It was a warm Sunday morning in late spring. Instead of my usual place leading worship at the local Presbyterian church, I found myself on a soccer field, coaching my younger son's team. It was the big end-of-the-year tournament, and for the first time in league history, they had scheduled games that directly conflicted with traditional church time. I had already scheduled this particular week off as part of my family's annual beach trip, so we decided to come home two days early and participate in the soccer games.
As I stood on the sideline that Sunday morning and looked around the complex, I realized how many more families in my town had made the choice to do soccer than church. By my rough estimate, about six times as many. Some of those families, I understood, were simply not churchgoers. They had left church participation behind long ago, if they had ever attended, and the decision of whether to play soccer or go to worship was not a decision at all.
But for many families, including a few from my own congregation, the Sunday morning soccer games did present a conflict of priorities. In the vast majority of those conflicts, church was the loser, and I knew that this choice was not unusual.
Whether it is sports, family gatherings, other recreational activities, or simply sleeping late and relaxing at home - Christian families and church members in general are increasingly viewing Sunday morning attendance as optional. Many still value the concept of Sunday mornings at church, and wish to see it continue and thrive in their congregations. Yet more and more, they are choosing other priorities on an individual, week-to-week basis.
Pastors and other church leaders are well-acquainted with this reality, especially in parts of the country where the shift to post-Christian culture is much further down the road than it is in places like my small Southern town. But even in the Bible Belt, the fact that church attendance is losing out to pretty much everything else is becoming apparent.
Congregations tend to respond to this shifting cultural reality in one of three ways. The first is a call to arms, a conviction to fight back against the culture that is perceived to be stealing our people away. Whether it was 10, 20, 40 or more years ago, church members tend to remember a time when the pews were full and there were bunches of kids coming down for the children's sermon.
They want to recapture that time by bringing back all those people who now choose recreation or sleep on Sunday morning. In addition, they see new people and new families who have moved into their community but don't go to church, and they want to draw them in. Either way, the belief is that the faithful response in this situation is for the church to up its game, and to somehow entice people to change their minds and start choosing church over all the other Sunday options.
This mentality was reflected to me in a recent conversation held at my church's annual retreat. One evening, the talk at the dinner table turned to the declining number of families who come to worship. I told the story about being at the soccer field on Sunday morning, and how there are conflicts of priorities for this generation that previous generations never faced.
The consensus of the group was that the solution to this challenge is to change our traditional worship style. Some thought we should go to a contemporary service with a rock band. Others suggested we move to the Fellowship Hall for a less formal setting. Still others lobbied for a blended type of service with a combination of all those elements. They argued for a while about which of these formats would attract the young people.
None of them were happy when I said that it wouldn't matter what we did with worship, because none of those options will bring people back like they want. Like so many in the broader church, they believe that declining participation is the result of the church doing something wrong, or at least not doing the best thing; and they are convinced that the solution is to be found is changing that thing, and attracting people like we did in the past.
Whether it's how to do worship, or fellowship events, or the youth program; whether it's hiring the right kind of pastor or putting together a snappy marketing campaign; or whether it's simply being more open and friendly with visitors - congregations often shift into this battle mode, into this determination to fight back against post-Christian culture and draw people back in by out-competing all those other options that now exist on Sundays.
It is a natural and understandable approach to the situation, but it completely misses the nature of the challenge. The reality is not that the church needs to fix whatever it is we are doing or not doing, and in the process fix the culture. The reality is that culture has changed, that we can't do anything about it, and that we are called to adapt and move into this new situation.
In other words, we are not called to compel people to choose us over their other priorities so we can fill our pews on Sunday mornings again. The challenge, as I learned a few months later the next time we had a Sunday morning soccer tournament, is much different.
But before I describe that experience, it is necessary to go back to the second type of response that churches can have to our changing cultural situation. Instead of trying to compete with culture, some faith communities simply withdraw from culture.
In the neighboring county to where I live, there is a significant Amish community. They operate a bakery in the town, but they maintain their own completely separate living space out in the country side. The only interaction they have with the larger culture is through the operation of their business.
Their children are raised and educated completely within their community. They do not participate in any recreational or social events beyond themselves. Their religious practice is completely separate from any of the other Christian churches in the area, and they do not engage in any sort of evangelism that I have seen.
One afternoon I stopped by the bakery to buy some doughnuts, and I was struck by watching two boys - about the same age as my two sons - helping out and playing behind the counter. "Their parents certainly don't face the conflict of having to choose between a soccer game and attending worship," I thought to myself.
The response of almost complete withdrawal from the dominant culture, which the Amish and other groups have practiced for centuries, has succeeded in eliminating the culture vs. faith conflict. It may seem like an extreme measure to many - especially to those who feel that spreading the faith is a core element of church life - but it is more likely to succeed than fighting culture. In fact, it is a response that is often taken by more mainstream, less sectarian churches as they seek to preserve their worship and Sabbath traditions.
The first church I served as a pastor was a small congregation of less than 100 members, but they were blessed with a generous endowment of nearly half a million dollars. Feeling the challenge of declining membership, they rejected the response of attractionalism - which at the time, was the response I favored.
Instead, they circled the wagons and committed themselves to using the endowment money to keep the status quo going for as long as possible. Despite my encouragements, they showed little interest in making any significant changes designed to draw in new people. One patriarchal figure even told me that he was leery of new members, because they might have designs on spending the endowment money.
This congregation did not explicitly withdraw from culture as the Amish do, but they worked just as hard to shield themselves from it's encroaching influences - and in some ways, they are to be commended for this. Within their church family, as there is in many small congregations, there is a strong sense of loyalty that supersedes the cultural competition for Sunday mornings. As pastor, I rarely heard "Sorry, but I won't be at church because...", as I so often do in my current church. The circled wagons might keep outsiders away, but they also keep the insiders from straying.
In the long run, neither of the first two responses to this challenge are healthy for the cause of The Gospel. The fatal flaw for both is that they focus on preserving the institution, not on sharing the Good News. Whether we fight culture or withdraw from it, we are making the assumption that we have Jesus contained within our churches, and that if we are getting smaller, then Jesus is getting smaller . But the third response rejects that assumption, and instead assumes that Jesus is out there among the people - especially the people that aren't showing up in our sanctuaries on Sunday morning.
