fact, the very contours of what that faith should look like needs to be re-evaluated and examined carefully.

Creating Culture Rather than Institutions
The paradigm for faith communities in the twenty-first century needs to shift from one of creating institutions to one of creating culture. The current problems in the world are products of social, political and cultural systems that are based in destructive, self-serving, unjust, and unsustainable value- and behavior-systems. In order for the Christian faith to significantly be a part of the social transformations necessary in the cultivation of a world in which all beings can realize their fullness of potential (a minimal definition of justice and sustainability), it must adapt and adopt a praxis of cultural creativity.

Current models of vitality and congregational renewal are still based in the institutional paradigm of the 1950s and 60s. The mega-church models are simply the Super-Size-Me revamping of the same model in the 80s and 90s. These are all church models shaped by society, adopting many if not most of the values, assumptions, and biases of society. The blasphemous Evangelical capitulation to White Supremacy, Right-Wing politics, and public support of the blatant immorality of the political leaders they favor is one egregious example of this. 

In my next few blogs, I will share some ideas for how people of faith can come together in community to go about the intentional creation of cultures that care for the earth, maintain justice and ethical behaviors, engage the Spirit at deep levels, and exuberantly express the joy of life through the arts.