In Critique of Pure Reason published in 1781, philosopher Emmanuel Kant says that it is the job of the mind to turn the chaos of raw experience into something that we, as individuals, can understand. We need rules, according to Kant, so that the confusion that is around us in life can be interpreted – can be made sense of. This sounds reasonable, except for one thing: Kant begins with the assumption that, at its essential nature, the universe is bedlam and human beings are the ones who bring order to it. Today the opposite is true. Philosopher Jay Ingram in The Theatre of the Mind says that the mind itself is bedlam – not the universe, and our job is to still the mind so that the harmony that is all around us can filter in.

If you study meditation– whether Christian or Buddhist or Hindu, you’ll know this latter reality to be more along the lines of these ancient religions. For thousands of years religion has said that when you still your racing mind, you come into a place of pure God. God is the first reality. Rules about God, far from being ultimate truth, are reflections of the people who make the rules up. They are secondary.

For instance, Paul becomes a follower of Jesus not because Peter or one of the other disciples comes to him with a brilliant thesis on Christian ethics or a well-packaged course on interpreting biblical texts. No, Paul has some sort of experience. It might have been an out of the ordinary and ecstatic experience, but it felt integral to him. Every parent who has watched their eight month old put her fist, the dog’s tail, or someone else’s old candy in her mouth knows of what I speak. In the beginning there is the event. The discerning and deciphering of the event happen afterward. The rules come later.

Of course, rules are important. Like the directions in a cook book, they help us move from a stage of uncertainty to a stage of proficiency. Rules mean that you don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time you try to make something that you haven’t made before. But any good cook knows, once you have become proficient, you throw the rules away again and do your own thing. You throw in some lemon grass. And some sweet basil. And a hint of hot pepper. And then the thing comes alive. Once the rules have served you, you leave them behind.

This is also true of rules about God. There is not one rule, one doctrine, one teaching in the whole Christian church, as important as they all are, that will exempt you from living your life as a full human being under your own steam. That’s why Paul says, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you.” After you become proficient, you have to let the rules go. Your job is to live. Period. Because living is what God intends us to do.

The full inclusion of lesbian and gay Christians in the life and ministry of the church is the issue at the heart of the next Social Statement. As a pastor of a parish that has been intentionally involved in welcoming gay and lesbian Christians since Caring Conversations was introduced at the 1999 National Convention, it is important to me that the wording of the statement be unequivocal when it deals with the twin issues of marriage and ordination.

The ELCIC needs to clearly support same-gender marriages while allowing for a diversity of opinion on the matter. I have regular requests for marriage from same-gender couples. The reality of our current system is that I must either refuse to honour these request in order to be in good standing with my church, or else honour these requests and be silent about my participation. What I do know is that policies that encourage a don’t ask, don’t tell mindset never serve the church well. An unambiguous Social Statement will encourage honesty in our church, foster maturity, further compassion, promote understanding and advance the cause of justice. For the same reasons, the ordination of non-celibate gay and lesbian clergy also needs to be addressed. We have ordained non-celibate non-straight individuals since the beginning of the church’s history and benefited from many wonderful ministries in the process. Why as a church would we want to be anything but transparent about this?

As the church seeks to build the next Social Statement, it will receive many letters from many perspectives, including theological, historical, confessional, personal and more. This is a brief, pragmatic letter asking only that our next Social Statement be truthful about the current reality of the church and its diverse practices. The work is already being done, let’s honour it.

McKerracher also reported that membership in the United Church of Canada (UCC) fell from 1.04 million to 638,000 over the same period, a loss of 39 per cent. And membership in the Presbyterian Church of Canada declined by 35 per cent, the Baptist church 7 per cent, and the Lutheran church, 4 per cent. Roman Catholic membership figures were not available, he said.

The Rev. Harry Oussoren, executive minister of the UCC Support to Local Ministries, told Ecumenical News International: “Generally, not only across Canada but the entire Western world, we’re aware of a trend that says that institutionalized religion is not central to peoples’ lives, as is individualized religion.”

A group that calls itself Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance says on its Web site that “small non-Christian faith groups are increasing in number and popularity.” [1] It says percentages of self-professed atheists, agnostics, humanists, secularists and people of no religious adherence are increasing rapidly, and many Canadians “identify themselves as adherents of a specific religion, religious group or denomination, but no longer attend services.”

Others have pointed to a decline in birth rates among the Anglicans’ traditional constituency – white Anglo-Americans and Anglo-Canadians – as a root cause of the membership drop.   According to Oussoren, the drop in support of institutions is also marked among the more traditional, conservative religious groups: “For example, in the 2001 census the Jehovah’s Witnesses are showing a loss of 8.1 percent and the Mennonites 7.9 percent.  The largest drop in the conservative group is with the  Pentecostals  at 15.3 percent,” he said.[2]

I invite you to think about your church.  Are there fewer people in the pew beside you than there was a year ago?  Five years ago?  Will Christians be extinct in North America by 2050 as is suggested by the Ecumenical News Service?  This is a tough question.  But here’s a much more difficult question:  If we assume that Christians in North America will be extinct by the middle of this century, is this a bad thing?

We’ve grown to believe that the church is essential to life and to the well being of our culture.  We almost can’t imagine there being no church.  But the truth is, more and more of our churches over the next thirty to forty years are going to close their doors, sell their land and build condominiums.  Is this a bad thing?  Maybe it is.  Maybe it isn’t.  If you believe that the decline in birth rates among the north American Christian’s traditional constituency – white Anglo-Americans and Anglo-Canadians – is a root cause of the membership drop, then it’s not such a bad thing.  After all, if the only mission – by that I mean the only purpose of the church is to have babies and baptize them, then maybe we’re really only serving ourselves and not the larger world.

We are in an age where we can’t take religion for granted.  Again, this is neither good nor bad.  It just is.  Luther and Calvin lived in such an age.  As did Augustine.  As did the first disciples.  It must have been quite difficult for the followers of Jesus, after his death, to see the great temple of Jerusalem, one of the wonders of the world, demolished, stone by stone, until it was nothing but a heap of rubble. Before it happened such a thing could not have been imagined.  And yet when Luke writes his gospel, the entire thing is gone.  Finished.  Over.  We, too, are in just such an age.

As I consider my church building, I ask myself:  what will we lose if we can’t afford to payback the second mortgage on our new roof?  What if the walls deteriorate and come down and those of us remaining pack the few belongings we have and leave – what will we lose?  On a personal level, what will I lose?  A comfortable place to worship, to be sure.  A sense of familiarity.  A connection with the past.  But I will not lose my  friends – the people with whom I  worship.  They will still exist.  Together we might lose a sense of identity – land and building and history are a visible sign of the journey we have been on as a people for the last forty-three years.  But would we lose the stories of the faith?  No.  Would you lose the ability, like Isaiah, to envision a wide-open future?  Not at all. Rather we are being asked to consider a great question:  what constitutes Christian mission?    What is the purpose of the church?

To put things in perspective,if you’re a male in Liberia, your life expectancy at birth is 39 years. If you’re lucky enough to be born a woman in Japan, demographers estimate that you’ll live more than twice that long: about 85 years. But no matter whom you are or where you’re born, mortality rates are 100%. Then comes your personal End — either annihilation and absolute nothingness, or your spirit moves on to some new experience of life, like resurrection or maybe reincarnation, or you join the angels at the pearly gates.  But the time comes when each of us looks back on our life and ask, “Was it worth it?”  “Did I achieve my purpose.”  This is the stage the church is at today.  An old way of being is dying and we are invited to reflect on where we have come from and at the same time are being asked to imagine a new way forward. 

In one respect, I think the church is in decline because we are afraid of death.  It’s a paradox of being human, that the thing you focus on most (even something you don’t want to happen) becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.  Because the church has been declining in numbers since the mid nineteen 50’s, we have become so aware of, and focused on our own death, that we have been holding back from actually living.  I don’t think we need to chastise ourselves for this.  We only need to be aware of it as a dynamic.  It might be helpful to remember that Mt. Vesuvius erupted nine years after the temple was destroyed – a decade before Luke wrote his gospel. The whole city of Pompeii was destroyed and the explosion created signs in the sky and mudslides, then draught.  These were followed by pestilence and famine.[3] Despite the predictions in Luke’s gospel however, the world did not come to an end in the first century. The temple was destroyed, yes, Pompeii was destroyed.  But not the whole world. The world went on. Twenty years earlier (before Vesuvius and the temple catastrophe), Paul told early Christians not to marry, not to worry about whether they were slave or free because this world was soon to end. But it didn’t. So Paul was wrong, too. The end did not come in 55 A.D. or A.D. 70 or three hundred and some odd years later when the Roman Empire fell. There have been wars and rumors of wars ever since but still the world endures.[4] So the earth has a tremendous ability to endure.  There is a deep lesson here.  Human institutions come and go.  Nations rise and fall.  But something bigger than us continues to bring healing and life and newness even when we least expect it. 

I like to think that the process of dying that we are in is necessary so that something new can come about.  Maybe that’s our one job as Christians this time around – to be a people who learn a whole new understanding of what it means to be a citizen of earth – not for our own gain, but for the betterment of the world?  Of course, this begs the question: what does a new Christianity look like?  What does following Christ look like in the next century, the next decade, next week?

I think there are a few things that need to be involved in the new way of doing church:

• First, I think community is key.  Is your church a place where people can have fun?  Are we having fun in our worship – not knee slapping, yuk-it-up fun, but soul-enriching, joyous celebration?  If the answer is no, then we need to make some changes.  Is coffee hour a fun time?  Is it a place where new comers and old timers can, if they want, reveal their most important personal selves without fear of censure or judgment, but knowing that they will be welcomed and embraced?  That’s the kind of joyous community that is essential in the new church.  It is being with people who bring you life.
• Also of importance is primary experience.  Is the church a place where you can eat real bread?  Is it a place where you can hear real music?  Excellent music?  Soul inspiring music?  Is it a place where the authentic depth of human experience is honoured or is it a place where institutional rules trump what is human and authentic?  The church in the next ten years needs to feel, touch, taste, smell and hear in a new and simplified and holy way.
• Silence.  There is only one real way to God and this is through silence.  I don’t care if you are an extrovert or an introvert – if you want to walk the journey of those who have come face-to-face with the divine energy of the cosmos, you have to get used to silence.  Period.  Think about how much silence we have in your worship.  If it’s very little, then worship has to be restructured so that silence can strengthen, heal, challenge and calm.  And we have to be taught how to be in silence. If it came naturally there would be a lot more of it in our world than there is.
• Fourthly we need a renewed sense of service.  The church needs to spend more time, energy and money serving the world than it does looking after its own needs.  Including paying the pastor.  Our actions need to be louder than our words.  In some cases, our actions need to be our only words.  Talk is cheap.  Loving service is the one message that is unambiguous.
• We also need hope.  We need to stop fearing our own death so that we can risk hoping in the world and its well-being again.  The truth is, we are all in it together.  The global community is not something the church thought about after the second world war.  It’s not something that was on the agenda in the 50s or the 60s or even the 70s.  But it is today.    Today we can expect Christians to also be environmentalists, socialists, capitalists, Buddhists, landowners, refugees, scientists and a whole host of other “…ists”.  And we can only go forward together.  There is no more room for divisions and denominations and separation and defending this theology against that theology.  Those days are over.  Our witness to hope is only as strong as is our commitment to the unity of God’s people the world over.

Of course we don’t have to make any of these changes.  We can carry on as we have been and plan to put up condos in the next fifteen years.  And maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world.  Because even if we do build condos, somewhere, somehow, the one or two of us who are left behind are going to gather to talk about the words and life of Christ and what his life two thousand years ago means for us today, if anything.  We are going to open a bottle of wine.  Share a loaf of bred.  And we are going to lean on each other so that we have the strength to reach out in love to heal a world that is hurting more than ever.  And in that moment the church will be born again.  And just maybe one or two others who hope for something better will be drawn to that small, floundering community without even knowing why.  And together we will discover again a renewed integrity and something of our  purpose in the world.  And abundance will begin to spill over like the wine in our earthenware cup.  And goodness will raise its head.  And there will healing. And new life.

[2] Ecumenical News International, Tuesday December 6, 2005.

[3] William Barclay, The Gospel of Luke.  (Westminster: John Knox Press, 2001).

[4] William Willimon, The Things That Make for Peace in Christian Century, May 6, 1987, p. 453.