Last Tuesday I posted on one of the scenarios I can imagine for Western churchianity - a fusion of commerce & communities of faith that extrapolates trends that are in play right now. Today I am posting on a vision that is interpolated from how I experience churchianity right now & imagine it in the near future.
From Mark Witton
No body noticed when the arc of extinction first started. Social scientist might look back and tag it to the culture wars or the clergy scandals or even the shifts in the culture that followers of Jesus moved in. The academics would point to factors like Genetics and demographic phenomena, Genetic pollution, Habitat degradation, Predation, competition, and disease, Coextinction.
Most people were expecting things to change, for some entities and institutions to become extinct. Some were bold enough to even to predict that whole industries would go extinct in the near-term.
We should have seen the signs of it when the "winners" started making statements like:
Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back it wasn’t helping people that much. Other things that we didn’t put that much money into and didn’t put much staff against is stuff our people are crying out for.
or like this:
The American church as a whole needs to move from selfish consumerism to unselfish contribution.
But these voices fell on deaf ear. Much like Jared Diamond, these prophets were tuned out by the din of new models, quick fix programs, changes in leadership, exciting new "mission fields". No one wants to hear their baby is ugly (as they say around my neck of the woods) - even fewer people will gather for a pronouncement of a barren family, of a field that has been plowed with salt to render it permanently fallow.
But it happened - the modern American church went extinct. The end lived up to the origin of the word extinct - churches all across North America found themselves put out, quenched.
No more professional ministers. No more shining or dingy building. No more worship leaders or organists. No more governing boards.
People looked up from the buzz of their lives and saw modern church as an old idea - one that we just could not seem to shake, but that has long ago lost it’s usefulness. These are things that we all take for granted and we assume are here to stay, but the reality is that they are the culprit causing the stink in the hallway. The rotting vessel of ideologies that were developed when the constraints of soul life, growing an organization or creating art were far more restrictive.
Gone, like the quagga, the sea cow, the aurochs or the dodo bird.
The reasons were many, but they all boiled down to the diagnosis of a late 20th century icon:
“We've long believed that when the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight. The only question is when.”
I have no crystal ball, so I can not predict when. But I fear that it is only a matter of time - that the sand is running out of the hour glass - that the church as we currently know it is going extinct before our very eyes.
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